Thought leadership and promoting your business and not boring yourself or your audience to tears. Let’s talk about it.
On a scale from one to ten, my colleague ranked herself a 7 in terms of getting her thought leadership out there. Why? Because of speaking events. After a few years of trying, she’s made great headway in speaking at the right events of her audience.
Public speaking is an efficient way to share your thought leadership because you can share the same speech multiple times! You get more mileage out of your message because each time you share it, it’s to a new audience.
Not so with writing.
No matter where you publish (LinkedIn, your website, Medium, a news outlet), anyone who searches your name will find it. You can’t publish the same message multiple times like you can with speaking. You can share the same ideas, but you’ve got present them in new ways. And it takes dedicated time and energy and creativity to pull that off.
My colleague put it this way,
“The issue is that I want my thought leadership to be promoting my business, and there are only so many angles that are different and non-repetitive. What can I write that is still promoting my company, in a subtle, thought leadership way, but is not repeating myself? It’s easy to repeat yourself on stage, but in writing there’s a paper trail.”
Three ideas to spark your thought leadership
There are ways around this, but have I mentioned that they take time and energy and creativity? I think your best bets for how-to-be-original-and-still-promote are:
- Storytelling: I read a lot of fantasy novels, and the plots and language and tone can get repetitive. I don’t care; I still enjoy the story. If you serve clients, you have a wealth of stories to promote your company, while positioning you as an expert and leader in your space.
- Format variety: writing is important, but so are video and images. Get more mileage out of each thought leadership angle but publishing it in multiple formats. This takes pressure off you and gives your audience different entry points to your work.
- Repeat yourself: you don’t have to be wholly original all the time. The Internet is a big place. There is always churn in your audience: some people drift away and new people enter the fold. The new people need to hear what you already said (yeah, they can Google but they might want to hear it from you now, not you from 2015). Besides, repeating the same angle with slightly different language is great for your audience and search engines alike: people phrase the same problems and questions in different ways, so give your answers some new clothes.
Repeating yourself (within reason) might feel excruciating, though. 1) Because you are your own worst critic and put pressure on yourself to be brilliant and relatable and original all the time (which is impossible and unnecessary). And 2) because you might be bored with your own thought leadership and the angles that promote your business – which is very real and normal, and a separate issue.
A room of one’s own
I’m so glad my colleague brought this up, because this is a Very Real Challenge for content creators and thought leaders. It’s not that you DON’T have good ideas to write about – but you might be stuck on wanting to be super original, or feeling bored, or being pressed for time.
You can come up with great though leadership content to write – see above if you need ideas – but the main ingredients to make that happen are TIME and SPACE. A Room of One’s Own. Unfair that these ingredients are at a premium, isn’t it?
Or you could give yourself some grace from writing and focus on your public speaking thought leadership. TOTALLY VALID. You don’t want to do everything all the time.
But if you want to write (as I do, hence this 100 Blog Posts challenge)… you totally can.
This post is part of my 100 Blog Posts in 100 Days series. View the rest here.
