In a previous post, we covered what Thought Leadership is and why it is important for your business. Now, we’d like to dive in a little deeper here and give you a few tips on how you can build your reputation as a Thought Leader using your personal or company blog.
1. Answer the Questions Your Audience is Asking
In the most basic sense, someone is a thought leader because they have answers. They have experience that a specific audience is seeking to learn from.
When looking to create content for an audience, you need to first determine who your audience is and what their interests may be. Even further, if you can determine the daily, small pain points this audience experiences, you can focus your content on addressing those pain points.
One of our long term clients shares their immense collective experience in retained search on their blog. They try to anticipate the questions their clients might have and then write a helpful post to provide the answer.
Tip: You can learn the exact information your audience is looking for by tracking the search queries made on your site.
2. Give Your Audience an Opportunity to Engage
It’s an easy temptation to allow your blog to become a one way form of communication. We can sometimes rest on a feeling of safety and security by imagining we’re just dumping our content into the world for our readers to just consume as-is.
However, we must give our audience an opportunity to engage.
Thought Leaders use their content as a starting point for further engagement with their audience. The ability to actually bring experience to a conversation is key to building thought leadership – not just the ability to scream facts from your own soapbox.
A couple of ways to pursue engagement with your audience:
Give visitors the opportunity to comment on your blog posts.
For me, the best part of most informational posts is an active comment section. Many times, your post alone isn’t enough to answer the questions someone may be searching for. However, if the comments are active, it is likely someone else has engaged with you to pull more valuable information out of the topic.
Ultimately, your blog posts can be considered a way to begin initiate the conversation with your audience and the comments, your greatest opportunities to let your expertise shine.
Actively engage on Social Media
Active engagement on social media gives you an outlet for your content. It allows you to build up a community in a more personal way and engage with your audience where they are.
Also, like the considerations above for the comments sections, sharing your blog posts on social media can be a great conversation starter. And conversation and engagement is the best way to build yourself as a thought leader.