Want To Be A Thought Leader? 3 Concrete, Actionable Tips

So, you want to be the next Seth Godin? Gary Vaynerchuk? Malcolm Gladwell? Well, we already have those guys. What the world needs is the next you.

Many of the marketers and entrepreneurs I talk to want to be thought leaders, but they’re under the false assumption that becoming a thought leader requires publishing a book… or gaining some distant and lofty number of Twitter followers… or landing that one big client that will finally allow them to do the work they always wanted.

While meeting these goals may help you develop personally and professionally, their status as “works-in-progress” aren’t preventing you from becoming a thought leader in your industry. My guess at what’s holding you back is the work.

My Biggest Tip for Would-Be Thought Leaders…

Get to work. Gladwell is famous for writing in Outliers that you have to spend 10,000 hours in any craft in order to become a true master. (And a thought leader is certainly someone who has mastered certain skillsets in their industry.)

So, it’s not the big client or the pending book or the just-out-of-reach Big Idea that’s holding you back from becoming a thought leader. It’s the work… the nose-to-the-grindstone part of thought leadership.

Actionable Tips for Thought Leaders

1. If you want to be a leader, associate with leaders. “You are who your friends are,” right? If you want to become a thought leader, a great way to get started is to reach out to the established experts you admire and ask to interview them. The interview can be packaged as a podcast, blog post, Twitter conversation, or any other form. Get creative. Keep knocking on doors, and you’ll be surprised how many will open. Many of the leaders you admire are more than willing to spend 15 or 20 minutes to share their knowledge with you and your followers.


2. Be active on Quora. Quora is truly one of the most valuable online forums for business, tech, marketing, and a host of other crossover industries. Use this platform to help others, and you’ll find that you actually help yourself!


3. Repurpose your content. We’re all guilty, to some degree, of living in bubbles. We assume that a strong blog presence or Twitter presence or Facebook presence means our content is “getting out there.” The truth is, your followers are spread across all these platforms and more. I don’t necessarily follow the same Twitter accounts as RSS feeds. We all pick and choose where we get our content. So, my advice to you is repurpose. When I publish a blog post, it’s not uncommon for me to also turn it into a Pin, multiple Tweets, a Facebook post, LinkedIn post, syndicated post, etc. To get your content out there, you need to post often and everywhere.

What’s Your Next Step?

My challenge to you is to do something – pick just one of the three items listed above – today. Reach out to an expert; register on Quora; repurpose your content in a way that you’ve never done before. Just get started! If you need help in creating and distributing content, give our team at BuzzPlant a shout; it’s what we do best!

So, what’s your next step?

Want To Be A Thought Leader? 3 Concrete, Actionable Tips