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Best Practices for Establishing Thought Leadership with Blogging

Best Practices for Establishing Thought Leadership with Blogging

Thought leaders are created through persistent leaning into critical issues with a distinct point of view and expertise. Here are our guidelines for positioning yourself as a thought leader using blogging and social media:

Goals

  • Build your personal or institutional reputation as a thought leader in your core expertise.
  • Create a readership that engages with your passion for your expertise by delivering insightful, practical, dependable and valuable content.

Personal Brand

  • Curate and manage your personal profiles on your organization’s website, your personal LinkedIn account, and other social channels.
  • Grow and cultivate your personal network comprised of practitioners, peers, collaborators and perhaps most importantly influencers.

Target Audience

  • Speak to practitioners, peers, collaborators and influencers.
  • Lead the believers in your cause. Persuade the receptive. Ignore the rest.

Keyword Focus

  • Think of the keyword or phrase you would like your blog post to be ranked for.
  • Search Google to see who else appears on page 1 of Google for that phrase.
  • Tie content to a single keyword or phrase.

Content with a Point-of-View

  • Write about research, studies, best practices, and policy issues.
  • Quote other authoritative peers and aspirational brands. They lend you credibility.
  • Provide authoritative perspective on your expertise and related topics.
  • Risk yourself. Lean into controversy.
  • Share lessons learned.
  • Where possible, tie it back to the institutional offerings.

Voice

  • Be positive, real, helpful, accessible, insightful, professional and knowledgeable.
  • Avoid jargon.
  • Democratize knowledge (think TED talks).
  • Communicate effectively and efficiently.

Length

  • Limit the length of blog post to less than 500 words.
  • Build topic authority by creating a series of small blog posts instead of packing everything into a long one.

Engagement

  • Encourage questions and comments on the blog.
  • Share your blog on your personal social networks as well as on your organization’s official social media channels.
  • Respond to comments on the blog and social media.

Measurement

  • Measure the number of shares and likes.
  • Measure blog post views with Google Analytics.
  • Monitor Google rankings for your keyword or phrase.

I welcome you to share your guidelines with us.

Wishing you a great journey ahead.