The Secret Ingredient to Thought Leadership

Are you an expert in your field?  

Do you have knowledge that you want to share with others?

Do you want more, new people to perceive you as a thought leader?

I recently wrote a book called We’re All Ears and when I wrote this book, I did a lot of research with thought leaders and marketing experts of all kinds.  In almost every single conversation there was one common thread that wove throughout all of them (and was not planned mind you) and that was consistency.  Consistency is the secret to success.  

Almost every person I talked to said the key to building authority online and being known as a thought leader is found in consistency.  Consistency means showing up on a regular basis in some rhythm or pattern.  

We all want the little colored pill that will instantly give us millions of followers on social media, notoriety in our industry, and name recognition beyond compare.  However, it’s not that simple. This secret to success as a thought leader is really not a secret at all, but we just don’t like to hear it.  Why?  We don’t love to hear it because it requires work.  

Consistency is one of the hardest and most simple things we could do at the same time.  It’s such a paradox for us and frankly it maddens us to no end.  It’s not always that difficult to post on my LinkedIn profile, but yet, it IS hard to post on it on a schedule.  It’s not that difficult to write a few blog posts, but it IS hard to show up regularly to get those blog posts out all year long.  We struggle with the follow-through in our culture.  

How can we build consistency in our personal brand building?

• Start small.  I find it easier to start with a lower pattern of work and build up from there rather than come out of the gate fast and fizzle out.  
• Build accountability.  Find people in your life who are wanting to do similar things and work together so the peer progress can keep you on track.  I’ve done this with video recording and it’s been a huge help to me!
• Batch your work.  Batching my work has been a huge help to my success in staying consistent.  This article, along with a bunch of other ones, was written on a plane ride.  It wasn’t edited or published for many weeks or even months later, but the article was written in one chunk of time.  
• Down time.  I just mentioned that plane ride.  I like to find chunks of time that are uninterrupted and easy to focus on one type of task.  I like holiday weeks where things tend to slow down business-wise and I can block out good chunks to do this kind of work.  See what time blocks exist for you and if you can take advantage of these to work ahead on a batch of work.  
• Schedule it out.  Most blogs allow you to schedule posts ahead of time.  Many social media programs and softwares have the capability to schedule out posts even.  Email programs allow you to schedule emails in advance as well.  See what tools exist for you to schedule your posts and release of your work.  When life gets busy, you can relax knowing that your work is going out without your direct hand in it.  
• Hire help.  Identify those tasks that don’t necessarily HAVE to be done by you and hire out people to help you execute them.  It may not be your top priority to post your latest article, but it can be someone else’s top priority.  This may be the best investment you make!

Consistency is important because we’re all busy people and if we want to get noticed in the world, we need to make sure that people are able to associate our face and name with the thing we want to be known for.  We can’t expect that telling it to someone once will make them instantly understand what we are experts in.  We have to keep reminding people and there’s never been a better time to do that!