Curate Your Own Community
Consider how you could invite your audience into a supportive community where they can learn and grow with you. This could be as simple as creating a group on Facebook or LinkedIn. Or it could be a membership program, a monthly Zoom event, or a private forum you create. Whatever you choose, creating and leading a community has several benefits:
- Allows you to directly connect with your audience.
- Has potential to grow over time.
- Establishes you as an expert and leader within your community.
- Helps you cultivate relationships that can transform into life-long readers and fans.
- Can be monetized or done for free—or a combination of both.
Answer This:
- What kinds of communities currently exist for my target audience?
- What are these communities doing well? What are they missing?
- How could I fill a void, deliver value, and cultivate a community that has growth potential?
Conduct Industry Surveys
Part of being a thought leader is also being a deep thinker, and you can introduce compelling perspectives in your field by conducting surveys or research. Sharing the results of a survey is a powerful way to show your audience that you can deliver value. It also gives you an excellent reason to pitch media outlets.
For example, if your focus is grief after sibling loss, you might conduct a survey that asks respondents to share the length of time it took them to recover from loss, rank the strategies that were most helpful for them, and reveal how their loss impacted their lives. Then you can take the results of the survey and share the data through media interviews, speaking engagements, and though your foundational content (blog, podcast, or video).
It’s generally believed you need a minimum of 100 to 200 responses to consider your survey results statistically relevant, and with a margin of error of plus or minus 10%.
Answer This:
- What statistics would your audience members be interested in knowing?
- What survey information would improve the lives of your audience in some way?
- What data would be interesting to the media?
Write White Papers
A white paper is a type of report that is typically well-researched, citing data and facts to solve a problem of some sort or clarify information. For example, a software company could create a white paper to demonstrate key findings in its research on Artificial Intelligence tools, thus establishing the company as a leader on this topic.
You can use this same strategy to deliver information of value to your audience, provided they are interested in complex data. For example, if you write about leadership in the healthcare sector, you might compile a white paper that reveals statistics on the dangers of employee burnout and how it impacts patients. You don’t necessarily need to create these statistics yourself. You can round them up from other sources and cite them in your paper.
Answer This:
- Are there one or more topics that would be a good fit for you to compile a white paper?
- Would your white paper attract your ideal target audience?
- Is your white paper of interest to the media?
Host Online Events
One of the few gifts from the pandemic is that online events gained tremendous popularity. This creates an opportunity for you to attract your readers and audience members by hosting free webinars or live events on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube. You can even use a tool like Streamyard to simultaneously go live across several platforms at once.
When you host your own live event, you create a virtual stage for yourself. These types of events are typically instructional. Teach your audience how to do something, answer their common questions, and always SERVE their interests, needs, and challenges.
If you host pre-scheduled events on Zoom or a similar platform, be sure to promote it in advance and require attendees to register so you can build your email list at the same time. You can promote your events to your email subscribers and social media followers and invest in social media ads to expand your reach.
Answer This:
- What kind of online events would you enjoy hosting?
- What topics would you cover?
- How can you promote your events?
- Could you collaborate with a peer to co-host and co-promote events?
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