Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
Take a 10,000-foot view of thought leadership, and you'll see two core components. Thought leaders:
Point one is about building a cohesive body of work, a Hit, that introduces a new way of thinking about a problem (a frame) and a new method of solving it (a framework).
Dorie Clark typically spends around two years writing a book – her Hit. That's two years of research, thinking, and writing on one problem.
She did that in 2015 with her second book, Stand Out.
She developed her unique framework to answer the question: How do you find a breakthrough idea and build a following around it?
That period of her life is focused on developing her thinking, not sharing it.
But she shifts gears when that Hit is ready to publish in 2015. She guested on 160 podcasts in the same year.
“I actually made a strategic decision in 2015 when Stand Out launched. I decided that what I needed to do was not necessarily go deeper in reaching people… I'm not going to have my own podcast, but I'm going to make it a point to be on as many podcasts as I possibly can around the book launch.” Dorie Clark
She wasn’t saying anything new on these podcasts. Everything she discusses stems from the Hit she’s built during the past two years. Sure, she might share ‘the sawdust’ that didn’t make the book, but generally speaking, each of those 160 guest appearances was a 30-minute taster of the Hit.
"I fear not the man who has practised 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practised one kick 10,000 times.” Bruce Lee
The mere exposure effect teaches us that people develop a preference for things (people, ideas, products) when exposed to them repeatedly.
Thought leaders like Dorie anchor themselves to a very painful problem experienced by a person who recognises they’re struggling with that problem, then present the same frame of the problem (repeatedly) that resonates along with a framework solution that makes sense.
I'm a big fan of Jon Ronson and have noticed the same pattern with him. He doesn't make a lot of content. He'll typically spend a year or more creating a Hit, like The Psychopath Test. He's not making anything else simultaneously. His entire focus is on the Hit. To an extent, he disappears from public view.
Then, when the book comes out, he extracts core elements from the book for public speaking (e.g. TED) and does the same while guesting on podcasts (e.g. Joe Rogan). You find him on dozens and dozens of podcasts, but he’s sharing the same message. The biggest podcasters in his space invite him on because he has something interesting to share (that he spent months or years developing).
The pattern amongst consultants who fail to break through the noise is that they want to spread the word before they have word to spread.
They want to juice the orange before they have an orange ripe and ready for juicing.
We all want to feature on the biggest podcasts in our niche, and people like Dorie Clark are proof that when you have something interesting to say, people will listen. Everything stems from the Hit.
Play the long game. Create something worth talking about, then go tell the world (a lot).
Want to become a thought leader?
Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
