Publish Your Way to Executive Thought Leadership
Publish Your Way to Executive Thought Leadership
One of the greatest challenges executives face as they are rising through the corporate structure is how to influence corporate behavior across an organization—or influence change across an industry. Doing good work that encourages change and growth in your own company is the first step. Broadening your influence to publishing platforms will be the second. Read on to learn how to become an executive thought leader through publishing original content.
Write a Blog on Your on Your Industry
The best publishing method you can use to demonstrate your executive thought leadership has a low barrier to entry, but it enables you to start building a following today. By writing a blog on your chosen industry, you can immediately develop a strong online presence.
Your Plan for Developing Online Thought Leadership and Influence
Briefly, your plan to write a blog to demonstrate your executive influence requires the following steps:
1. Choose a blogging platform. You can choose a free blogging platform such as WordPress.com, or you can buy a URL and install a free blogging platform, such WordPress. You can expect to pay a minimal amount annually to host your web site, but WordPress itself is free.
2. Choose a focus for your blog. Your blog must reflect your expertise to be credible. If you are building executive career momentum in, for example, cloud-based executive dashboards, then you need to develop a position for your blog in that industry.
3. Develop an editorial calendar. Major publishers have editorial calendars, and you need one, too, to ensure that you are covering all of the major topics that you want to influence. Develop a list of broad industry topics and assign them to particular days or weeks to ensure that you do not neglect key industry topics you need to address.
4. Decide the format and length of your blog articles. Typically, blog articles are successfully picked up by Google and the other major search engines when they are roughly 400-600 words each. However, there are many successful blogs, Seth Godin’s in particular, that publish multiple times per day in 200-300-word articles. You simply need to choose and to be consistent.
4. Determine the schedule on which you want to publish. You can choose to publish every day, three times per week, on Mondays at 4:30pm only, or any schedule you choose. Again, the key is consistency.
5. Promote your blog in your social media. Start by promoting your blog articles on LinkedIn, in your profile and in groups. Expand from there to your industry-specific sites. Share your articles with colleagues as well, if you believe that they will find them interesting or benefit from them.
6. Stay with the project. Writing your blog for executive thought leadership might feel like you are trying to do the impossible, particularly in the early stages. However, the more you stick with your efforts, the more influence you will develop online.
7. Improve your process. To improve your focus, technique accountability, you might consider hiring an expert who can help you determine the best strategy for your online thought leadership program. Call Five Strengths; we are experts in this process, and we will help you design and build your blog, develop your editorial program, and publish content that demonstrates your executive thought leadership.
Image courtesy of Stock.xchng / channah
