The Ultimate Guide to Branding Yourself as a Thought Leader

I get emails like almost every day from people who work for companies and want to be more prominent thought leaders: “Lucas, I love your blog posts and how you are always out there helping others. But I’m not running a business or starting a company, I like just being an employee. What do I do to become more of a thought leader in my space. Where do I start?” These people usually have already achieved a lot of success in their fields. They are professionals. They just haven’t built a platform for spreading their message yet. I can’t respond to every request individually, but I can explain the process in this post so that anybody can get started no matter where they are in their career. I will guide you through the process of creating your own branded platform from start to finish. I will also leave you with resources to help you take it to the next level. WARNING: This stuff is not easy and will require a substantial amount of time to implement correctly. But the payoff can be huge. If you don’t put in the time and effort to do it right, I will save you time now and tell you to not even try. Half-hearted efforts will lead to disappointing results. Step 1: Register a Domain Name Picking a domain name can be frustrating and difficult. If you are trying to build a blog to be a thought leader, you are branding yourself. If your personal name isn’t taken yet (like lucascarlson.com), then register it now. It’s easy and straightforward (unless your name is impossible to spell or pronounce). If your name is taken or impossible to pronounce, don’t despair. Here’s a great domain name picking guide. If you still need help, check out 18 Tools for Picking the Perfect Domain Name and 5 Tips for Choosing the Best Domain Name. Either way, you can go to NameCheap and buy a domain name if you don’t already have one. You could use GoDaddy, but NameCheap won’t try to up-sell to you 50 times during the registration process. Step 2: Your Newsletter (Not Your Blog) is The Heart of Your Operation Signup for MailChimp. Go ahead, I’ll wait. I’m serious. Do it right now. If you don’t have an email newsletter already, you need to start there. I can hear you now: “But Lucas, I thought you were teaching me the new way to do it. Email newsletters are so old and skeezy. I’m not a spammer. I just want to start blogging.” Here’s what will happen if you start blogging without a newsletter: you will write your heart out, you will spend countless hours composing the best prose you have ever written in your life, you will eagerly press “Publish,” and… nothing. Nobody will come. At first, this won’t discourage you. You will continue blogging while telling yourself: “This takes time. Be patient.” But after 10 or 12 posts, you will get discouraged because after all your effort, you are still getting only 15 people to come to each of your posts. So, you will give up and think: “Well, at least I tried.” Don’t be that putz. Sign up for MailChimp. It’s free. You have no excuse. An opt-in mailing list is the backbone of the whole system. It’s by far the most effective way to stay in touch with your true fans. Keep in mind, staying in direct regular contact with true fans is your ultimate goal with all the work you are about to do. Step 3: Create a Landing Page Your landing page is like the front door to your personal brand. Your homepage should be a simple page that collects emails for your mailing list. It should have one sentence that clearly defines the benefits people can expect from signing up (i.e. the selling points of your list). But what about your blog? Where does that go? We will get to that in a minute. But until you have over 1,000 subscribers to your newsletter, having your homepage be anything but a simple mailing list opt-in page is inefficient. A typical blog will convert 1–5% of its visitors into mailing list subscribers. A well constructed landing page can turn 25–50% of visitors into mailing list subscribers. It is more efficient to use a simple landing page. Remember: staying in direct regular contact with true fans is your ultimate goal with all the work you are about to do. So, higher email opt-in conversion rates are more important than the discoverability of your blog posts (at least at first). If you have $37/month to spare, save yourself time and headache and sign up for LeadPages. They have everything you will ever need: AB testing, MailChimp integration, and pre-designed pages that look great and are proven to convert. If you don’t want to pay monthly, you can pay $97 for lifetime access to a WordPress theme/plugin like OptimizePress. Alternatively, if you are on a budget and want a simple free landing page service, check out LaunchRock. I’ve used all three, but LeadPages is my go-to these days. If you need help figuring out what to put on your landing page, check out How to Create Killer Landing Pages That Convert Users, and Landing Pages: A How-to Guide, and 6 Fantastic Landing Page Examples You’ll Want to Copy. Step 4: Your Blog Okay, now you have a mailing list, a domain name, and a landing page. When do you start blogging? Are you getting itchy? I bet you are thinking that this is where I tell you to go grab WordPress. You are wrong. Blogging on your own desert island when getting started is one of the worst mistakes you can make. Why? Because you have no captive audience yet. No matter how incredible your posts are, if you send them to your little obscure slice of the Internet, they will wither and die. Imagine you are starting a new rock band. What does every band do to get noticed? One of two things: Open mic Opening act for more popular bands So, where do you start blogging? Right now, the equivalent of an open mic night in blogging right now are Medium, LinkedIn, and Quora. If you are writing technical stuff, Medium and Quora might be better for you. If you are writing business-related posts, LinkedIn and Medium might make more sense. What’s the equivalent to opening for more popular bands? Guest blogging. If you don’t know much about guest blogging, start with this Free Guest Blogging Cheat Sheet. Then read How to Find the Best Places to Guest Blog and The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging.