YOUR THOUGHT LEADER ARCHETYPE
Influential Content Creator
Your thought leader archetype helps you identify your unique skillset and your greatest leverage to achieve your goals.
Your passion for writing fuels your journey as a thought leader. Your talent for producing captivating content sets you apart, providing a vital conduit for expressing your ideas and perspectives. Your writing isn't merely a means of communication; it's a vehicle for asserting your influence and establishing a prominent foothold in your field.
The good news is that you already have a compelling brand and growing audience. You've proven that you have the ability to captivate and engage people's attention. The trick is to fine tune your positioning as a thought leader so that they are aligned with your goals. With careful strategy and positioning, you can get alignment from your mission, to your activities, and from your activities to your goals to scale your impact.
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5 Biggest Mistakes You’re Making as an Influential Content Creator
Wherever you are in your thought leadership journey, these are the most common pitfalls of being an Influential Content Creator.
1.
You have folders of valuable articles or other thought leadership content stored away indefinitely.
Sure, you may have published some articles or blog posts, but you have so many ideas and resources that you’ve written out in one form another that haven’t seen the light of day. You have them stored away somewhere for some unidentified future state.
You have amazing ideas in the shower, on your walk, in the car, and you may have a repository of short-form content that you never get around to sharing. You may also keep things under wraps for a future book “one day”. These lightbulb-moment ideas that strike a cord in you feels so precious and valuable that you hoard them and hide them out of sight.
You think, “I should monetize this somehow,” or “This needs to be saved for when I have more time to work on it.” But these musings aren’t usually tied to a concrete goal or strategy, and the central problem may be that you don’t have the appropriate channels and platforms to share your content as it exists.
Not everything needs to be flushed out into an article approved for publication by an editor. And no one can evaluate your expertise and thought leadership if you don’t share your ideas generously. It is a mistake to treat your ideas and your content too preciously. Your value as a thought leader is in who you are as a critical thinker and communicator, not in the individual words you’ve typed on a screen.
It is vital to have the right strategy tailored to your strengths and your goals. And with the right platform to support that strategy, you will have a digital home for all of your content, to keep your thought leadership vibrant, welcoming, and authoritative.
2.
You decide to wait on your thought leadership brand and digital platform until you know what to do with it.
They say that the worst mistake you can make in investing is not starting sooner. And the same is true of investing in your professional brand. The earlier you start building your thought leadership, the greater returns you will reap over time.
Professionals put it off for these common reasons:
“I don’t have time.” Here, let’s go back to the investing principles. Saving even a little bit every month starting in your 20s will reap enormous rewards that are very difficult to replicate if you start in your 40s. Same principle applies here. You may have a long list of other responsibilities and priorities taking up your time and energy, but if you’re professionally active or you have valuable ideas and insights to share right now, it is a mistake to put it off.
“I don’t know what the ROI would be right now.” When you are stretched thin with all your other responsibilities, it’s understandable to put off anything that isn’t urgent and knocking at your door. But building your brand and platform as a thought leader is not a means to a very specific short-term goal. It’s the foundation for your professional career writ large.
Consider this: They say that we will change careers or jobs an average of six times in our lives. But there’s one common denominator that will never change — our professional brand. And there’s one sure asset that we have agency over that we can take with us where we go — our professional platform.
Investing in the one asset that you’ll be tied to for the long run will yield enormous returns across many facets of your life and career.
“I don’t know what I want to be known for.” This objection seems legitimate on its face. Thought leadership that is neither valuable “thoughts” nor true “leadership” is just… noise. But in reality, those who bring up this objection are usually those who are in the position of having too many areas of expertise. They are paralyzed from the fear of commitment and being pigeon-holed.
But consider this: The most insightful minds with truly original, creative ideas are people who naturally have immense intellectual curiosity and drive that they can (and do) apply to many different domains. If you invest in your own name and platform, you have agency to deploy the strategy to gain recognition in the ways you choose. And even if you put the spotlight on one area of expertise to start, you can remain in the driver’s seat and take that platform in new directions.
Fear of being pigeonholed is simply a fear of not having agency. And ironically, the most impactful way of having agency over your work is to commit to investing in your thought leadership and platform.
3.
You’re on all the social media channels.
In our current media landscape, there are a million ways to show up online. And if you’re in the position of trying to grow your audience and impact, you may think you need to be everywhere, all the time.
Perhaps you’ve set up all your accounts and tried to streamline your content sharing so that it shows up across all channels. Or you are simply overwhelmed by it all that you’re stuck in paralysis. Either way, it feels like you’re spinning your wheels, or it’s taking up too much of your bandwidth. There are three important reasons why this is a big mistake.
First, unlike commercial brands, your brand as a thought leader is valued for being human. And especially when you’re in early growth stages, it’s hard to be everywhere all the time online and still be a compelling human.
Second, most audiences are not meaningfully engaging on more than one or two social media channels. The first rule of growing a brand is to be laser focused on who your audience is. And if you’re doing it right, you’ll likely find most of them on one main social media platform.
And most importantly, social media is not the end game. It is, at best, a tool that can be tailored to help you meet your goals as a thought leader, but only if it is deployed in an intentionally designed digital ecosystem that is built specifically for your brand and your goals.
Successful thought leadership does not involve becoming a social media influencer; it requires deploying a digital strategy and platform that is tailored to your specific goals.
4.
You have an outdated (or inconsistent) digital presence.
There’s certainly a brand of thought leader (perhaps in academia) who intentionally avoids engaging in the online world. And for many years, this may have even been a sign of credibility. You may be in a certain industry or from a certain generation where putting up a shingle in the form of an “online presence” was considered tacky or sales-y.
But today, digital natives (generally speaking, Millennials and Gen-Z) make up 38% of the workforce, and by 2025, they’re expected to make up the majority. If you have any intention of being engaged in public discourse, it is a critical mistake to allow your digital presence to be outdated (or inconsistent).
Here are some signs that your digital presence is outdated and may be hurting your impact and legacy:
When people google your name, the photos that show up on the first page are mostly from more than 5 years ago.
You have published articles and books, but they are hard to find online and recent ones are not on your website.
There are different iterations of your name online, causing confusion.
Your current profile picture used on different platforms and sites vary significantly (different hair, different time period, different style).
Your headshot was taken more than 3 years ago. (There may be some exceptions to this, but 3 years is a pretty good cadence for getting your headshots redone.)
Having an outdated online presence is the professional equivalent of having a boarded up storefront. You’ll turn people away.
5.
You spend much of your time and creative energy on social media.
Because you have an existing audience on social media, you feel a responsibility to show up for them regularly. And without realizing it, you end up spending a lot of your time scrolling and engaging, just to “maintain” your presence and stay relevant. That “pull” you feel is real, but it’s a mistake to keep feeding into it.
Social media platforms are designed to engender conformity over time. Anything original that gets the approval of the algorithms tends to evolve into a trend that quickly saturates feeds and becomes tiresome.
As a thought leader, your value is in creating and sharing original ideas and perspectives in your unique way. It’s imperative that you spend a significant portion of your attention outside social media in order to bring fresh content to the platforms for potential amplification.