Thought leadership diversification: the content production pipeline that scales

Ever considered why world leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg circulate across all media sources all the time?

Former success is the obvious answer - but there’s more.

It’s media presence.

World leaders respect the Q&A

World leaders either actively schedule their interviews and event appearances or respect them enough to show up on TV, join podcasts, and answer questions in AMA sessions.

• Bill Gates has done AMA on reddit

• Mark Cuban joined Quora and spent a few months engaging with the community

• Elon bought Twitter

• Zuckerberg did his own “Q&A with Mark” on Facebook

Community engagement, media presence, and strategic networking are imperative for world leaders to keep the pulse on the audience.

Thought leadership emerged

When you achieve the clout of the Fortune 500 billionaires, world athletes or Taylor Swift, anything goes.

But regardless of whether you run a small business and want to elevate your visibility for prospecting and recruitment - or want to amplify the value of your career role - thought leadership is the answer.

I authored my first blog in 2006. A couple of years later, companies started to send over gifts, inviting me to industry events, first-row tickets to concerts or sports shows. Ford gave me the keys to a new Focus model for two weeks to drive at their expense and write about it - good or bad.

I launched my career early, worked in a media company, managed forums as an administrator, authored a blog, led training sessions for companies like VMware, SAP, CERN, Saudi Aramco, Software AG. The inherent boost of networking and personal relationships allowed me to switch to full-time freelancing in 2008 and start my first company a bit later.

I’ve since launched multiple businesses, scaled 3 companies past 7 figures, gained a columnist status for Entrepreneur and Forbes, unlocked angel investing opportunities in businesses like Substack or Stacked Marketer, and a long list of accolades primarily thanks to visibility.

My brand has saved my business several times

My audience is merely 80,000 followers and 10,000 email subscribers combined, along with 50 thousand monthly readers on my blog. It pales in comparison with world leaders gathering millions of impressions on a single tweet.

Nevertheless, it’s been enough to save me on multiple occasions.

1. My first customers were word-of-mouth through my public speaking and writing career. I could have ended with a different path if this network did not exist.

2. My Stripe account was banned twice. Same goes for PayPal. Traditional support did not work - a couple of online posts did the job in 24 hours.

3. My Mercury account was not approved and I couldn’t launch my first US LLC. A tweet later, their CEO replied directly and solved the automatic error caused by their algorithm vetting.

4. I’ve found investors for existing agency and advisory customers in a tough spot.

5. I’ve found buyers for my businesses and client companies through my network or a cold outreach to the right parties.

6. The inbound journey has led to over $8 million in attributed revenue combined through personal relationships, conference contacts, and social followers reaching out at the right time.

7. My columnist/contributor entries were only possible due to hundreds of online interviews, “top 100 influencer” articles, podcasts, webinars, and other guest appearances.

Outbound marketing failed to deliver

I’m a firm believer in branding, and its importance has only increased with the economic turmoil in B2B and DTC starting at the end of 2022.

In 2018-2022, PPC and cold calling had a successful turn and tens of thousands of companies raised from nothing to 8-figure businesses or even unicorns thanks to sheer brute force outbound strategies.

This efficiency however, fails to deliver and achieve the same results in 2023 and 2024.

Chris Walker, a famous B2B influencer, reviewed Metadata’s report of $42 million in ad spend across multiple channels.

The average PDF download costs a business $126. An informational ebook has little to do with sales, and at a 0.3% closing rate, leads in this funnel end up costing $41,958.

Cost per lead campaigns are not much different. Closing a sale is estimated at an average of $57,000 - excluding operative costs, sales rep time, and other missing pieces.

In the era of infinite VC funding and the hockey stick growth model (users at all cost), freemium SaaS ended up burning tens of millions of dollars in losses for years without failing to grow profitability significantly.

And this model led to excessive cuts, bankruptcies, laying off hundreds of thousands of employees, and affecting tens of millions of other vendors, freelancers, agencies, SaaS used by corporations…

What keeps working once and for all are reputable brands and companies reliant on word of mouth, honest 5-star reviews and use cases online, genuine brand ambassadors, and organic appearances and showcases by conference speakers, bloggers, podcasters, and the broader community.

On thought leadership and personal branding

Going through dozens of branding and marketing books and meeting hundreds of subject matter experts, here’s what branding is about:

Everyone has a brand - you either control the narrative or not.

Look around yourself. Friends, colleagues, companies, supermarkets, car brands, laptop models. Every human, each company, every device is associated with a feeling or a personal experience.

This is their brand.

Companies have been laser-focused on establishing a consistent message which helps them to repeat the same story over and over and over again and try to gain mass adoption of a consistent market believing in its story.

Retractors will always exist, but it’s a matter of noise. How much of the public narrative you hear vs. subjective stories and individual reviews by experts or myth busters.

Volvo’s brand revolved around Safety. This has been their narrative for over a decade.

Most people will associate Volvo with boring yet safe vehicles suitable for families or older people who care about safety first.

I’ve been looking into safety charts and crash tests for several years ago. And the truth is, Volvo is rarely in, or represents two of the top 30 cars in any chart.

Even when disparity occurs, even when quality goes down, it takes years and years to ruin the reputation gained by consistent messaging.

And if you want to control the narrative of yourself and be the go-to person and a subject matter expert in an area, you have to consistently convey this message across as many channels as possible for years. Once it clicks, it’s extremely resilient even if you drop the ball for several months or a year.

Thought leadership and personal branding walkthrough

A quick rundown of what thought leadership represents and how to nurture your personal brand successfully:

1. Refine your narrative and define your brand message. What do you stand for? What is your strongest area of expertise? What do you care about? What’s the message or movement you want to develop? Which area are you willing to keep investing in for years to become even better?

2. Come up with several high-level topics about this narrative. As a thought exercise, sit down and write 40 different topics you care about and believe in. Then, consolidate and narrow down to 5 to 7 different areas you want to cover. The more you squeeze them, the easier it is to build consistent messaging.

3. Now validate against your audience. Who are you speaking to? Who is your client? Building buyer personas or ICPs for your messaging is what makes the difference here. Remember: speaking to everyone means speaking to no one.

4. Now include monetization. Take this a step back and ask yourself: Do I need a brand for career growth and professional progression or do I want to establish myself as a thought leader in an area unrelated to my work? A professional example would mean you target clients and position yourself as a vendor or consultant with your hard skills and traits. A mission-driven brand may be supporting your local community, charity, helping homeless people or stray animals. This may be at the expense of your job and other streams of revenue - just answer the question first.

5. Pick the right channels. We’ll talk about an omnichannel strategy, but regardless of your audience, ask yourself where do they hang out, what do they read, which social networks and events they frequent. Build their narrative around that.

My personal branding framework uncovered (case study)

Here’s a professional brand example I’d portray with individual cases:

I help B2B marketing leaders beat the algorithm uncertainty and uncover growth opportunities across all channels.

My main brand narrative is a veteran digital expert with 20+ years of expertise in tech and marketing, a diverse portfolio of data points and companies I study (through my agency, consultancy, angel investments, startup clients), and this forward-looking vision provides me with unique skills and visibility on strategies that work, channels that fail, and tactics proven to work not once, but dozens of times.

So I work with CMOs, VPs of marketing, VC funds designing and implementing effective strategies that work today in their organizations.

This has a multi-faceted billing approach:

• B2B businesses hiring my agency for digital retainers

• Founders and executives working with me directly as an advisor, ambassador, consultant, or a fractional C-level for their brands

• My network allows me to make strategic connections for my clients and brands to investors, enterprise clients, and strategic partners - increasing their value and leading to successful exits and payback

• I do revenue-share deals with businesses through advocacy

• And I’m still able to do what I love - teaching and educating - while having the funds to gain visibility and additional reach through ads, expensive tooling, paid masterminds groups and memberships, paid mentors and advisors I work with

Content repurposing 101

I cover a handful of channels - thanks to my teams - but back when I took my content repurposing strategy more seriously in 2016 or so, I worked myself and spent 8 to 12 hours a week covering all the bases myself.

In fact, I still keep a 2018 video talking about this:

To spare you the outdated technics, the secret is in achieving effective repurposing.

In simpler terms, it’s creating a powerful piece of contents and breaking it down into dozens of micro pieces across different channels.

One of my favorite ways to launch that is recording a 1-hour video.

• It’s a long-form educational resource on a topic

• It could be broken down into 5-8 different 5-10min videos

• You can create reels with Opus or other 1-min shorts for modern channels supporting shorts

• Captions can serve as a blog post - or multiple posts

• The same narrative can be rewritten with AI and some personal insights across other channels (like Entrepreneur or guest posts)

• High-level nuggets can be summarized across all channels

In essence, a 1-hour video can turn into:

• 1 full video

• 1 podcast (audio-only)

• 6 mid-length videos

• 12 shorts

• 5 blog posts

• 8 bullet lists (high level items)

• 8 different creatives based on this

That’s 40+ content pieces from an hour-long video.

And with the myriad of networks, a lot of this could be repurposed on several networks at a time. Shorts can be posted on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram reels. Same for long-form. Bullets and images can go on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn.

Even YouTube supports text posts now.

There’s also Threads that’s gaining popularity.

So, the 40+ pieces can turn into 80 to 100 posts.

And if you produce evergreen content, republishing old content every 4-8 months is not uncommon. Here’s to 150 posts out of an hour-long video.

Create your content folder and align some of the pieces toward bottom of the funnel content and actual ICP needs. Here are the types of content that businesses care about (and pay special attention to):

There are other ways to go around it - I’ve created videos out of blog posts and my Entrepreneurship book on Amazon was compiled from Quora answers. So think creatively here.

The operational part of repurposing

Right now we’ve covered:

• What’s personal branding and why do we need it

• Practical reasons to maintain and command a successful brand

• How to refine your own brand

• A sample brand (mine) and how to mimic it

• A powerful framework to turn 1 piece of content into 100+ posts

How to handle all the media and prep work yourself?

For the full suite of content pieces, preparation, recording, editing, captions, images, bullets, and scheduling, you’ll realistically need a hundred hours or more to get this done correctly.

With the power of AI, this could be trimmed down to 30 or so hours - but it’s still a hard feat. And it assumes your public speaking skills are good and your command on the core topic is really strong.

If you’re just starting out, there are two ways to approach this:

1. Start small and DIY a portion of this. Start with a video or long-form post (you can facilitate outline support or stats with chatbots). Use tools like Rev.com for caption generation or other AI summary tools - or YouTube’s captions. Use AI like Opus to auto create shorts. Use content scheduling tools like Buffer or Taplio or Tweet Hunter to schedule content online.

2. Work with assistants. I hired my first VAs in 2016 and one of my companies is entirely VA-driven. They follow these playbooks and go through the process of creating videos, doing SEO research for headlines, summarizing the main thoughts, preparing bullets, setting up Canva templates for images or creatives, scheduling, publishing, general commenting. You can start with low-cost freelancers on Fiverr or hire someone on OnlineJobs or Upwork to help with this task.

Real experts and leaders work with an army of producers, videographers, writers, journalists, data experts. Gary Vee popularized this model a while back. Alex Hormozi has been dominating the web in a similar fashion, Ali Abdaal has a large team for his YouTube channel and courses.

And as you get serious about thought leadership and unlock different steps of monetization, this process is bound to evolve in complexity and effort, thus costs.

Practice makes perfect

Every overnight success story has been the result of 10 years of hard work. So branding is hard work and takes time - but efforts aggregate over time.

Once you start the process, you have to be consistent. Here’s the successful combination that will get you there:

1. Focused content. Don’t post about everything and anything. Stay true to your brand topics established earlier. Every drop adds up to a tiny pool then will turn into an ocean. But it’s about consistent messaging.

2. Regular publishing. Serious creators post daily. Even busy entrepreneurs and business leaders devote the time and organize their schedules around content prep and posting. Doesn’t have to be an hour a day - I used to allocate one Saturday every other week to prepare and schedule everything when I started, and 5-10min of commenting/replies daily if and when I can. That said, consistent posting and frequent commenting help.

3. Community building. Successful brand require engagement. Before you build your tribe, the best thing is pairing up with other experts in your area and help one another. Share tips and strategies. See what works. Comment and share stories. Do collaborative studies or content. The more initial boost you can gather, the higher the visibility and reaching organic supporters.

4. Data. Monitor what works and find out what you need to do more of. This is hard to gauge at first but over time, you’ll uncover specific patterns around content topics and formats, posting hours, types of conversations and pain points. Use native analytics tooling by each platform or specialized tools like Taplio an Tweet Hunter to facilitate that.

Don’t get discouraged by vanity metrics such as likes or comments.

In my experience, many of the 6-figure and 7-figure deals closed were attributed to my content, podcast, interviews and never replied to.

My clients and partners keep bringing up my posts on DMs or during calls. They see them. Higher ups just don’t react as much for various reasons - lack of time, privacy, red tape in their companies.

So keep posting and don’t keep track of vanity metrics.

And if you spend 30 consecutive days of posting, hit reply or share your track record on LinkedIn/Twitter and tag me in. Extra support can go a long way.