So you wanna be a thought leader?

Here’s what I’m thinking at the close of the weekend and the start of a new week…

To paraphrase my good friend Dana VanDen Heuvel of MarketingSavant, the difference between a thinker and a thought leader is that while the thinker has a point of view, the thought leader has a PUBLIC point of view; a point of view that is searchable, findable and knowable. This public point of view gets the thought leader a share of voice which leads to a share of mind which leads to share of market which in turn adds to the bottom line. Almost anyone can establish a thought leadership position using the tactics and tools I discuss and use every day; a good thought leader can beat the great thinker to the customer by learning to use these tools well. If you want to know about the STRATEGY of being a thought leader, then you need to head over to MarketingSavant.com, subscribe to the rss feed and newsletter and learn from Dana — he does the thought leader thing much better than I do. If you want to know about the TACTICS AND TOOLS of thought leadership, however, read on…

As of today, this website is ranked 364,509 in the United States by Alexa — and thanks to my friends in the UK, it’s ranked 273,939 there [btw, I want to use my incredible influence there to say one thing: “Hey, British dudes! Give Ireland back to the Irish! but I digress.”]. Three months ago, my site was not even within the top 20 million in the world so that’s a pretty rapid ascent. Traffic this week is more than double that of last week. Traffic this month is 59% greater than that of last month and today is only the 18th of the month. What’s the secret? Home bases and outposts. Home bases and outposts. Home bases and outposts….

Every day I use my ‘top 10 tactics and tools’ [tomorrow I’ll be writing about #2; using Google Reader to help establish your point of view] to market my business. Using a systematic process, I take the reading I do every day and spin it into a blog using good, fast, and cheap cross-platform tools widely available on the internet — kind of like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold — and I could teach you how to do it too. If you want to be a thought leader, Dana has the data and the strategy and I’ve got the tactics and tools; together we can help you get the market share you want!

Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact form…

6/22/2011 Hey, kids! Back when this was first posted in 2009 I thought I was really on to something. And I was right. Here’s my Alexa ranking today…

If you want an effective but inexpensive website that rocks traffic, comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…

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