Apr
07
Thought leadership effectively means establishing credibility with an audience to produce extra brand equity for a blogger and by extension of the blogger’s company.
Thought leadership was found to be an important goal by many bloggers in the Backbone Media Corporate Blogging Survey 2005. Respondents to the survey stated that the top three priorities for bloggers starting a blog were 4 “another way to publish content and ideas,” “thought leadership,” and “build a community.” The same respondents were asked what issues continued to be important in their current blogging strategy. Thought leadership and idea sharing were the most important factors. When asked about the impact of their blog on their company, the following factors were identified as bearing the most impact from their blog: “another way to publish content and ideas,” “thought leadership,” and “RSS syndication.”
There are reputation benefits from establishing yourself as a leader in your community, but there are also some practical benefits for search engine rankings. If a blogger establishes himself or herself as a leader in the blogging community with a good following of readers, there is a good chance other bloggers will cite and link to the blogger’s posts and comment on those posts. Those links may help with boosting the ranking of a blog in a search engine for any keywords listed on the blog post. Those higher rankings may translate into more traffic to the blog. A blogger, and by implication, the company that employs him or her, will gain credibility and influence in their community by writing blog posts that establish the blogger as a leader in ideas in their blogging community.
What do you think is important for establishing credibility as a blogger? How did you gain your credibility and what tips would you give for budding bloggers to replicate your success?
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It takes lots of work to build credibility and this means lots of giving to the community. To get to the top you have to start at the bottom. This means going around and getting your foot in the door of all of the more established blogs in your niche. If you start to comment on their posts regularly at some point they are going to start coming to your site to see where this guy that’s writing lots of quality comments on my site is coming from and what is he/she about.If you also write good content along with good comments then a few things could happen. First they could "introduce" you to the rest of the community by posting about this great new blog. Second they could add you to their blogroll, a permanent link. Third, maybe someone else who follows this more established blog sees one of your comments and takes the initiative to come see what your all about. Of course for this to work you have to write a comment that supports the post and continues the conversation that’s going on. Simply commenting great post, or I totally agree won’t do it. Although those are warm fuzzes for the writer what does it really accomplish? I tend to stay away from these sort of comments now. If you like someones post then submit it to a social bookmark site or vote if it’s already there. Give it your stamp of approval not a worthless comment. Of course that’s just my opinion, and just like anyone else I like to have "nice post" comments. In the big picture isn’t it more satisfying if someone votes up your content than writes a comment that doesn’t add to the conversation?
Kyle James’s last blog post..Links of the Week April 4th, 2008