 Andy epitomizes thought leadership and is constantly on the cutting edge of digital marketing research. Andy is a co-founder and strategic director at Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning web design company out of Chicago with some of the best and brightest staff that I know. Andy is a top-rated speaker and author of content chemistry. Buckle up, my friends. This is going to be an incredible kickoff to virtual Moscon 2020. Take it away, Andy. Hi everybody. This is Andy Crestadina. I am thrilled and honored to be back because Moscon rules. You guys are amazing. I am so impressed with everything already and I love to teach. This is a fun topic. This presentation is actually a combination of some practical advice and some new research that we did on the topic of thought leadership because they're really isn't agreement on what is it. Specifically, as an SEO for 20 years, I'm happy to connect that dot with a straight line between thought leadership as we'll define it and rankings and search and links and authority. Here we go. I'm not really excited about the definitions I've seen for thought leadership. Edelman does it this way. It's free deliverables for organizations or individuals produced on a topic they know a lot about and feel others can benefit from having their perspective on. Doesn't include sales content. That to me is literally the definition of content marketing. I think thought leadership, we can hold a higher standard. That is totally discontent marketing. Am I wrong? That's pretty much a good definition of content. In individual, this is Wikipedia, an individual or firm that has recognized this in authority, maybe a little better, specialized in a field whose expertise is sought after and rewarded. I actually like this one from longitude. Original insight, that's a higher standard that engages senior audiences and has a clear marketing rationale makes sense. Here's my thesis for you. Thought leadership combines three things. A personal brand, taking a stand and being an expert, being an expert. This actually aligns in a simple way with the Aristotle, three modes of persuasion, taking you back to college. Remember Aristotle and the three modes of persuasion. Ethos, pathos, logos. The quick review. I'll break it down even in simpler terms, more contemporary terms. It's a combination of an influencer, personal brand, taking a stand on something, a key opinion leader, and being a subject matter expert. You got to know what you're talking about, of course, and it's the intersection. I'm going to say you need all three. It's the intersection that makes you a thought leader. I'm going to break those down and I've got a tactic for each, the influencer, opinion leader, and subject matter expert. First of all, first and foremost, that research found this, you've got to be an expert. Let's break that down. To be an expert, I'm going to give you three ways, three examples of how this works well in content and specifically for search, publishing original research. Writing new novel ideas and writing books immediately makes you more of a subject matter expert. This is what we found. We got 480 plus people to answer a bunch of questions about what is thought leadership. I did this in combination with Michelle Lynn from Antis Research and Morgan and Collette from SurveyMonkey. Awesome collaborators. Great project. Experts in a field, that's who makes the best thought leaders. 60% of the strong agreement that you've got to be an expert in the field to be a thought leader and that the best thought leadership content is actually strong overlap with content marketing, the educational how-to content, identification of trends, also research reports. These were the biggest correlations with thought leadership content. 71%, in fact, 71% of our respondents said that purely educational content can be thought leadership. Again, I'm kind of disagreeing. I'm going to hold this to a higher standard. You'll see in a minute, but let's go deeper on this, right? Publishing original research. I've got some specific things. This is one of like three or four, maybe five strategies I have for you, and this one is all about publishing something new, original, unique to you. Steve Rason found this. I mentioned this last year at Moscow. Steve Rason found this true to be of one million articles. Those that overperformed, outperformed the others in terms of links and shares had two things in common. Well, first, he publishes the scariest hockey stick curve in all of digital, where he shows that most content gets nothing, like zero, like goose eggs. 75% of articles get no external links, nobody ever links to them, and 50% have two or fewer Facebook interactions. Kind of a problem. But what does work? What does outperform? High level of both shares and links, call it social in search. It's opinion-forming authoritative content and well researched and evidence content that's going to align exactly with our thesis here, which is strong opinion and original research. We're going to do original research first. Hinge marketing found the same to be true. High growth firms are three times as likely as their peers to publish original research as part of their content strategy. Just go look at Search Console for any account you have access to, or go look at Moz and check the backlink profile for anybody that's published original research. Go put in the big boys and go put in major publications and you'll see this is always true, right? Because the link is a citation. You are like the bibliography for the internet. Original research attracts links better than any other content that you could ever possibly publish. We proved this over and over. We do this all the time. And the key is just to answer a question like this one. What is the lifespan of a website? I don't know. How long does the average website last? I don't know. Anyone know? No one knows. So I basically got a virtual assistant to go back and look at the top 50 websites and see how and look in the way back machine and see the interval at which they were redesigned and publish this lovely piece of content that show that reported for the first time this URL is the primary source for this information about website lifespan. The average website lifespan of the top marketing websites is two years and seven months. There you go. This site is the source of that information. It is valuable, important content, I hope to say, because I have evidence. One of them is Wikipedia links to this article. Now, I know that that is not an equity passing link. I understand SEO. I know no follow means. It's just pointing in the right direction. You're doing something good. When you get an outcome like that, something good is happening in your marketing. Again, go check it in Search Console or in Moz or whatever tool you use. Lots of links that URL has attracted more than 100 links over time. Great. Another example, what website features are standard? I don't know. Anyone know? No one knows. Couldn't find it. So decided to do the research. Again, gave a virtual assistant a list of the top 50 websites. I think some lists we downloaded from Alexa. You get lists on things and gave it and gave a list, basically a blank spreadsheet of like your features here are websites. Go look at them all. The final piece, web design standards, the top 10 best practices in the top 50 websites. And this chart was the first time that this information appeared on the internet, which features are standard. Ranks like a champ. In fact, out ranks the World Web Web Consortium, which isn't surprising because they're not really great at search over there. They don't have to be. They control the internet. But that has led to a lot of visibility as well as links. You can see them. This is examples of how you can drive thought leadership. 160,000 page views since that page has gone live. And literally hundreds, more than 100 websites, more than 200 websites have linked to that URL. It's working. It's working. Very recently, since last year, some of this I may have presented at other conferences, or you may have seen, but this one's new. What's a good bounce rate? What's the average bounce rate? What's a good bounce rate for a website? Not really strong supported data on this topic. But as a web development firm here at orbit, we have access to literally like 500 plus Google Analytics accounts. So we went and had, and again, a VA goes through 500 Google Analytics accounts and copies and paste all this data into a giant spreadsheet. Probably there's like a, I don't know, Google Sheets add on or some kind of data studio thing I could have done with the developer. But we did it manually. It takes a long time to do this. And here's the thing. I've got the industry B2B, B2C, or hybrid bounce rates for different traffic sources. Kaboom. The average bounce rate for websites is 61%. Now you know, that was this page is one of the most credible sources of that information. And I also broke it down to different industries. The average bounce rate per industry, the average bounce rate for e-commerce 62%. So bottom line, here's the tactic, take it this way. What do people in your industry frequently say, but rarely support with evidence? That's called the missing stat, go find and publish the missing stat, and you will win your for your the internet for the day in your in your industry. Most brands don't do it. Only 47% according to Michelle at Mantis Research found that only 47% of brands consistently publish original research. But you can do it, you can do it how you just have to work a little harder. It's 10 times the effort. Each of those things was like, if the average post takes us 10 hours to create total all in content project. These are sometimes like 10 times that. Yes, I'll spend 100 hours on a piece of content. But look at the effort, right? Most content gets nothing. These are getting hundreds of links to them, literally 100x the results. Totally worth it. Next tactic, we're going to write a book. 32% of respondents said that authors make the best thought leaders. The key here is to just understand and track your lifetime body of work. It's your elbow. Track your elbow, your lifetime body of work. So I've got a spreadsheet where I capture all my partial thoughts and bad ideas and, and half written articles. And I've got a tab for everything I've ever written. It's called, it's this giant spreadsheet here, 440 articles or something to this date. I can put output that to a little chart that shows you can see my guest, my era of guest posting, you can see my recent trend of jumping more into video. Track your lifetime body of work over time, making that visible as a powerful motivator. And by the way, book pages are link magnets. They're the easiest thing to build links to books just drive attention, they drive opportunity, they drive thought leadership, awareness, influence, very, very powerful. So if you just make a list of everything you know, it's an awesome intellectual challenge. Literally make a list of all the things they try to try to outline your brain on a topic. It's a it's a do it with a bottle of wine. It's a blast. And then look to see what you've written about and have it written about and go blog into that outline to fill in those blanks, right? When you get to critical mass, slow down, stop, pull back, you've got 70% of it done, go write the book. It's mostly done. You blogged into it over a span of a couple of years. This was my andy pedia. It was, it's a crappy picture is like a Post-it notes on a wall. It took me forever to like organize this. This is my wall for like six months. It turned into an outline of all the stuff that I know, which turned into the table of contents, which turned into the book. Now in its fifth edition, it's used by companies as training tool, universities who said as a textbook, this is marketing that makes money. Marketing is an expense, right? What's your budget? No, no, this actually pays for itself. Weird how the laws of physics sort of reverse themselves in content eventually and people start paying you for your content. And book pages are magnets. They're definitely magnets here. 260 websites, according to Search Console have linked to that book page. Not bad. Next, thought leaders take a stand. You've got to take a stand, stick your neck out. I'm talking about strong opinion. You come out for something, which means you come out against something. You're not afraid of controversy. You're an inspiring writer or speaker. But this was not a stronger correlation like interviews, opinion and commentary, inspirational content. Not as common of answers with our panel in our survey as the purely educational content. But still 53% that having strong opinions was essential in thought leadership. Seeing unpopular controversial things was more of a nice to have. True story. I got to ask a few questions of Seth Godin at the end of a conference. We were all sort of in this room. I'm sitting on a couch front row raised my hand. I asked about thought leadership. He had a huge grin even before I finished the question. He loves the topic apparently. He said thought leadership always creates tension. It's about making assertions. You've got to be willing to be wrong. You can be certain some people would disagree. Clearly, Seth does not think that purely educational content or that Edelman definition is sufficient. You've got to be willing to be wrong. Take a stand. He believes that the point of your content is to give people something to talk about. So my next strategy for you is to publish strong opinions. 53% said that that's essential. Example, Basecamp, popular project management tool, search for the brand navigational query, and add at the top from another brand. Jason Fried gets angry and makes an ad that says I didn't want to run this ad. And then he tweets the ad that says I didn't want to run this ad. And then 13,000 people start talking about it. Why? Because he said something that people tend not to say. He stuck his neck out and said, this is stupid. This is wrong. I'm being held hostage. It's a shakedown. Google is making me buy an ad for my own brand. Boom. Press. Every Google's paid search ads are a shakedown, says the Basecamp CEO. Tens of thousands of URLs are talking about the Basecamp shakedown. Put it into Moz. Look at that. That's what a PR spike looks like. You can gold build links one at a time or you could do something interesting and controversial. You could take a stand. You could be a brand with an opinion, right? Hard, I know. Try it. Consider it. Mark Schaefer has been doing this for years. He's a legit thought leader that I've looked up to for years. When he published this thing, we all had to talk about it. Content shock? Basically said content marketing is an unsustainable tactic. More than a thousand websites have linked to that. He's not even thinking about SEO. He's just doing interesting things, like showing you the inside of his brain, like really like having thoughts. Important for thought leadership. 1,200 websites linked to it. Five years later, I just recently put this into Buzz Zoom mode, shared 2,000 times a year, five years later. Wow. That's pretty good. I'm talking to clients about link building. People asking me, how do you grow authority? Two clients in the same categories, senior communities, senior living. One of them, I say, yeah, publish original research, do influencer marketing, build relationships, outreach to press. I told the same to the other one. The one gradually tried to build a few links. My second client ignored my advice and instead took 30 octogenarians to Burning Man. Boom. Our message is that we are alive in our 80s and get out there. Literally, giant desert art party and she brings a bunch of 80 year olds and the press goes wild. Ask yourself this. What do you believe that most people would disagree with? Or what do you think will happen in the future that most people think is unlikely? Even better. What questions are people in your industry afraid to answer? There are they coming to mind? Do you feel that tension already? That's thought leadership. Mark Schaffer has been trying to get us to do this for years. 2013 social media strategy. Grow a pair people. I love that guy. You can kind of fake it by just having stronger language and more less watered down writing. Fix your funnel. 15 things to remove from your website immediately. You got social media icons in your head or you're an idiot. You got to take those giant exit signs on your site. They're candy colored exit buttons. Why would you put that on your site? Do you want people to stay? Traffic is hard to win. Easy to lose. Where there's traffic there's hope. Do you really want someone to go from your homepage to Pinterest? That's a terrible idea. Okay. This article has 136 comments. Wow. Including this acacia who says that my sanctimonious tone was surprising. I was ready for it. But look at Curtis right above there. He says I instilled hope into his young ambitious designer's heart. Yeah. You can be sure that people will disagree. That actually wasn't really strong opinion. It was just saying giving normal advice more directly. Shared thousands of times. The key there was just to not water down your content. Look at this. Best practices to consider. Changes that might improve your website. Boring. How about this? Fix your funnel. 15 things to remove from your site immediately. Just don't soften it. Don't qualify every sentence. Be direct. Go straight at it. Good writing. This is Anne Handley stuff, right? Bold. He bold. Okay. Third final tactic. Thought leadership. These people have personal brands. A social following or some media presence. They get cited by others and they're influential. They're influencers in the true sense of the word. Question. You thought leadership needed a large social following? No. We had 480 respondents. 77% said no. You do not need a social media following, but does a thought leader need to have active followers of some sort who share and discuss their ideas? Yes. So basically you have to have a platform. It doesn't have to be Twitter, but you have to have a platform. This is fascinating. Can a brand be a thought leader? I could come out with some strong opinions. I'm not sure that like 70% said yes, a brand can be a thought leader. Discuss amongst yourselves. What about this? Is the quality of thought leadership impacted if it's ghostwritten? Half the half the respondents said no. Thought leadership can be ghostwritten. Obviously it can be ghostwritten. There's people, maybe some attendees who literally write thought leadership content on behalf of their clients. Not weird. People all over. Friends of olivars, right? Do that every day. But what happens in this be visible thing? Partly relates to personal SEO. Just search for Mark. What do you see? That is visibility. That is SEO. Look, he's got the big knowledge panel. He's got books, right? He's got this Twitter stream. Can you do this? Yes, videos. The only thing I would suggest to Mark is that he claims his knowledge panel. There's a little extra step there that you can take it. There's not that much you can do once you do claim your own knowledge panel, but do it anyway. So, Mark Schaefer, actually you can see hundreds of people per month. He shows up and you do keyword research on the personal proper noun, right? And that bio page is a link magnet. Here's my bio page. On my site, 447 websites have linked to my bio page. That is another example of the direct, not dotted line, straight line between thought leadership, personal brand, taking a stand, or being an expert, and search, right? And authority. So, my next tactic for you is to contribute to other people's websites. 32% said quotes in the media make effective thought leadership. This is, Mark, this is not a classic PR tactic, but I'm going to make it more strategic because I don't have tons of opportunities to contribute to people's sites. I need to get the most out of each one. So, if you go to Moz and put in and just look at the volume for all the phrases that you're tracking, you'll see some are like 10x or 100x the others. Wow. Then look, and if you also consider to see what your ranking is fluctuating going up or down, you'll quickly find the best opportunities. In other words, the pages that need a little love, the pages that would get the best benefit from a link, the pages you should be referencing when you contribute to other people's websites. Another way to do this is to go to search console landing pages, choose a date range before and after so you can see the pre-post and just scroll down and you'll see the changes in impressions or clicks for all of these URLs across that interval, right? Which ones are going up? Which ones are going down? Look, this one's going down. Okay, a lot of reasons I know there's lots of SERP features and so on. Click the rates of declining, but still this is giving you clues. Data Studio isn't even a better way to do it. Build a tiny report in Data Studio so you don't, it's all on subsequent rows and you can see the delta there on the right, like the percent change in traffic from search per URL on your site. Those are the opportunities. What do you do with them? First thing you do is you put them on a list. You've got to track those. I've got another tab in that same spreadsheet I showed earlier called Focus. These are the pages, these are the phrases that would get the best benefit from a little love, right? These are the ones that need a little love. So now as you are networking, as you are discussing things, as you're publishing, as you're commenting, as you're involved, and, you know, taking a stand doing the things you do all day, hopefully including others in your content and hopefully that karmically is coming back to you and you get a request for a quote. Hey, would you like to contribute to my post? Absolutely. Feel free to go check out, by the way, the value of that potential link takes two seconds. We do this 10 times a day, right? We do this all the time. Domain authority would have, you know, sort of indicate the relevance, the value of the equity of a link, it should there be one. And then go look at the pages that need the love the most. Wait, that one could use a little love. And then in your contribution, look for opportunities to reference anything from that list. Sure, how about an article, how about a contribution about blogging best practices? Sounds great, buddy. So then you submit a contribution that includes and mentions that link to that article. Wait for the post to go live. Actually takes a couple weeks. Article goes live. Now go look at that and to confirm that that contribution in fact included that link. Easy, easy if you have images because then you can recite the, you can include an image from that article. And then the image source link is something that they're very likely to leave in. I think every, it's really hard to optimize a piece of content or build links to anything if it doesn't have some original diagrams, graphics in it. That research piece helps, right? Original research. So then go track that you just want to mention. You want to link to that thing. It's on the promotables list. Then there's a social media marketer who just goes in and follows these instructions. I made a piece of training content to know exactly how to share that and promote that through our channels. Great tip for content marketers. Make a training tool that shows other people how to do your job. It's going to move the fulcrum over and make you more effective for the rest of your life. So this appears in my social stream. Check the box, right? You won. Now go do that a hundred times a year. Do it as often as you can, right? Keep tracking. Keep going back and looking to see which one needs the most love and keep that conversation going on that topic. Very, very powerful. I do this all the time. Recapping that. Leveraging a personal brand for mentions and links. Find articles that need love. Track them on a list when you get an opportunity. Provide a quote that references the articles from that list. Once that goes live, check for the link. Thank the author and promote that on social media mentioning them. People feel deep gratitude for that often. Next tactic. We are going to give presentations because it does strongly correlate with thought leadership. 28% of respondents to the public speakers do in fact make good thought leaders. This is one where then you can use I've got some rush for this one. Maz does the same thing. I just happened to have this tool set up over here. Tracking your name or their name, whoever in your brand is coming is being put forward in this way. Track the company name, of course. And then wait. Look at those mentions. Monitor those. Go check those pages. And I'm going to do social biolink reclamation because if that person just links to my social media account, bummer, that doesn't really help me that much, right? I'm not trying to build links to Twitter. I don't need another link to Twitter. You'd rather have that link go to your site. So you've got to reach out to them. First, they show gratitude. Make a quick request and ask them if they wouldn't mind changing that link to go to what page? The speaker's bio. Create a speaker's bio. Then they write back and say it's been updated. You built a link. They'll confirm the link. These speaker bios are also link magnets. And the speaker's bio can be optimized to rank for a commercial intent key phrase such as topic speaker. My speaker's bio ranks for content marketing speaker. There's the rank. This actually generates traffic for that. 100 plus visitors over this date range and generates leads for that. The page is both a link magnet that will improve your domain authority helping every URL on your website rank higher forever after. And that page can rank for the commercial intent key phrase that drives the opportunity to give presentations which creates much more brand visibility. You can see this flywheel is working. This virtual cycle is working. This was fun. I'm going to wrap up here. I'm going to give you now a new definition, a new data driven definition about thought leadership. What is thought leadership and can anyone do it? So I'm going to combine all the answers from all the survey questions and tell you basically this is what thought leadership really means to the respondents. It is educational content produced by an expert or a business that drives marketing outcomes. It challenges the thinking of the target audience and it identifies new trends and is supported by research. The benefits of this traffic, leads, mentions, subscribers, these are all responses from our survey. Invitations to speak, back links were surprisingly low as people who responded to our survey really need to watch this session. That actually aligns almost exactly with the blogger survey which we do every year. We get 1000 bloggers to answer 15 questions about the success. Is thought leadership successful? 65% said yes. Those that are doing it. In our blogging survey is your content marketing successful? 51% said that it's delivering some results. 30% said strong results. So it's working. This works. Then we learned that 66% of the respondents said that thought leadership is a marketing priority for their company. I love that. I love this one even better. 47% of the 480 respondents said that they personally strive to be a thought leader. Hope, love, beauty. People really want to help others. That is a great number that people do strive themselves to be leaders in their life, in other people's lives. I'm so encouraged by that. Here is the final assessment, right? The essential qualities for thought leadership, communication, the challenge thinking, they publish data, they do something new, they do have strong opinions. So you must, I'm combining it again, communicate clearly, challenging new ideas, back them up with data and have a strong point of view. These are the essential qualities of thought leadership. The nice to have qualities were cited by others. You're likable. You publish consistently. You say things that are unpopular. So also we'll add to that. It doesn't hurt if you're a likable person who publishes consistently and doesn't shy away from controversy. I get this question sometimes people ask, how can I get more speaking opportunities? I'm going to give you a couple of tips for growing your own thought leadership, whether your goal is speaking or whatever it might be. Backlinks, rankings, drive demand, traffic, shares, likes, comments, demand, whatever the goal. When people ask me how to be, you know how they can get more visibility and then I go look at their social media bios and it looks like this. Like it's scary. My first thought is you need to go polish your social profiles. Let's start with the with the with the social profile picture. Okay. You got to frame that nicely, not like too close in their face or like way back here, picture the guy silhouette on the mountain. What is that? No, we're trying to be a visible person here. I don't want to see a tiny head in the bottom corner of your social profile. Also, the background is what's used for the setting in context, right? Not your picture. The silhouette is not what you need to be if you want to have grow your personal brand. And also, take a quick look at your endorsements. Microsoft Office should not be your number one skill. Okay. So, expanding on that, I'm going to give you 15 ways to be a more visible expert in a lightning round. Number one, polish, please polish your LinkedIn profile to perfection. Number two, Google yourself. How's it looking? It's called personal SEO. Do you like what you see? Does it need to be helped, right? Ask me later. I'll share tips for personal SEO. Three, publish deeper, more comprehensive articles. That's really the only reason anyone knows me is because I just go farther into each topic. Right? Works like a charm. How do you be in the top 1%? Just do it. 99% of people won't do and make that thing meatier than the other writers. Number four, conduct a study. Number five, share more. Just share more. Publicly. Online. Offline. Six, similar. Leverage social media video. This is the golden age for social media video, especially on LinkedIn. It's doing amazing things. I got lots of data for this. Very, very powerful. Makes you uncomfortable. That's how you know you're on the right track. Seven, network with other and collaborate with other experts. Not hard, very powerful. It grows your network, right? Checks every box. Offer to speak at classes, speak everywhere, accept every opportunity to stand in front of a room and teach. Start a mastermind group. Cost zero. Networking benefits, huge. Learning opportunities, fantastic. Right? Just monthly virtual call with four people that you know and love and want to learn from. Do you want to be part of this? Let's do it. Go to events. Coronavirus era will end. When you attend a live event, I almost always do this. Organize a breakfast for the morning of. Nobody's got plans. And you can actually get a bunch of people together. Take a selfie afterwards. You build long-term relationships. Or better yet, just go start a meet-up. Be consistent. Consistently start a meet-up. Write for many sites. Write every day. Always write. Get up early before other people do and write something. And then track that lifetime body of work. My 15th and final and most important ultimate takeaway, my best advice that I know how to give and the most rewarding thing I've ever learned is that if you just learn something useful and teach it to everyone who will listen. Content marketing is a test of generosity. The brand or individual or thought leader who gives the most away wins. This was a pleasure. Thanks, ModsCon. Stick around. We've got a little bit of a Q&A and there are more sessions to come. It's better not know again this is Andy from Orbit Media. Stay tuned.