📚 Related read: Check out our deep dive into Animalz own content strategy.
Did you notice a couple of years ago when tons of well-known companies reorganized their blogs into libraries?(Example: Lattice)
That was because ofthis blogwritten by Jimmy Daly, the then VP of Growth at Animalz.co.
That article shifted the industry's thinking and set Animalz out as the go-to resource for content leaders.That's the potential power of writing thought leadership into your content.
Ryan Law, VP of Content at Animalz, is my guest on the How the F*ckSEO podcast this week.
Any Animalz fans out there will know, Ryan's content is continuously straight 🔥
Ryan will probably kill me for saying this, but he's as close to a guru as the content marketing world has right now.
⚡ New here? Check out our fast-growing library of SEO case studies.
In this episode, Ryan and I deep dive into thought leadership and how SEOs can, should, must incorporate it into their content.
Here's a sneak preview of 1/4 of the frameworks:
We covered these key points:
⚡ We learned the secrets behind Animalz own content strategy
⚡ We learned how Ryan chooses which topics to write about
⚡ We learned why SEOs must move away from the Skyscraper technique
⚡ We learned how the Animalz team defines thought leadership
⚡ Four frameworks to build trust, authority, and conversions
What is Thought Leadership?
Internally, Ryan and his team define thought leadership ascontent that shares an earned secret.
💡 Definition: The term ‘earned secret’ was coined by Ben Horowitz, an American businessman and investor. It is defined as the uniqueness of each individual. Only by being who you are, doing the things you do and no one else does, can you talk about your earned secrets - your knowledge, thoughts, opinions, etc.
In Ryan’s own words, thought leadership boils down to this:
“You are leading front and center with your personal experiences, your beliefs, your ideas. And that, ultimately, I think, is what matters in terms of getting people to buy from you. They understand you, they trust you, you’ve helped them.”—Ryan Law
Ryan notes that this has two key benefits:
- Standing out in a sea of nearly identical articles on the same topic. This could lead to higher rankings and more added value for your readers. Most importantly, your content will also convert more.
- Baking trust and credibility into your brand. Your business will no longer be just a random information source to click away from, but rather a trusted brand your customers (and future customers) can rely on.
Toolkit: Four Frameworks to Make Your ‘SEO Content’ Actually Good
Here are 4 mental frameworks that will help you inject thought leadership into your content.
Framework 1: “Yes, and”
Main idea: Building upon other people’s (popular) ideas, insights, and opinions.
How to do it: Whether it is on social media such as LinkedIn or in a blog post, simply respond to someone’s idea you agree with and add more context or more information you're privy to on top of that.
Example: This MarketMuse article that expanded on Ryan’s own article on copycat content with their ideas about information gain.
“More and more, content creators who bring a fresh perspective to the topics they cover are rewarded with greater traffic through search engines and social media.”—MarketMuse
Benefits:
- A less intimidating way to put yourself out there and start creating thought leadership content.
- No blank-page-syndrome: you already have the original idea to start with, so you don’t have to worry about where to begin.
Listen to this clip here:
Yes, and?
Framework 2: Challenging Truisms
Main idea: Challenging and questioning the best practices and truisms that are taken for granted in the industry.
How to do it: Have you found an edge case in which a best practice does not apply? Or do you think (and better yet, have proof) that an industry truism does not hold water? Write about it. Be thorough and detailed (and also polite and respectful) in your exploration. Make new conclusions, start rocking the boat!
Example: This Animalz article challenged the content marketing industry’s view on blog structure and change how users consume blog content (probably their most well-known article
Benefits:
- Potentially become the driver of a major industry change/movement.
- Improve the way things are done and as a result advancing the industry as a whole.
Listen to this clip here:
Challenge truisms
Framework 3: Sharing personal experiences
Main idea: Documenting and talking about your own personal experiences in the industry.
How to do it: It actually doesn’t matter whether the experience is big or small or whether it has a disruptive effect on the industry. What have you done that is interesting and potentially useful to your peers? Solved a problem based on a methodology you came up with, introduced new processes, organized a fundraiser, etc. Talk about it! Write social media posts, blog posts, share with the world what you learned from your unique path.
Example: This article from Georgios Chasiotis, our previous guest on the podcast, about how he and his team utilized topic clustering to help a client rank for 1000s of keywords.
📚 Read more about Georgios’ thoughts on topical authority here.
Benefits:
- Connecting with peers who are open to sharing their own experiences.
- Helping others learn from your smart moves and/or mistakes.
⚡ Top tip: Sharing a personal experience does not have to be a standalone post. It can be integrated into standard SEO-focused blog posts that target keywords and are optimized for search engines. This way, the blog posts also contain useful insight from personal experiences that make them invaluable.
Listen to this clip here:
Personal experience
Framework 4: Analyzing events
Main idea: Provide more context as to why an event happened, what are its far-reaching consequences, how to use it for your own business, etc.
How to do it: It doesn’t have to be an event that you or your business have had anything to do with. Maybe it doesn’t even have to be an event from the same industry. As long as you can find the connection between the event and your industry and how it impacts it in the future, you can write about it.
Example: This article from Kevin Kwok analyzing how and why the famous design tool Figma succeeded.
Benefits:
- If it’s a popular event, you’d be jumping on a trendy bandwagon, making the distribution of such thought leadership content easier.
⚡ Top tip: Of course, not all of these frameworks hold the same weight. Challenging truisms can potentially be far more groundbreaking than any other option. Consequently, you might write only one such post and gain a lot more attention and credibility than writing a single post using any other framework.
My advice? Mix and match. Try them all, combine them, both with each other and with standard keyword-focused content; see how these frameworks work for the goals you are trying to achieve.
Listen to this clip here:
Analyze events
Write With Authority, For People First
Content written for people first will have longevity compared to content written for search engine rankings first. Google confirmed this in their 2022 Helpful Content algorithm update.
Content with unique value not found anywhere else in SERPs:
- Instills trust in your readers.
- Establishes your brand as an expert on the topic.
- Establishes yourself and your company as an expert.
It’s time to buckle up for a new era of content marketing. Exciting times are ahead.
