A “thought leader” is someone who’s positioned themselves as an expert in a given profession, interest, or business. Being a thought leader has tremendous advantages. You get more and better clients. You get hired to speak at events. Your business flourishes. If you’re wondering how you yourself could become viewed as a thought leader by your peers, you’re in the right place. LinkedIn is the perfect platform for you too!

Think about the thought leaders you know of, Gary Vaynerchuck for instance, or Tony Robbins. Why do you think of them as thought leaders? Is it because someone just told you that they were? Probably not! It’s because every time you turn around you see a book or video that Gary or Tony did. In online marketing terms, it’s because they have an amazing amount of content online that consistently builds the idea that they’re thought leaders and reinforces that idea.

You can do the same yourself, and you can do it on LinkedIn! As a matter of fact, LinkedIn is the perfect place to “thought leaderize” yourself, if you’re a business person. Why? Because it is the business platform par excellence! Here’s what you need to do to get the ball rolling.

You need content and a lot of it. You need status updates, blog posts, LinkedIn pulse posts, and you also need to be taking this content and cross promoting it and reusing it on other platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. There’s a battle going on in cyberspace for eyeballs and to win that battle, you need content, and a lot of it.

You need quality content too! It can’t be junk, or rehashed nonsense. Can’t be yesterday’s news or something that’s been repeated forty million times online. You can’t farm this out. You’re going to have to do it yourself from the beginning, unless you have a huge marketing budget and can afford to hire a marketing company.

Here are a couple more idea. Try to pick a “niche”, for lack of a better word, that has less competition. Go narrow and deep, not broad. Also, realize this is a marathon, not a sprint! Something like this isn’t happening overnight. Plane to take a year or two to get where you want to go. That’s a long time, sure, but think of what you’ll have when you get there!