5 Tips On Becoming An Industry Thought Leader

An industry leader isn’t following the pack; They are a generating the newest thoughts and creative directions that will catapult their industry into the future. It may seem like being recognized as an industry leader would be difficult, but it’s not. As long as the ideas are linked to you or your company, they give you credibility and star power too. Take a look at these five ways to get started becoming an influential leader in your choice of industry.

Five Easy Ways to Become The Meeting Ground for New Ideas

Here are a few tips that others have used to get positioned to become industry leaders. You can do the same by following in their footsteps. Here’s how.

Start an Online Community — Community members have a “one-stop-shop” where they can go to for answers to their questions. Community creators have a captive audience that helps them build their own credibility. This mutual admiration society is dynamite for creating a large circle of influence with people in your industry. Sites like www.foodstorage.com that have an active community can be a constant source of new and good ideas. Foodstorage did this by creating the prepperfeed forum to provide information on emergency preparedness, and Foodstorage gets the credit, even when they’re just hosting the site, not answering every question.

Speak at Events — There are so many conventions and speaker panels who are dying for quality speakers. If you can show that you are an expert in your field, you can apply to be a guest speaker and thus rub elbows with other industry thought leaders. Robert Shapiro, founder of Shapiro Negotiations (www.shapironegotiations.com), regularly speaks at different events to put himself in the spotlight more often and with the right people.

Host and Promote a Webinar — Webinars are conducted more like online classrooms with more give and take between the audience and the presenters. They follow a formal outline to deliver technical information, but on a more casual basis than a speech. They can be produce hours of videos that can be stored in a video library to continue to provide information even for those that couldn’t attend. For example, www.PNMSoft.com regularly hosts webinars for Business Process Management (BPM) software solutions to help their attendees get a more indepth look at the power of their software purchases.

Publish a Popular Industry Blog — Whether you’re a financial guru or a healthcare expert like ww1.novarad.net, you can publish a blog to help you draw people to your site and get them started thinking. As a company that deals with healthcare imaging, they know that their audience needs information on different health problems and their imaging solutions. By providing a blog where people can read up on their chosen topic and comment, the company provides an area where they can come to research their topic from an authoritative site.

Participate in a Speaker Panel — If you see have a group of business friends with complementary services, you can host a speaker panel. In this situation, you all bind together to provide a wider overview of an industry topic and you also help to promote each other’s services. Speaker panels can be done online or at real world conventions. It works well for companies who do a lot of referral work too, like the SoCalMoms.com group that directs other people to local experts.

Start Building Industry Influence Today

If you don’t have the money to create an online forum just yet, you can still pick up a camera and do a short video or speak at a local event. Get yourself noticed by discussing your thoughts on the latest trends, case studies, and providing new solutions to old problems. If you are around the right people and in the right setting, you will get noticed and gain influence as an industry leader.