This week, I’m breaking down the top thought leadership myths, two minutes at a time, so you can get over the ‘ick’ and start sharing your expertise. Check out the intro and Myths #1 and #2 if you missed them.

Myth #3 - “Thought leadership to too saturated”

I hear this one many different ways:

• The space is too saturated
• There are too many ‘thought leaders’ these days
• Everyone’s saying the same thing
• There are a million podcasts out there
• My inbox is full of webinar invites already
• Everyone’s trying to sell a course
• No one has the attention span to engage with anything
• We’ve hit ‘peak thought leadership’

I hear you. There has never been more thought leadership content being created, and it’s being pushed on us everywhere we turn.

So how do you break through, or better yet, why even bother?

The easy analog here is television. Large networks used to control the lion’s share of programming decisions, and would only greenlight shows with the broadest common appeal (e.g. sitcoms about white middle-class families).

This is problematic, but understandable given the context - there were only a certain amount of programming slots and networks had to maximize their odds of attracting and retaining viewers.

Then cable came in, and suddenly there was room for more programs for narrower audiences.

Streaming followed and further accelerated the trend. And what now might seem like “too much content” is actually the manifestation of niche programming for micro-audiences that were otherwise not being directly served.

The outcome is an interesting tradeoff — you can scale down the size of a show’s target audience while scaling up your relevance to that audience.

Pulling this back to thought leadership. Aiming for broad appeal and a massive following out of the gate is the real trap. You would need to generalize your message and as a result, you'd almost certainly get lost in the crowd.

Besides, why would you need 10k+ followers anyway, if you’re building an expertise-led business through which you can only serve a few dozen clients a year, or fewer?

Centering your thought leadership efforts on a niche audience is your path out of the saturation problem.

So what does that niche audience look like? Typically your ideal client or buyer and no one else.

And how do you stand out to them? You leverage your unique expertise and POV into helpful content that is hyper-relevant to that niche.

Just like an obscure TV show, there will always be an engaged audience for that.

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Tomorrow: Wrapping up the TL myths + charting your next steps

💡

-Wes

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P.S. What common thought leadership mindsets or challenges have I missed? Just hit reply - I can answer here in a follow-up next week.