TRANSCRIPTION
Building a Strong Thought Leadership Strategy
Joe Fairless: There needed to be a resource on apartment syndication that not only talked about each aspect of the syndication process but how to actually do each of the things, and go into it in detail… And we thought, “Hey, why not make it free, too?” That’s why we launched Syndication School.
Theo Hicks will go through a particular aspect of apartment syndication on today’s episode and get into the details of how to do that particular thing. Enjoy this episode, and for more on apartment syndication and how to do things, go to apartmentsyndication.com, or to learn more about the apartment syndication school, go to syndicationschool.com, so you can listen to all the previous episodes.
Theo Hicks: Hi, Best Ever listeners. Welcome back to another episode of the Syndication School series, which is a free resource focused on the how-tos of apartment syndications. As always, I am your host, Theo Hicks.
Each week we air a two-part podcast series – in this case, a four-part podcast series – about a specific aspect of the apartment syndication investment strategy. For the majority of the series, we offer a document, a spreadsheet, or some other resource for you to download for free. All of these documents, as well as past and future Syndication School episodes can be found at SyndicationSchool.com.
This episode is going to be part four of the four-part series entitled “The Power of Your Apartment Syndication Brand.” I highly recommend that you listen to the first three parts before listening to this episode because this episode is going to be an accumulation of those three parts and the ultimate, final component of the brand, which is the thought leadership platform.
In part one, which was episode 1534, you learned the primary benefits of creating a brand, as well as why and how to define a target audience for your brand, and then we discussed the first three components of the brand, which are the company name, the logo, and the business card.
In part two, which is episode 1535, we talked about the fourth component of the brand, which is the website. We discussed how to create a website and ways to increase your website traffic and convert your viewers.
Then, in the third part, we discussed the fifth component of the brand, which is the company presentation. We outlined the purpose of the company presentation, how it’s used, and also the seven-part company presentation document. And we also offered a free document, which is a company presentation template for you to use as a guide to create your own presentation, which you can download at SyndicationSchool.com for free.
Now, in part four, as I mentioned, we’re gonna go over the sixth and final component, which is the thought leadership platform. By the end of this episode, you will learn what a thought leadership platform is, how to select a thought leadership platform, the keys to a successful thought leadership platform, the process for developing a thought leadership platform, as well as addressing the objections you’ll likely have to creating a thought leadership platform.
What is a Thought Leadership Strategy?
Lots to go over in this episode, so let’s dive right in. What is a thought leadership platform? Well, the outcome of the thought leadership platform is to attract your 2,000 true fans, which is your primary target audience, which you defined in part one of this series, episode 1534. So, if you wanna achieve massive levels of success in apartment syndication, then a thought leadership platform is an absolute must. As I mentioned in part one, about how important the brand is, the thought leadership platform is the foundation for your brand.
Specifically, what a thought leadership platform is – well, an example is you’re listening to one now, but specifically what a thought leadership platform is, is an interview-based online network where you consistently offer valuable content to your 2,000 true fans for free.
The Benefits of a Thought Leadership Platform
The five benefits of the thought leadership platform are the same five benefits of a brand as a whole, which are 1) credibility – with your thought leadership platform the goal is to become the go-to source for best investing advice and wisdom. If you are the go-to source, you’re a pretty credible person.
Next is education – you can use your thought leadership platform to create your own customized educational program.
Three is networking – you can create and cultivate new relationships with potential investors, team members, and business partners, as well as reinforce existing relationships through your thought leadership platform.
Four is contribution. By having your thought leadership platform, you’re also not only helping yourself in regards to education but you’re also helping others with their education, and since your thought leadership platform is gonna help you grow your business, the investors who are investing in your business will also benefit by being able to find you for investment opportunities and achieve their investment goals.
Then, lastly is the potential for cashflow through sponsorships. Now, we’re not gonna discuss this on the podcast, but if you go to SyndicationSchool.com or the show notes, you can download a free document for this episode, which is “How to Structure Sponsorships on Your Thought Leadership Platform.” It’s a guide to how to essentially monetize your thought leadership platform.
Overall, the purpose of the thought leadership platform is to stay top of mind with and be incredible in the eyes of your 2,000 true fans, your primary target audience, your passive investors, along with the secondary benefits of education, contribution, and the cashflow.
Choosing Your Platform
So how do you select a thought leadership platform? We’ll just use Joe as an example. Joe’s first thought leadership platform was a podcast, which you’re listening to now, and then, from there, he expanded to other platforms, which are a meetup group, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, blog, conference, books, and a Facebook group. All of those are examples of thought leadership platforms, and we recommend that you follow the similar strategy of starting with one and then focusing all of your attention on that and then, once that is a self-sustaining machine, you can grow and expand from there.
Podcast
So pick one of these following thought leadership platforms – a YouTube channel, a podcast, a blog, a newsletter, or a Facebook group. How do you know which one is the best for you? Ask yourself what would you enjoy and prefer doing? Let’s say, for example, that you really like speaking but you don’t like the prospect of being on camera or talking in person because you get stage fright or, I guess, video fright. Well, then your best option would be a podcast.
Blog
Well, let’s say you don’t like to speak but you like to write; or let’s say that you enjoy speaking but you’re afraid to do any sort of speaking or video thought leadership platform because of your full-time job and, if your boss finds out, he’s not gonna like how you’re spending your spare time… Well, then your best option might be a blog.
Meetup Groups
Or let’s say you enjoy speaking and you’re comfortable with being on camera but you don’t wanna actually speak in person; then the YouTube channel would be your best. Or let’s say you enjoy speaking, you’re comfortable being on camera, AND you’re comfortable speaking in person – essentially, you’re a rockstar – then the meetup group might be best for you.
Now, the last two – the newsletter and the Facebook group – you should do regardless because those are places for you to post and share your content. Whether you enjoy or prefer doing those doesn’t really matter; you need to make a newsletter and a Facebook group.
Based off of Joe’s experience and my experience with having over 1,500 episodes for the podcast that generates over 350,000 monthly downloads, as well as creating hundreds of blogs and YouTube videos, writing multiple books, hosting meetup groups for years, hosting two conferences, these are the five keys that we’ve discovered to creating a successful thought leadership platform.
The Keys to a Successful Thought Leadership Strategy
Keep it Interview-Based
Number one is it must be interview-based. Because, remember, one of the main objectives of the thought leadership platform is to increase your credibility, to be perceived as an expert apartment syndicator, as well as to network with investors and team members. The only way to accomplish this is to actually do interviews. So, from a credibility perspective, you are going to position yourself as a go-to resource for the best info, advice, and strategies because you’re going to be interviewing the most successful real estate professionals. As you do that, your audience will grow, as well as your reputation, which will allow you to attract even better guests. When you attract ever better guests, your audience and reputation will continue to grow even more, which will allow you to, again, have that credibility and expertise perception, which will allow you to attract more passive investors.
From a networking perspective, you’re able to speak with people who are active and successful. And, in fact, as I mentioned in a couple of Syndication School episodes before, you’ll be able to network and speak with people that it would have been impossible for you to otherwise. For example, Joe has spoken to Tony Hawk, Emmitt Smith, Robert Kiyosaki, Barbara Corcoran, and the majority of those were before he had done many syndication deals. The reason he was able to do that was because he had a podcast that he posted consistently that had a following of active real estate professionals.
If you think about it in the long-term, if you just do one interview per week for two years, that’s over 100 conversations with successful, active real estate investors. Look at that from many perspectives – from an educational perspective, you’re going to learn the best advice from over 100 people, and then also think about the networking opportunities from speaking to these 100 people, and then having access to people that they know, and it’s a runaway effect from there. So that’s number one – it must be interview-based.
Post Consistently
Number two is you must consistently post content. Your audience needs to know when to expect new content. If you post new content sporadically, then you’re building less rapport and, therefore, have less loyalty from your listeners, and it also comes with less credibility because you’re not perceived as someone who is consistently posting content. So what you should do is pick a frequency – daily, a few times a week, maybe Tuesday or Thursday, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or even if it’s twice a year, pick a frequency and stick to that frequency no matter what, with the only exception being you increasing the frequency. If you started off by posting once a month, then you cannot go to posting twice a month. You must stick to at least once a month but, from there, you can go to maybe bi-monthly, or weekly; then you go to bi-weekly and then you go to daily.
The reason why is because think about something that you really like – pick a TV show or a movie or a sports team. Do they have their games or their TV shows just randomly posted, without the notice of the audience, or are these things scheduled months or years in advance? It’s the latter, not the former. They don’t have random basketball games that you don’t know when it’s gonna happen, and the reason why is because that increases the anticipation because they know it’s coming, as well as their loyalty because, again, they know when this content is going to be coming, so they can plan to listen to it accordingly.
It’s going to be very difficult at first, and this depends on the type of personality you have, but it could be hard at first to stick to your frequency because you’re not gonna have the momentum and the habits from doing it for months at a time, and you’re also not gonna have the motivation from having a large following because, when you first start out, you’re only gonna have a couple people listening to your podcasts or reading your blog… So that’s why it’s extremely important for you to actually create a schedule that’s at least a month out in advance (ideally two months) of the content that you’re going to create.
Essentially, you wanna create an editorial calendar for the frequency of content, as well as the topic. If it’s a blog, what are you gonna blog about? If it’s a podcast, who are you interviewing? Have that calendar.
For example, if you want to post a podcast once per week, then you want to have at least five episodes recorded before launching, so that means you have five weeks’ worth of content. Then, as long as you record one new interview a week, then you always will be five weeks ahead of schedule. So you [unintelligible [00:16:13].07] then schedule out five weeks’ worth of episodes and then, each week, schedule one new episode, and that way you’ll always be five weeks in advance. Another benefit is that you’re increasing your chances of being featured on the New and Noteworthy section on iTunes.
If you want, you can actually release all five of those episodes once a day for five days, so you’ll have ten episodes pre-recorded, released five days in a row, and then do one weekly. If you do that, you’ll increase your chances of being on that New and Noteworthy section, which will give you a huge boost and a huge head start.
Overall, pick a frequency – daily, monthly, weekly etc. – and then create a content calendar that’s at least one month out in advance. So that’s number two, consistent content.
Tap Into the Existing Audience
Number three is to tie into a large built-in audience. Don’t start from scratch. Start by tapping into a platform that already has a large existing audience, and leverage that audience. For example, Bigger Pockets has one million members. iTunes has 70 million monthly podcast listeners. YouTube is used by over a billion people. Various social media sites are used by over 80% of the population, and WordPress is the world’s biggest blog.
So, rather than just simply posting content on your website, tap into these existing networks. But even though you are tapping into this large existing network, don’t expect to see quick results; don’t expect to really see any results for at least six months. And then, to see some results that I guess put a smile on your face, expect to wait at least 1-2 years. Just like apartment syndications, building a brand is a long-term game, but once you’ve posted content consistently and followed these keys for a year, you are going to see results. And maybe even sooner, depending on how well you structure your thought leadership platform. So that’s number three, tie to a large built-in audience.
Create Unique Content
Number four is going to be uniqueness. Tim Ferriss says, “Be unique before trying to be incrementally better.” What that means is focus on creating very unique content specific to you first and then focus on how to grow your audience, rather than trying to focus on what are the best ways to grow your audience and not focusing on what you’re actually good at and what your talents are. Because we all have a unique talent, we’re all unique – we have different backgrounds, areas of expertise, personalities, passions, interests… So you need to figure out what your unique talents are, and then figure out how to incorporate that into your thought leadership platform.
One way to determine your unique talents is to ask other people. There is a four-step exercise called “The Unique Capabilities Survey”, which is from the 80/20 Sales and Marketing book by Perry Marshall. The four-step process is to:
- Create a list of five people that you’ve known for at least a year that aren’t family members… Because our family members may not give us the best responses. So create that list.
- Ask people on that list, “What is my unique ability and what do I do naturally better than most?”
- Categorize their responses based off of things that are mentioned by everyone and then things that are mentioned by at least two people and then, based off of those categories, determine your giftedness zone. This giftedness zone are your unique talents that were confirmed by others; you will use these to create your unique thought leadership platform.
For example, when I performed this exercise, my three responses that were either said by everyone or said by a few people, was 1) I was funny, 2) I was very detail-oriented, and 3) I was personable. So, since I was personable, I decided to start a YouTube channel, and I tried my best to incorporate my humor into that YouTube channel, as well as getting into the weeds with the information I was discussing, so very detail and data-oriented. And, again, I wouldn’t have known what I was best at without asking those people because I would never have said that I was personable or detail-oriented. That’s just me. Maybe you know what you are objectively and don’t need to do this but, still, I recommend doing it just to confirm your assumptions.
Another strategy to either do instead or in addition to implementing and incorporating your giftedness zone is to incorporate your area of expertise into your thought leadership platform. For example, if you have a background in construction, then you can have a thought leadership platform that is about hands-on tips from your experience, and then you can extract what questions to ask others during the interviews.
Let’s say you have a background in direct sales. Well, you can create a thought leadership platform that focuses on sales techniques and how that applies to attracting passive investors or team members or deals. Or, let’s say that you are a marketing executive or, I guess, a marketing manager, then you can do a podcast or a YouTube channel with marketing tips for finding deals or finding residents after you have a deal under contract.
So those are two approaches but, overall, the idea is to make your podcast or YouTube channel or thought leadership platform unique based off of either your giftedness zone or your area of expertise… Or, ideally, both. That’s number four, uniqueness.
Edutainment
Number five, and lastly, is to educate while you’re entertaining. So who is more famous – LeBron James or Mrs. Wrinkle? The answer is LeBron James, or your answer is probably “Who the heck is Mrs. Wrinkle?” Mrs. Wrinkle was my first-grade teacher. She was a great educator, but the reason why she wasn’t LeBron James status, besides her (I guess) physique, was that she was not an entertainer. People prefer to be entertained more than they prefer to be educated, which is fairly self-evident, but still worth saying. So take this into consideration when you’re structuring your thought leadership platform and ask yourself, “How can I entertain my listeners while also educating them?”
Let’s use Joe’s podcast as an example. Rather than just having a dry interview format that’s the same every single podcast, instead, Joe has some engaging intro and outro music. He also has different types of podcast episodes each week. Obviously, there’s the Syndication School that you’re listening to and then he has his Monday-Thursday interviews, where he just interviews regular guests and then, on Fridays, we do Follow Along Friday, where me and Joe go over our business updates for the week. Then there’s Situation Saturday where Joe has a conversation with an investor about a stinky situation that they were in and how they overcame it. Then, on Sunday, there’s Skillset Sunday, where Joe interviews someone to extract a specific skillset that that investor has and how that applies to real estate.
Also, Joe concludes his episodes with the Best Ever Lightning Round where he asks them questions about their favorite book, their best/worst deal. He also has a name for the listeners – the Best Ever listeners – which is what we use when we introduce each podcast. We’ve also incorporated a trivia question of the week into Follow Along Friday. So those are all podcasts, and then there’s another example – we’ve created a quick for the blog… An engaging quiz that allows people to test their knowledge, rather than just absorbing information.
Those are all just some examples of how to create entertaining content, educating at the same time, so brainstorm some ideas for your thought leadership platform… Either copy Joe’s exactly, which is probably what you don’t wanna do, but it could work; I recommend just using Joe’s as a guide, and then incorporating your giftedness zone and your area of expertise into how to make your podcast or YouTube channel or thought leadership platform entertaining while educating.
A good question to ask yourself after creating content to determine if you’re actually entertaining people is to just ask yourself, “Would my target audience love this content so much that they will feel compelled to share it with their friends?” Because, if your audience is sharing it with people, that’s the ultimate validation of your content. Of course, you wanna track what content was shared the most in order to optimize your content on an ongoing basis.
Those are the five keys to success. Again, those are having an interview-based thought leadership platform. Number two, posting on a consistent basis. Number three, tying into a large built-in audience. Four, uniqueness, and five is to educate while entertaining, or entertaining while educating.
Steps to Developing Your Thought Leadership Strategy
1. Determine Your Goal
Now let’s get into the specifics on how to actually develop your thought leadership platform, which is a five-step process. Number one is ask yourself, “What is the goal?” Well, the goal of a thought leadership platform should be to help you achieve your 12-month goal and long-term vision, which, if you don’t know what those are, listen to episode 1513 and 1514. Based off of those goals, you wanna list out how your thought leadership platform will help you achieve those goals. For example, let’s say you believe your thought leadership platform is gonna help you find deals, build trust and a personal connection with your investors, as well as help you with your education. Well, then you want to create a mission statement that is specific and quantifiable about how it will help you achieve those goals.
For example, based off of those – finding the deal, building trust and personal connection with investors and education goals – my mission statement would be “I will research questions to ask when buying an apartment for apartment owners in my target market, invite at least one per month to be an interview guest on my podcast, build a relationship with them, and ultimately purchase their apartment communities in the future.” That covers goal number one.
By interviewing active real estate professionals once a week, including these owners, my target audience will get to know me faster, resulting in a higher level of trust and confidence in my ability to successfully invest their money. So goal number two – build trust and personal connections with investors.
When I stick to interviewing one real estate professional per week, which equates to 52 per year, I will grow smarter. In turn, this will help me execute my business plan. So, goal number three, which is the education.
So that’s the first thing you wanna do – determine what the goal is and create a mission statement for how specifically and quantifiably you will accomplish that goal.
2. Find Your Target Audience
Number two is to ask yourself, “Who is my target audience?”, which, if you’ve been following the syndication school series in order, you should have already done. If you haven’t, go back and listen to episode 1534, where you will define your primary target audience, which is specific demographic information on the type of person you want investing in your deals, which, more than likely, will be your current circle of influence, so people that you already know.
But you also want to define a secondary target audience. We briefly hit on this during episode 1534, but your secondary target audience are people that you want to know, people that could be potential team members or other people that you wanna attract. Let’s say, for example, your goal is to eventually have a consulting program; well, then your secondary target audience could be people who are interested in becoming apartment syndicators. Or maybe the secondary target audience is people who can bring you deals. Those are examples… Again, it depends on what you’re trying to get out of it, on top of attracting passive investors.
Once you have your primary and secondary target audience, you want to add those to your mission statement. For example, Joe’s statement for this part would be “65% of my content is directed at my primary audience, who are 35-65 year-old males who are accredited investors. 35% of my content is directed at my secondary target audience, who are individuals who want to become apartment syndicators.” So that’s number two, who is the primary and secondary target audience.
3. Figure Out What is Attracting Your Audience
Number three is why will they come? Because if you build it, they will not necessarily come. So questions to think about for this particular step in the process are “Why does your target audience need the information you will provide?” What solutions to their problems can you provide with your thought leadership platform? What’s in it for them? How will they benefit? Why will they become a loyal follower of your content and not the thousands of other real estate-related thought leadership platforms? And finally, what qualifications do you have that make you the go-to person for this information?
I recommend writing out a couple of sentences in response to each of those questions, and then take those answers and incorporate them into the description for your thought leadership platform, as well as the name.
For example, “Joe’s podcast is the best real estate investing advice ever because the reason why people will come is to learn the best advice ever from real estate professionals.” His description is “Are you ready for the best real estate investing advice ever? Welcome to the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. Join Joe Fairless as he talks to successful real estate professionals as they give you their best ever advice with no fluff. Joe controls over 400 million dollars in real estate but started with zero dollars in 2009. He went from buying single-family homes worth $35,000 and moved up to raising money and buying large apartment communities with investors. He has made mistakes, money and friends along the way, so click play now and see why this is one of the top investing shows on iTunes.”
If you break down that description, it starts off with a question that they’re gonna respond with, “Yes, I wanna know what the best advice ever is.” He also mentions that it’s the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast so, again, that’s a qualification. He also talks about what the podcast is actually about and what they’ll be getting out of it by listening to it, which is the best advice from real estate investors, with no fluff. He also discusses more qualifications as to why people should listen to him, which is that he owns 400 million dollars of real estate and he started with zero dollars in 2009. And, finally, he ends with some honesty where he says, “I’ve made mistakes, money and friends along the way.” Again, all of that is to attract that listener and answer that question, which is “Why should I listen to this podcast?” Well, that’s covered by the title and the description.
4. Name Your Platform
That takes us into step four, which is what is the name of your thought leadership platform. Again, ponder those questions from the previous step and create three to five names based off of the answers to those questions, as well as your goal and your target audience, and then ask for feedback from your target audience preferably, or just your circle of influence, and select the most popular name.
For help or guidance on how to create a name, if you’re stuck, I recommend going to iTunes and taking a look at the names of some of the most popular podcasts in the real estate investing industry and using those for guidance.
5. Create Your Flow
Lastly, step five is how will the thought leadership platform flow? Some questions to think about are what will be the specific structure of your thought leadership platform? Will your content be your own, or will it be presented in interview form? …which you already have the answer to – interview form. How often will you create content, which you should know when you picked and committed to your frequency. How often will you create content? How will it start and end? If you’re doing a podcast, how will it start and end? Will it be the same each time or will it be different? How long will the content be? For a blog – are you gonna do 1,000 words, or is gonna be 15,000 words, if you’re feeling bold? Or how long will each podcast episode be? And, will the content be unique, or will it follow a standard template each time? For example, Joe’s got Follow Along Friday, Situation Saturday, and Syndication School, so it’s gonna be unique each episode… And the same thing for blogs. We’ve got blogs based off of interviews, we’ve got blogs based on a specific topic, we do picture blogs, we do blogs based off of questions in the Facebook community…
For example, the flow of a podcast – Joe’s podcast, in particular, one specific type of podcast, it starts off by briefly introducing the guest, then Joe asks the guest to provide more information on their background and what they are focused on now; then the meat of the podcast is asking questions related to their given field. If it’s a real estate investor, Joe asks deal-specific questions. If it’s not a real estate investor, then he asks questions to extract skillsets that might be relevant to investors. Then he asks the money question, which is “What is your best real estate investing advice ever?” Once they answer that question, Joe goes into the Best Ever Lightning Round and then concludes the episode by providing a summary of information provided by the guest.
What you wanna do is you wanna create a similar list of exactly how your podcast, YouTube channel, or thought leadership platform is going to flow. One of the reasons why you wanna do this, besides the fact that you want to determine this information, is that you want to send this info to any interview guests so they know what they’re getting into. As I gave that example structure, the interview guest would know beforehand that it’s gonna start off by them being introduced and then they’re gonna have to give more information on their background and they’re gonna be asked questions about their related field, answer the money question, as well as the questions from the Best Ever Lightning Round.
That’s the five-step process to actually develop your thought leadership platform. Number one is what is the goal, number two is who is the target audience, number three is why will they come, four is what is the name of your platform, and five, how will it flow?
Dealing with Your Objections to a Thought Leadership Strategy
Now, I know we’re a little bit over time here, but I still wanna go over this last section, which is addressing any objections you may have. The top three objections to creating a thought leadership platform are:
- I just don’t wanna do it, for whatever reason; most likely because it gives you anxiety speaking or being on video or speaking in-person kind of gives you anxiety.
- I don’t have the time to do a thought leadership platform, which is probably the most common, and
- I don’t have the money to do a thought leadership platform.
Let’s go over all three of those quickly, as well as what you need to do in order to overcome those objections.
Weighing the Anxiety Against the Benefits
In regards to not wanting to start a thought leadership platform for anxiety reasons or commitment reasons, well think about it from this way – regardless, you’re gonna have to commit to something, you’re gonna have to do something with your life, and do you want that to be a thought leadership platform that could potentially lead to you launching a multi-million-dollar apartment syndication empire, or do you want that commitment to be working a 9-to-5 job that you dislike?
Now, maybe you like your job, maybe it’s some other reason why you don’t wanna do it but, overall, you need to keep in mind that the thought leadership platform is the key to your success, it’s the foundation of your business; it will help you educate yourself and others, it’ll help you build that credibility that you need when you’re first starting out because you haven’t done a deal before, and it will help you and others achieve their financial goals.
So what holds a higher priority in your mind – those benefits or the anxiety or the dislike or whatever it is why you don’t wanna do a thought leadership platform. So which one would you rather have, one or the other? You’ve gotta choose. Do you want the benefits of a thought leadership platform, with the downside of the potential anxiety upfront or would you rather not have that anxiety and continue doing what you’re doing right now? Ultimately, it’s up to you.
Overcoming the Issues of Cost and Time
The next objection is “I don’t have the money”, and the question to ask yourself for that one, as well as to ask yourself if you’re saying, “I don’t have the time” is to ask yourself how have these similar excuses served you in the past? Think of something that you haven’t done in the past because you didn’t have the money or time and what that outcome was. And, to overcome both of those objections, what you wanna do is brainstorm ways to prioritize things in your life in order to accomplish the goal of starting a thought leadership platform. So, if you don’t have any money, a potential solution would be to focus on using free tools for your thought leadership platform and your website. Or, if you don’t have the money to shell out and buy a nice microphone or some fancy video editing software, then just record your interviews with your cell phone or laptop, which you already have.
If your objection is “I don’t have the time”, well, it will take a maximum of 30 minutes a day to create a thought leadership platform if you’re doing weekly or monthly content, so ask yourself “How can I create 30 additional minutes per day?” Does that mean reducing the amount of time you’re on social media or watching TV? Does that mean waking up 30 minutes earlier each day or staying up 30 minutes later?
Now, if you have the money, another solution is to hire team members to reduce your workload. So maybe all you do is the interviews and have team members who set up the interviews, edit the interviews, and post the interviews. Or you can forego all of that and just do all of the content creation on the weekend. So block an hour every Saturday morning. Instead of sleeping in, get up an hour earlier and work on your thought leadership platform then.
These are just a few potential solutions but, ultimately, it’s up to prioritizing your time because everyone has 24 hours in a day – so it’s prioritizing those 24 hours to fit this thought leadership platform into your schedule. The reasons why are, again, because of all those benefits. It’s gonna be the key to your success; you need this thought leadership platform.
Conclusion
Again, I know we went a little bit over time but, to conclude, this is part four of the four-part series about the power of the apartment syndication brand. In this particular episode, you learned what the purpose of the thought leadership platform is; how to select a thought leadership platform; the five keys to success of a thought leadership platform, which is it being interview-based, posting content consistently, tying into a large built-in audience, making it unique, and educating while entertaining.
Then, you also learned the five-step process to actually develop your thought leadership platform. And, lastly, we went over some strategies to overcome any objections that you have. And, of course, the free document for this episode was the Guide to Structuring Sponsorships on Your Thought Leadership Platform so, eventually, you will be able to monetize it with sponsorships, assuming you’ve grown your audience and have followed the five keys and developed your thought leadership platform properly.
Thank you for listening. To listen to parts one through three, as well as the other Syndication School series about the how-tos of apartment syndications, and to download all the free documents we have available, make sure you visit SyndicationSchool.com. Thank you for listening, and I will talk to you next week.
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