How do you measure thought leadership?

For many years, this blog has emphasized earning an audience through thought leadership (authority) rather than rolling the dice, hoping for SEO for traffic. I never thought “hope” was much of a strategy!

With the profound disruption from AI, the view of earning authority independent of algorithms seems more relevant than ever. Build your audience, build your own mailing list, and control your destiny. The main engine for this is content. You need to show up in the world to have authority, which means consistently publishing helpful, meaningful content.

One persistent question is, how do you know if it’s working? How do you measure thought leadership? I teach this topic in my personal branding master class, so I thought bringing it to you today would be useful.

There are four major buckets of success:

1. Awareness

If you are building a personal brand, you want to be known and that means people have to be aware of us. Luckily for us living in this digital age, we have plenty of easily available metrics to show progress

• Website Traffic — If we’re creating authoritative content well, we should see a lift in website traffic as people discover and share our work.
• Subscriptions — I recently wrote that this was really my…