How to Get Over the Fear of Creating Thought Leadership Content

Here’s the thing: We previously ran the exact same study for Wix and it did well. So we decided to replicate it for Squarespace.

Quite innocuous, right? Turns out it wasn’t. Someone shared the takeaways from that post on Reddit and boy, was the criticism full on.

Call me thin-skinned, but I remember feeling hurt. It was my first ever ‘research’ article, after all. And it was as safe a research study as possible. But reality is often harsher than you’d imagine.

Criticism doesn’t diminish. Five years later, I still see the same about the studies I publish:

The reason why I’m telling these stories is because making thought leadership content—studies, opinions, experiments—can be scary. Criticism will come hard and fast. You’ll put yourself out there and can expect to receive ‘hate’.

I’d admit that’s one reason why I (used to) love making SEO content. Use a couple of SEO tools, pop in the necessary H2s (What is X? Why is X important? How to do X?), and fill in the blanks. No opinion required. Publish a post and tuck yourself in bed, warm and cozy.

But it’s only a matter of time that it won’t work anymore. We’ve avoided years of controversy as content marketers by shuffling ideas around. Content curation is safe because it can’t offend anyone. But generative AI can do that regurgitation now. And it can do that better than all of us… and at scale too.

If we want to stand out in our careers and help the companies we work for differentiate from others, we need to embrace creating thought leadership content. Sharing lived experiences, professing strong opinions, and gaining and using our hard-earned expertise.

Doing that first requires us to overcome that fear of putting ourselves out there.

hundreds of blog posts but could only summon hate for two. Because no one cares about the rest. It didn’t challenge anyone’s thinking or was about topics that no one bothered about.

So, if you published something that other people actually took the time to criticize, it means you did a good job. You pushed the boundaries and challenged the industry’s assumptions. You made people think.

It’s a mindset shift. You don’t need to fear criticism anymore. It can still hurt of course, but take pride in the fact that you’ve made people notice.

But don’t take this to say you should intentionally poke bears. Your goal is not to say something controversial “for the attention”. Don’t ragebait and don’t rile people up. That’s not helpful and it’s not thought leadership content.

You should share your genuine opinions based on your expertise or experience. Sometimes, this polarises because it differs from everyone else’s. But you’ll be surprised how many people were thinking about it.

For example, I was a little hesitant to publish my opinion about entity SEO. After all, who am I to talk about it? But I plucked up my courage. Turns out: There are people who agree!

A comment agreeing with my opinion on entity SEO

Further reading

Ryan, our Director of Content Marketing, didn’t share his thoughts about generative AI and content marketing. It would be doing everyone a disservice because many people would continue to try and generate as much AI content as possible to rank in the SERPs.

That would damage the SEO and content marketing industry:

More AI content means poorer search results and quality. Everyone is worse off for it.
AI content is mediocre and will likely lead to inferior content marketing ROI. Low ROI means less investment from stakeholders, affecting the industry.

I’m not saying Ryan is that influential. (He might be, though.) But if he could change the minds of one, ten, or even a hundred people—that’s a big impact. He helped everyone do things better and improved the industry as a whole.

Imagine that was you, but out of fear, you neglected to share your opinion on the right ways to do something in your industry. Now, everyone in your industry will continue to chug along the wrong path without any improvements. You did everyone a disservice.

But what if you did the opposite and shared your opinion? You could positively impact everyone in your industry.

Louise to discuss if my “opinion” had merit:

Then, after I had drafted the outline, I asked my colleague Despina to review it:

Doing all of that gave me confidence that my opinion was worth publishing.

“fear-setting”. The basic idea is to define your fears in writing.

Here’s the question he uses:

“Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering. What doubt, fears, and “what-ifs” pop up as you consider the big changes you can—or need—to make? Envision them in painstaking detail. Would it be the end of your life? What would be the permanent impact, if any, on a scale of 1–10? Are these things really permanent? How likely do you think it is that they would actually happen?”

What’s the worst that could happen? Someone already said my work was no better than a second-grade kid. But I’m still here, publishing thought leadership content and sharing my opinion.

Often, you’ll find that there’s nothing really worth worrying about.