How to Become a Massively Successful Blogger or Podcaster

 Photo Credit: Aleksi Tappura via Unsplash

Now that LinkedIn has opened up its blogging platform to the general public, rather than just its elite cadre of Influencers, it’s easier than ever to start sharing your ideas with the world. But if you hope to emulate top business thinkers and ‘go viral,’ it’s worth exploring how today’s most successful authors, bloggers, and podcasters rose to the top. What is it about their message, or its delivery, that has resonated? While researching my forthcoming book Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It, I’ve discovered four patterns that might inform the content you create.

Frequency. Tim Ferriss, with his infrequent but lengthy missives, is a notable counterexample. But in general, if you’re just starting out, it’s far more effective to follow the model of Seth Godin, who blogs daily and has built up a loyal “tribe” (to use his phrase) of followers who await his missives. Similarly, podcaster John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire has had unprecedented success – to the tune of earning more than $275,000 per month – through his innovation of hosting daily podcasts, rather than the weekly format that was previously considered standard. (Full disclosure: Dumas recently interviewed me on his show.)

Ubiquity. In politics, my former career, there was a saying that a voter has to hear your name seven times before they’ll even remember who you are. The same principle is true in business, as well, which is why you’ll find thinkers like James Clear syndicating his work in outlets such as Entrepreneur, the Huffington Post, and Business Insider. (I also strive for ubiquity, writing for the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and more.)

Self-Disclosure. The master of self-disclosure has got to be James Altucher, who has built a massive following by sharing tales of his personal disasters and how he recovered from them. (One recent post on personal finance began, “I managed to totally screw things up for myself at the ages of 20, 22, 24, 29, 33, 37, and 40 so I decided to write everything I know about so-called ‘personal finance’.”) He takes the same scalpel to his love life, his business strategies, and more. Successful podcaster Pat Flynn (of Smart Passive Income) openly shares his genesis story of being laid off from his job at an architecture firm and having to scramble to find new ways to earn money. Being open and relatable builds a powerful and loyal audience.

Sharing Counterintuitive Advice That Is Nonetheless What People What Want to Hear. This isn’t meant to insinuate that you should misrepresent the facts or pander to your audience. But I’ve certainly noticed that some messages resonate better than others. One of my most popular Harvard Business Review articles of all time was “5 Things You Should Stop Doing in 2012,” written in late 2011 as a kind of anti-New Year’s Resolution piece. To date, it’s garnered 316 comments. In comparison, the next year I wrote a piece for Forbes, “Five Things to Start Doing in 2013.’ That one has two comments. In a busy world, people love it when you tell them they should take long vacations, stop checking email, and generally not do stuff. Of course, those are good pieces of advice, but only taken in combination with the other hard reality: you’re not constantly checking email, but you may instead be up until 4 in the morning mastering Vine or other new technologies on your priority list. There’s no getting around working a lot, just in a more focused way.

What are the common strands you’ve seen in your favorite business thinkers? And how are you going to add to the conversation?

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, and you can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.