Thought Leadership Examples: What Five Experts Publish and Why It Works

The strongest thought leadership examples share one habit: each expert publishes the same kind of piece, on the same rhythm, from one clear point of view. They do not chase every format. They pick one, repeat it for years, and let the reader’s trust build.

This article is for founders, directors and marketers who want to see what thought leadership looks like in practice before they start. It matters because buyers read before they call, and the examples show how to be worth reading.

It looks at five commonly cited thought leaders: Ann Handley, Seth Godin, April Dunford, Justin Welsh and Rand Fishkin with SparkToro. For each, we describe what they publish, as their own sites presented it when we read them on 22 October 2026.

We then look at how large companies such as Deloitte, McKinsey, IBM, Accenture and Patagonia do the same thing at scale, and what any business leader can copy from both groups.

We use no audience sizes or revenue claims for individuals. Those figures are easy to quote and hard to verify, and the lesson does not depend on them.

Thought leadership examples work when the format never changes

Look across the five and the first thing you notice is how little variety there is. Each expert has a signature format, and the format is the reason people remember them.

A signature format does three jobs. It tells the reader what to expect, so they come back. It removes a decision from the writer, so the work gets done. And it makes every piece add to the last, which is how a body of work turns into a reputation.

This is the difference between thought leadership and a scatter of content marketing posts. Content marketing asks what to publish this week. Thought leadership asks what you are known for saying, and then says it again in a form the audience recognizes. A good content marketing strategy makes room for both.

For the full definition and how it differs from branding and PR, see our guide to what thought leadership is.

Ann Handley makes her writing voice the product

Ann Handley is a speaker, author and marketer, and her site lists her books, including Everybody Writes and Content Rules. She also sends a newsletter, Total Annarchy, which her site says arrives every two weeks and mixes marketing, writing and life.

The stance is stated plainly on her own pages: she helps people and brands find their voice and tell their own story. Everything she publishes is an example of that claim in use.

Why it works: the newsletter and the books prove the advice by being well written. A reader who enjoys one issue has already seen the craft she teaches. The proof and the offer are the same object.

What to borrow: write about the discipline you sell, in the style you recommend. If you advise on clear thinking, your own posts must be clear. A reader judges your expertise by how you write long before they judge it by what you charge.

Seth Godin publishes one idea a day and lets the rhythm persuade

Seth’s Blog is Seth Godin’s personal blog. When we read it, new posts appeared almost every day. Each post centers on one idea, usually developed in a few short paragraphs, and some are only a line or two.

Each offers insights from a unique perspective, and the daily habit helps him engage audiences who may never have met him.

The topics run across work, trust, culture, marketing and change. The blog also points readers to his workshops, courses, a podcast and a free email digest, so the daily writing feeds the rest of what he offers.

Why it works: short, frequent and single-minded is easy to read and easy to share. No post needs a reader to have seen the last one, yet together they build a recognizable way of seeing business.

What to borrow: the constraint of one idea per piece. A leader with a full diary can keep up a brief note far more easily than a long article. A steady run of small, sharp thought leadership posts builds credibility faster than a rare large one.

April Dunford turned one method into a book, a newsletter and a podcast

April Dunford’s site describes her as a positioning consultant for B2B technology companies. Her books are Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch, and the site also links to a Substack newsletter and a podcast, The Positioning Show.

Her stance is narrow and clear. She presents positioning as the foundation for marketing, sales, messaging and branding, and she describes a structured method for doing it. The method is the idea, and every format teaches it from a different angle.

Why it works: one framework, repeated in several forms, gives business leaders a handle they can remember and pass on. When a buyer says “we need to do the positioning exercise”, they are using her vocabulary and, in effect, recommending her.

What to borrow: name your method and give it a consistent shape. A framework that others can repeat travels without you in the room. Our guide to brand storytelling shows how a clear structure helps an audience retell your idea.

Justin Welsh sends one essay a week from a single stance

Justin Welsh’s site describes him as a writer and entrepreneur who built a one-person business. He sends one essay every Saturday morning, and his site groups the essays under themes such as tradeoffs, freedom, ambition and work. He is also active on LinkedIn, X and Instagram.

The stance is personal and consistent: work that fits your life, and the choices that make that possible. The essays and the social media posts make the same argument in different lengths.

Why it works: a weekly essay is a promise the audience can hold him to. The fixed day and the fixed length make it a habit for the reader as well as the writer. Short LinkedIn posts then carry the same idea to people who have not subscribed.

What to borrow: pick a day, a length and a theme list, and keep them. The essay becomes your owned asset, and the LinkedIn post becomes the way in to it. If you want help finding your one theme, our free ebook The Founder’s Face is built for that job.

Rand Fishkin and SparkToro publish what they learn about audiences

SparkToro is audience research software, and its blog mixes opinion essays on marketing, audience research newsletters and product news. Rand Fishkin, who writes about the startup world in his book Lost and Founder, is commonly cited as a leading voice in this space.

Why it works: the company publishes about the subject its product serves. A reader who wants to understand where an audience spends attention learns from the content, and then meets the tool that does it at scale.

What to borrow: publish what your work teaches you. Many businesses sit on proprietary data and customer questions that their competitors never see. Turn the most useful pattern into a short piece or a research report, and you have original insights no one else can write.

A caution from the SparkToro example: its blog mixes essays, newsletters and product announcements. That shows the value of a company voice beside a personal one, but blending formats makes the stance harder to see at a glance. Keep the thought leadership separate from the news.

Companies build thought leadership from original research

Individuals are only half the picture. Large firms do the same thing with research teams, and the pattern is the same: a defined audience, a recurring format and original data.

Their research reports give industry leaders and industry experts something to cite, and they follow industry trends and emerging trends before the rest of the market.

Deloitte’s insights hub publishes annual industry outlooks and workforce research, with titles such as 2026 Global Human Capital Trends, to help executives plan. McKinsey & Company’s insights page describes its output as its latest thinking on the issues that matter most in business and management, from the McKinsey Quarterly to reports from its research institutes.

IBM’s Think hub reports on technology adoption and responsible AI, including a trends piece based on a survey of more than 1,000 C-suite executives. Accenture’s technology pages label pieces such as The CIO’s guide to AI tokenomics as research reports.

Patagonia shows a different route. Its mission statement reads “We’re in business to save our home planet”, and it says it aims to use its business, its investments, its voice and its imagination to act on that.

What to borrow: a small firm cannot match a research team, but it can match the habit. Pick one question your customers keep asking, gather what you see across your own work, and publish the answer on a fixed schedule.

Proprietary research of this kind gives readers unique insights that engaging content alone cannot, and credible evidence behind a distinctive point of view is what separates it from opinion.

Talks, posts and videos carry the same ideas in other formats

Thought leadership content includes blogs, podcasts and videos, and the format should match how your audience likes to learn. Brené Brown’s TED talk The power of vulnerability, filmed at TEDxHouston in June 2010, shows 71,349,597 plays on TED’s own page.

Satya Nadella’s year-end post on LinkedIn, The pace of AI innovation in 2023 was astounding, is a chief executive using a social post to reflect on a year of AI and point to how people are applying it. A LinkedIn post can be a thought leadership article in miniature.

Thought leadership marketing also uses longer formats. Live streams and webinars are live presentations that let an audience ask questions. White papers are concise guides to one specific problem. Ebooks give in-depth analysis of a complex topic. Infographics use engaging visuals to explain a finding quickly.

The format matters less than the quality. In the LinkedIn and Edelman B2B Thought Leadership Impact survey, which LinkedIn cites on its own page, 71% of decision-makers say less than half of the thought leadership they consume gives them valuable insights.

Of the same group, 81% want provocative insights that challenge their assumptions rather than validate current thinking.

LinkedIn’s page also cites Miller Heiman Group research that more than 70 percent of B2B buyers fully define their needs before they talk to a sales representative. By the time a buyer calls, your published ideas have already done part of the selling.

The five examples share four habits any leader can copy

Set the five side by side and the pattern is plain. None of them depends on a large team, a big budget or constant presence on every platform.

The four habits behind the table are these:

• A single, owned format. Each expert has a place they control, a blog, a newsletter or a podcast, and treats social media as a way to point readers back to it. Publishing consistently across owned channels is what builds visibility.
• A stance that can be summed up in a sentence. You could describe each person’s view to a stranger in one line.
• A fixed rhythm. The audience knows when to expect the next piece.
• Proof built into the product. The way they publish demonstrates the thing they advise on.

The best thought leaders help their audience understand what matters and what to do next. These four habits are how they do it.

Thought leadership content marketing is judged by trust before traffic

Once you have a format, the next question is how to promote thought leadership content and how to tell whether it is working. The answer differs from a normal campaign, because the first return is trust and not clicks.

You do not need paid channels to begin. Start with the channels you own: your site, your newsletter and your own LinkedIn profile.

Share each piece where senior executives and c suite executives already read, and let the owned asset stay the home of the idea. Video content and executive interviews carry the same argument to people who prefer to watch or listen.

Each format can educate potential customers and reach the right audience, provided the content creation rests on thorough research and credible research rather than opinion alone. Public speaking engagements put the same ideas in front of potential customers in competitive markets.

A landing page with one clear next step can drive traffic from these pieces to an offer and win new prospects, but it should never replace informative content and valuable content.

Decide in advance what counts as a result. Useful key performance indicators include replies from your target audience, requests to speak, people quoting your idea back to you, time spent on your pieces, and inquiries from potential clients and existing customers who mention a piece they read.

Edelman’s own page for its 2024 report, a survey of nearly 3,500 management-level professionals across seven countries, notes that most organizations say thought leadership is under-resourced, misused and not measured appropriately. Lead generation does follow, but later and more quietly than it does from a sales page.

This is also how a thought leadership content strategy sits inside a wider plan. A thought leadership strategy takes a holistic approach and keeps the bigger picture in view. It decides the stance and the rhythm, and the measures tell you after a quarter whether the stance is landing.

Our guide to how to write thought leadership content covers the writing, and our guide to content strategy shows how to set the plan around it.

A founder can copy the pattern without copying the person

It is easy to read a list like this and conclude that thought leaders are simply gifted writers. They are not. They made a few decisions early and held to them, and a founder or director can make the same decisions.

Creating thought leadership content starts with your target audience. Decide which decision makers you want to help, and what they get wrong today. Then choose one stance, specific to a particular industry, that corrects it, based on experience you really have rather than on a view borrowed from a conference talk.

Next, choose one format you can sustain on your worst week. For some leaders that is a short LinkedIn post, for others a monthly essay or a recorded conversation. Speaking engagements and a podcast are worth adding later, once the written habit is steady.

Finally, write the plan on one page: audience, stance, format, rhythm and the single place a reader can take the next step. This is an effective thought leadership strategy in its simplest form, and it is how a leader starts to gain credibility and become a thought leader.

A free playbook and a weekly note turn the pattern into a plan

If you want more worked examples of the wider field, our content marketing examples article covers fifteen brands. The page on Brandesis content strategy explains how we help a business decide what to say.

For a practical next step, the free ebook and workbook show how to choose your pillars, channels and a rhythm you can keep. You can read the Content Strategy Playbook today.

If you would rather get one idea a week, Ground Truth arrives on Wednesdays. For the idea underneath all of this, see the Brand Library entry on authority.

FAQ