How to Insulate Your Thought Leadership Platform from Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Experts
Insulating yourself against the foolishness in your industry (and in the economy) is a non-negotiable if you are doing your life’s work or other meaningful work that you want to continue to scale the impact and earnings of.
What exactly do you need to insulate your thought leadership, intellectual property, and personal platform against?
I offer the following exhibits into evidence—
Exhibit A: 🙄🧇🤷🏽♀️
The people in their basements (who I sense are eating Eggo waffles right now, and I’m not entirely mad at them) who are using A.I. to churn out 5 products a day . . . let’s call them artificial experts (A.E.).
Exhibit B: 👩🏽💻💼📊
Pre-established competitors and new entrants who actually have some level of skill to consult/train/talk about the things you do.
Exhibit C: 😬😰🤯
The ~1,700 economic shifts that have happened since you started in your current industry. Or more accurately, since you started reading this piece.
Exhibit D: 📲🤔🤬
The major social media (and other) platforms you use who go through various identity crises 👇🏽 at least once a year.
“We’re a photo sharing platform to connect you with your friends. No. We’re a platform to connect you with the brands you love. Wait. No. We’re a video platform where creators can earn a living. Wait, did we say that? What we meant is we’re a suggestion engine that will show you what we want, when we want, and use you as the talent and the product to sell your attention to the highest bidder.”
I’m sure there are more exhibits I could add to make my case, Your Honor . . . but I think you get the point. There are things going on in your industry, in tech, and in the world at large that you simply can’t afford not to consider—if maximum impact and consistent or scalable income are your goals.
But, there’s hope, my friend. What do I mean?
Basically, in your industry, there are a few “forces” of insulation for your intellectual property, your thought leadership, and your personal platform.
[And again, I’m specifically talking about industries where you sell information and expertise.]
These forces are at play whether you’re tuned in to them or not, and they can either help or hurt your chances of insulating yourself.
Force #1: The barriers to entry of your industry.
As a general rule, your power as a company or as a personal platform decreases with the growth of competition in your industry. So, the million-dollar question is: how hard or easy, expensive or cheap, time-consuming or fast is it to become a “player” in your field?
The answer to that question equals the “barriers to entry” in your industry.
Here’s the thing: you may have already been in a saturated industry with low barriers to entry, but add on A.I. and A.E. (artificial experts) to the other real experts entering your industry every day, and we have ourselves a situation.
Especially with how easy it is for people to design a slick website overnight using Squarespace, make attractive graphics in Canva . . . and call themselves a consultant.
ACTION #1: MOVE TO AN AREA OF YOUR INDUSTRY WITH A HIGHER BARRIER TO ENTRY (WHERE THERE IS STILL DEMAND).
Instead of worrying about the faux/real competition, or getting stuck in a war of who has the bigger advertising budget or ability to use high-pressure sales tactics, you can insulate yourself by moving to a segment of your industry with a higher barrier to entry.
A place to which A.I., A.E., and other real experts can’t easily follow you.
Below are four suggested ways you can make that move.
Method A: Develop solutions for higher context buyers.
Since you have a much more nuanced understanding of your industry and years of experience, you can provide solutions that are more sophisticated than what your competitors provide, and you can answer the higher-context questions people are asking in your field.
When a person—your potential future customer—first starts out with a goal (ex: writing a memoir, shifting the culture at their organization, learning code to transition into tech, starting a business), they may not know what questions to ask, or, their questions and actions may be very basic.
They are low-context on their goal, which doesn’t mean they’re not intelligent. Context simply indicates how deeply someone understands the factors that will lead to their success or failure in something.
If you’ve never renovated a house before, you might not know your options for fixing the subfloor in that one spot, or why you shouldn’t try to add a bathroom right there, or what the line items on your general contractor’s invoice even mean.
Education (books, courses, etc.) can only get you so far with context. But, as you attempt different things to achieve your goals, and take time to assess what worked or didn’t work and why, your context increases and you start asking more refined questions. [Questions that wear a monocle 🧐 and rearrange their salad fork to the left of the dinner fork.]
The way someone talks about their goal, the questions they ask, the publications they read, the thought leaders and companies they follow online . . . these are all indicators of someone’s context.
All this to say: you can speak the language that artificial experts, beginner competitors, and even intermediate experts simply won’t know how to speak.
Why? Because you need context, experience, awareness, and pattern-recognition skills to not only solve these higher context inquiries in nuanced and satisfactory ways, but also to even be aware of these more sophisticated needs in the first place.
A.I. and A.E. will have a hard time knowing about, or finding their way to, the high-context areas of your topic and industry.
And, even if a few A.E. did stumble in the room, it would be hard for them to get higher context people to invest in their solutions without proof they know what they’re talking about.
“How did you get in here?” - asks the potential client
“Blah, blah, blah, words, word, words.” - A.E. or beginners trying to answer the question
“Ah, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” - thinks the non-client, in their head, as they leave
Note: another area of your industry with a higher barrier to entry is simply one that is more specific (niche) than the general solutions you commonly run into.
For this, I think about my friend Esmé Wang who hosts The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy. Instead of helping all people, ever, who want to write and publish a book of any kind (which would be a low barrier to entry solution), she helps people living with limitations who want to write a memoir or personal narrative nonfiction book.
Since she has considerable experience in this, moving to a more specific area of the industry gives her some insulation. But, she also combines that with Methods B & C below.
Method B: Lean into more rare “supplies” (or inputs) for your work.
If you were making physical products, you could source higher quality ingredients to set yourself apart from your competition, right?
Well, with information products and services, you can do the same.
Think about what supplies your work . . . what makes your work possible. (This may mean: where you get your information, the types of customers/people you have access to and get ideas or questions from, the research and resources you can reference, etc.)
Whatever your inputs are, can other people access them easily? If the only things that supply your work are easy to “Google” or ask A.I., then your supply isn’t rare.
But, since you’re more experienced, you likely:
Have convos with successful/high-level clients your competition does not have access to; meaning: you can learn in real-time from real people with real problems and speak on your topic in more depth
Have worked behind-the-scenes in a past career (ex: you worked in HR at Google, you’ve done marketing for a large restaurant group, etc.) that allows you to speak authoritatively on things your competition cannot
Have built connections over years that allow you to collaborate, get in front of new audiences, or get uncommon/scarce resources for your work
Or, you may have access to some other rare input; you get the point.
Esmé is a great example here as well. She has built wonderful relationships and credibility with other amazing writers over the years, so she can co-host epic, meaningful sessions with them inside her academy.
Method C: Distinguish your work with elite and meaningful accomplishments.
For this, you have to know your industry and the mind of your buyer, who is perhaps a more sophisticated client.
In many industries, people will never ask you if you went to college, let alone what your degree was in and where you graduated from. Also, in a surprising number of industries, holding certain certifications can seem silly/bogus to your ideal clients, or at best, be uninteresting/neutral to them.
So, the question is: what accomplishments, awards, credentials, certifications, or other distinguishments actually mean something to your specific buyer?
It could be:
Getting published in publications your clients respect
Having worked with certain companies/people that you can share on your site or in conversation
Achieving specific titles, certs, or awards
Publishing a book with a great reputation or speaking at specific conferences
Etc.
It can be a waste of time and money to pay for or pursue an angle that your clients don’t respect. So before you go down that road, converse with the sophisticated clients you love and want to attract to find out what means something to them.
Esmé is well-positioned in this (yet again) because one of her books was a New York Times Best Seller. And as amazing as this is, there is something in your industry that can be your “wow factor” without having to figure out how to write a NYT best seller yourself. Or, that may be exactly what you’re going for. Either way, awesome.
But also:
If you’re in food, a James Beard nomination goes a long way. [This is huge, actually.]
If you’re in wellness, writing a guest article in a number of publications would be excellent.
Ditto if you’re in business, or really any industry.
The list goes on and varies in how much “wow” you get from potential clients.
Method D: Do your (most self-aware and complete) due diligence on substitute solutions, and adjust what you publish accordingly.
“There are no substitutes for what we do; it’s so unique; we don’t have competition really; even our clients tell us there’s nothing like us.” - many business owners
No.
Every knowledge-based product, offer, or solution on this planet has substitutes. Mainly because you’re selling to humans.
As humans, we often address internal (mental/emotional) needs with external things.
So, the C-suite executive who you want to help transform their leadership style might be going to get massages (to relieve stress) instead of attending your introductory “emotional intelligence for corporate wellness” workshop.
The person you feel needs to change their diet and get upper cervical chiropractic care in order to get their energy back may be investing in a new programmable espresso machine for their house so they can make coffee as soon as they wake up.
You get the point.
The “substitutions” for your solution are not always a competitor with an offer your clients view as similar. Sometimes your greatest competition is the client themselves, or misinformation, or a Nespresso Vertuo machine.
There are three key things you’ll want to figure out in order to plan around substitute products:
Learn what your clients consider a close substitute for what you do. For this, you might ask them what other authors/books, podcasts, publications, services, trainings, etc. they use to help them with their goals.
Learn the surprising substitutes your clients are using. For this, you’ll need to use your Sherlock Holmes level detection skills or Burton Guster super sniffer (TV detective played by Dulé Hill). You will arrive at the surprising substitutes through your powers of observation and critical thinking . . . because sometimes, even your clients won’t realize they are using these things as substitutes.
Gain an understanding if it’s an “and” or an “or” for your clients. Do they buy that substitute book and your coaching package? Do they attend a competitor’s training program and yours? Or do they do one or the other?
The higher the context of your client, you’ll often find they invest in multiple solutions and actually don’t view them as competing offers. They attend a training, buy 3 books, and hire a consultant all on the same issue.
It’s important for you to understand the 3 items above in order to make a plan for them. That plan might include how you present your packages as the healthier option, or it may mean you present your offer as something that will complement the learning/training the person has done elsewhere.
The key here is extreme self-awareness. And to not believe that your solution is the exception to the rule that everything has a substitute.
Whether the market offers good substitutes or not is actually not the point. You have to know what the substitutes are and how your clients view them to make a proper plan. Then, you’ll be well-informed as you decide what to publish online, how to position your platform, and how to package your offer.
Force #2: The design and costs of your customer pipeline.
There’s no delicate way to put this (if you’re a strategic coach, author, speaker, consultant, or course creator), so I’ll just say it:
You can let your chosen business model narrow down your marketing options for you, or, you can let your chosen marketing methods limit your income and business model.
Basically, the way you solve client problems & make money (which loosely translates to your business model) can and should dictate what types of marketing and platforms actually make sense for what you’re doing. [Not the other way around.]
If you decide you want to solve your clients’ problems with a sophisticated program that you deliver to small groups over a 6-month period, and that you want to get paid $7,000 per person who registers, then you can likely guess this next thing:
Dancing on TikTok 3x/day, creating “enough” content on Instagram to get your affiliate sales up, and releasing a new free cheat sheet download each week to get people’s email addresses is not necessary or advisable.
Some of my friends and clients who run programs like the one above ($5,000 to $50,000 for 3 - 12 months) run very targeted ads and barely create any organic content, some do purposeful organic posts and don’t run any ads, and some get most of their clients through 1-on-1 conversations online.
Multiple methods work, but who they want to serve and how they want to serve them narrows down the types, frequency, context, and quality of content they publish. It also directs the platforms (social media and otherwise) that make the most sense to use.
As you can imagine, this is way better than launching straight into creating 20 posts per week on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, or your website/podcast and then trying to slap a business model on top.
The stars ✨ rarely align and match your content production to what you are offering. This has to be planned and acted on intentionally.
How though?
It’s helpful to think of your thought leadership platform and business as a function of two things: the size of your gas tank (or electric vehicle battery), and how much gas/energy you’re able to fill it up with.
I’ll explain. You know those puzzles that are like “two trains leave a station at the same time; one is traveling 130 miles at X speed and the other is . . .” ?
I have a real-life scenario for you.
A few friends and I flew from Quintana Roo (a state in México where I used to live) to Ciudad de México one day. The remaining friends in our group (one of them a helicopter pilot) flew in a chopper over the same ~1,000 miles.
Who made it there first?
It’s not a trick question. We (the plane ✈️ crew) got there in a little over two hours. My helicopter pilot friend got there the next day because he had to stop and refuel his chopper 🚁 and rest a few times.
I’d never thought of it before that day—🤦🏽♀️ of course the chopper has a smaller fuel tank than the standard AeroMéxico plane.
We don’t even have to get into the engine size and how much faster the plane is able to go to understand why my friend took so much longer to get there.
Bringing this back to your business—
Your tank size is equivalent to your income earning potential and business structure. Basically, how much fuel can you hold?
And your fuel is equivalent to the customers and conversions you have waiting in your “pipeline.” How far can you travel with this fuel? Can you take full advantage of your tank size?
Let’s dive in further.
Since a bigger tank means you can hold more fuel (a.k.a. you’re set up to support more clients and/or earn more money), it gives you the potential to be more insulated.
If you’re only set up to take on 3 customers per month for a $500 service, your max revenue is $1,500. After taxes and operating expenses, that may only cover you for a few days.
If your business supports bringing in 30 new customers each month, and they each pay $10,000 for your offer, you have a bigger tank size.
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But, it’s not just about tank size, it’s about how much fuel you have in the tank too.
Just because there’s room in the tank, doesn’t mean a person is able to fill it all the way up.
(Translation: just because you can take on 30 clients @ $10,000 each, doesn’t mean you have 30 people waiting to pay you.)
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The way you do marketing and the customer pipeline you create is the amount of fuel in your tank. Your expenses and labor are what drains your tank.
In other words, to understand whether your tank is on F (full), E (empty), or somewhere in between, you must understand what income your “pipeline” of qualified customers is bringing you and how much that pipeline costs you.
Many of my clients build consistent paths into their customer pipelines through:
Cornerstone content pieces that bring organic visitors (from search engines) to their website or YouTube videos each month; and/or
Lean, evergreen thought leadership ads (that we teach an intro class on inside The Intellectual Property OS Program)
This means my clients can estimate (with a high degree of certainty) how many new customer leads and sales they’ll get each month based on the last several months.
They understand their pipeline and how inexpensive it is.
Which speaks to how insulated you are. How many months can you keep operating if your tank is full?
If you can keep operating for a long time, you have both a big tank and a lot of fuel. You’re insulated.
Here’s a fact that surprises a lot of people:
Many service providers and course creators in my industry spend $10,000 - $1M per month on social media ads. Not joking. They also spend $100,000+/month on salaries for their teams.
There’s nothing wrong with this, but insulation is important here. If you spend this kind of money, your tank size (business model) and fuel levels (customer pipeline - expenses) need to make sense for you.
Not too long ago a client linked me to a very transparent blog post where a course/coaching business owner outlined making $99,000 CAD one month, in the same month her expenses were $192,000 CAD.
Now, I don’t think these are standard numbers for her business (which she has since shut down), and she also shared how grateful she was for saving money 🙌🏽 in other months to cover months like this, but you get the point: people’s pipelines can cost more than they make.
And on another, related note: you can make mad profits 💰 in your business, but if your personal money management and saving skills are as jacked up as mine were when I first started in business, whoooo 🤦🏽♀️. You’re in for some deep personal development work . . . and I’m speaking from the frontlines of this battle, not at all judging.
ACTION #2: INCREASE YOUR TANK SIZE AND/OR INCREASE HOW MUCH GAS YOU HAVE IN IT.
To change your tank size:
You will likely need an overhaul of your business model. I’ve done this before and will just say: this is a big conversation we need to have another time.
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To increase how much gas you have in the tank:
Move A: Make it less costly to get each customer.
Turn your focus to decreasing how much time, labor, and money your “client pipeline” costs.
Here are a few ideas to that end:
Consider using thought leadership marketing as a way to draw people in (instead of having to hunt clients down, which is time and labor intensive). You can do this through targeted thought leadership content that is search engine optimized. (We have an entire section on this inside the The Thought Leadership Marketing Engine Crash Course, fyi.)
Create an ideal OPP strategy 👀. Where OPP = other people’s platforms, of course. You can increase your reach and credibility simultaneously by doing guest interviews on specific podcasts, guest talks at conferences/events, or guest articles on publications your potential clients read and respect.
Stop running basic ads (that look/sound like the rest of your industry or other industries). Start running lean, evergreen thought leadership ads. Their lean budget works because you only pay for ads that get people thinking . . . content they want to share with everyone they know. This helps you save so much money on your paid marketing strategies. Please refer to our crash course experience for more details on this system.
Move B: Focus on one scalable path and platform to grow your pipeline of people who are a good fit.
Either from the list directly above, or a different idea you have, choose one path you know is extremely scalable for you, and lean in to that.
If you can’t stand public speaking or teaching/talking live, then being a guest at conferences and podcasts is not sustainable or easily scalable for you. Also, in general, I don’t recommend that my clients rely solely (or even heavily) on a path into their pipeline that depends on other people, or OPP.
Whatever sole method and platform you focus on first needs to be possible and practical for you. The path you outline for clients to hop in your pipeline should be built around your strengths and things you actually want to do.
It also needs to be a path that can practically create enough “entries into your pipeline” as to help you earn a great income. If only 50 people per month search for anything in the realm of your topic online, SEO content is probably not the way forward for you.
When you make a plan to scale, you have to think about the whole chain. It’s not just the initial content or interaction that gets people in your pipeline, but there are also follow-up conversations or actions you’ll need to cover (with niche content, or your time, or the expertise and time of someone you’ve hired).
This may involve sales calls, white papers, online workshops, or some other experience in between entering the pipeline and buying your offer. When I work with clients, I help them set up an in-between experience that itself is scalable, whenever possible.
For example: a potential customer might come across your thought leadership ad, which then directs them to a well-written essay or video that sparks deeper interest. They may go straight from there to register for your introductory workshop (or buy your book), from which they apply for or purchase your deeper offer—without ever getting on a sales call.
This is just one example and is not right for every thought leader. But it’s something I’ve set up with multiple clients (and myself), and it’s life-changing.
Quick note: for both the content that attracts people into your pipeline and the content that helps people choose to convert people to your deeper offers, creating true perspective-shifting thought leadership content is key.
Especially if what you do means you are serving a more sophisticated, high-context customer, and/or if what you’re doing is serving a group of people who are probably bombarded with content around their goals every single day. Nedra Tawwab and Tara McMullin are great examples of people who regularly create content that makes people stop scrolling and think.
Creating content that helps people think in new ways, and that sparks ideas for change, is the primary focus of our crash course. It even comes with a bonus 28-Day Intellectual Property Push that includes prompts for you to practice creating this type of content.
Why? Because thought leaders can’t have the impact they want to have or “scale” their income effectively with low-context/basic social media posts and ads, pointing at unimportant things on Instagram reels, or dropping yet another link to a semi-interesting article 3x/day on LinkedIn.
You have to activate people’s minds in new ways throughout your pipeline.
Move C: Add/diversify paths.
Once you have one path into and through your pipeline that’s working, it’s time to add another path so that the ways you create impact and earn income are diversified.
So, if you set up an awesome ecosystem/pipeline that began with thought leadership ads and went to an essay, then an introductory workshop and consulting offer, maybe it’s time to create organic search engine optimized videos (on YouTube) that lead people to a video series, then to your same intro workshop and consulting offer?
Pro tip: Use a “PPP” as one of your most important signs of health—
Profit per person: how much profit do you bring in per team member or employee in your business? If it’s just you, then it’s profit/1. If it’s you, an admin person, and 2 additional consultants, then it’s profit/4. You get the point.
Profit per path: how much profit does each path (funnel/customer journey) bring in?
If you have ads→essay→workshop→consulting and you have YouTube SEO→video series→workshop→consulting as your two paths, how much is each one bringing in?Profit per product: it’s also good to understand how much profit you make per offer in your product line or product suite. Sometimes an offer (like an introductory book or workshop) plays a much bigger role in your business than the income it provides—so don’t count it out without knowing the full picture—and sometimes, you’ll be surprised by the type of profit a seemingly small product is bringing in.
One or more of these PPPs can a better measurement of how insulated you are than just knowing simple profit or revenue figures 😨. Figure out which ones make the most difference to you.
Force #3: The life cycle and current state of your market.
One of the most important forces to pay attention to in any business is the life cycle of the industry you’re in.
This loosely translates to knowing the relationship between your product, the people who will buy your product, and the state of the economy and technology as a whole. Let me explain.
Industries (and products) go through phases in their life cycle: emergence, growth, pruning, maturity, and decline.
Emergence (or Infancy): innovation is high, risk to enter the market is high; few people are searching for this type of product because they don’t know it exists yet
Growth: demand for this type of product is rising, risk is declining, and competition is generally still low; so the power is with the sellers/businesses during this phase
Pruning (or, Shake Out Stage): competition is high, many competitors fail and leave, and customers are much more aware of their options
Maturity: innovation is low, many companies are merging with each other to stay afloat or gain more market share, the power is with buyers who can demand more
Decline: innovation is at its lowest, competition is extreme, it’s very risky to enter this market; a massive innovation, however, will kick off a new life cycle (ex: desktop computers to laptop computers)
I made these two graphics for a lesson I was teaching in early 2022 (so the position of some of these industries may have changed, but you’ll get the point):
If you created the first personal computer, yay! Good for you. You’re rich.
But if you just stopped there, and never made a faster, smaller computer, and never branched into laptops or tablets, your product and profits would soon become obsolete.
Basically, you can’t create in a vacuum.
So whereas innovation is still high with software that fakes audio/video of a person (since it’s in the emergence, or even, growth phase), personal email software—like Gmail—hasn’t had much innovation in decades. It is in the declining phase, since email software already has mass adoption; it would be extremely difficult for a new email provider to enter the game and succeed.
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In order for you to insulate your intellectual property, you need to not only understand where your product/industry is at in its life cycle right now, but also, how it got there and where it’s likely headed.
ACTION #3: STUDY A FEW KEY FACTORS OF YOUR INDUSTRY, AND KEEP YOUR FINGER ON THE PULSE OF ADJACENT/OTHER INDUSTRIES FOR INSPIRATION.
In your industry (plus other similar, complementary, adjacent, and unrelated-but-inspiring industries), pay attention not only to the history, cycles, and current state of your industry (to know what people need/value), but also:
Make efforts to keep a continuous grasp on your ideal clients’ awareness, adoption, and understanding of your product (and similar products). What words do they use to describe them? How do they the products? What’s the real reason they buy or don’t buy? How aware of your type of service/product are they? Have they encountered similar offers before, or do you go some ‘splainin to do? Is it widely adopted amongst people like them?
Tune in to your audience’s needs and general feelings about your industry. Are they over-marketed to? Do they feel your industry is impersonal? Do they run into scam artists and incompetent service providers more than anyone else in your industry?
Remember: you’re likely pretty immersed in your industry, so your feelings on it may be wildly different than your ideal clients’ feelings.Pay attention to the state of the economy as a whole, and the state of things for your clients, specifically. Are there laws coming down the pipeline that your clients are worried about? Is there something in the economy that is affecting your ideal clients differently than it affects the rest of the world? Let the answers to these questions inform whether it’s time to add a new product at a different price point, or position/price your current offers in a new way. This will help you know what you should spend valuable marketing time/money on.
Stay on top of technology that affects your work, your industry, and/or your clients. For example: what does A.I. mean for you? How can you use it in ways that enhance the customer experience and help you create more sophisticated content and solutions? Do your clients embrace/abhor it? How should your content and communications support or challenge their assumptions about technology?
Without getting general and specific industry knowledge (in the areas above), and without the ability to recognize patterns in your industry and amongst your clients, you will not know what to insulate yourself from or how to best do it.
Remember:
All three of the forces we discussed today are at play, at all times, affecting your ability to spread your thought leadership, create valuable intellectual property, profit form your ideas, and insulate yourself as you do so.
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Which insulation methods do you use right now?
Do you feel like there are other forces at play?
Which insulation methods are you going to pursue going forward?