A Simple Formula for Thought Leadership

Next to launching a product, thought leadership is the No. 1 reason why prospects seek out our services. Public Relations encompasses many tactical pillars, but thought leadership is becoming one of the most important. It also happens to be one of the most controllable.

There’s a good reason for emphasizing thought leadership now. As we become increasingly dependent on, and directed by, LLMs, thought leadership is a strong anchor to an authority-building strategy. Thought leadership placed externally gives LLMs one more external source connecting a brand to a third-party validator using the same terms on that brand’s ground truth page.

My personal and professional plea to anyone writing thought leadership, though, is to make sure it contributes something helpful or interesting to the conversation rather than being a place to rattle off credentials. To help that along, follow these tips and the basic formula for solid thought leadership.

Trade journals aren’t the only destination for thought leadership.

Trade journals are the logical place for thought leadership, but don’t forget Substacks and other newsletters. We’ve been studying the education trades and sources cited most frequently through our new service, QueryScope, and have a good sense for the most cited sources for our space. Surprisingly, Reddit hasn’t shown up as a strongly cited source, but ResearchGate and Wikipedia have. There are also a surprising number of .coms showing up. That suggests that those corporate blogs and newsletters are valued so if the topic matches the blog or newsletter’s audience, pitch your piece to them.

There’s a basic formula for thought leadership

Once you know where the piece belongs, your next job is to make it easier for an editor to say yes. Here’s my formula for thought leadership that often runs in education trades and trades in many other industries. Follow it like we teach our students to master the five-paragraph essay. As your skills improve, get creative. While we have several writers on our team who have skills with prose that I can only dream about, I often have to pull them back to this basic formula. There is always a place for the expected intro-body-conclusion structure of basic thought leadership.

Opening paragraphs paint the picture and explain the importance.

Don’t introduce yourself, introduce the topic. No reader wants to spend two paragraphs learning about you. They want to know what they will get from reading your piece. Tell them:

• the reason for writing and why it matters
• why the topic is interesting, compelling, necessary, or helpful
• a data point (or two)
• a personal or anecdotal story they can envision, might have experienced, or wish they had experienced

Organize the main body into three to five subheadings.

This might feel formulaic, but three is a great number of subheadings. Six is too many. Two is too few. Like good visual design, odd numbers lay out nicely so I like three or five.

The main body of the piece is the place for your evidence and discussion in support of the overall thesis. Bullets can work, but this is the place for solid narrative writing. Be descriptive. Paint a picture of what is happening rather than rattle off facts. Your reader will be more engaged and therefore more receptive to the heavy data or theory that follows.

Subheadings should be specific enough to explain the point if the reader chooses not to read the entire piece. See my earlier article on thought leadership submissions for suggestions on topics and how to prep and pitch a piece to an education trade.

Keep concluding paragraphs from becoming complex.

Don’t introduce something new or add detail that could have been in the main body. One day I realized that most of my discarded openings (and there are usually lots of them) usually have the conclusion somewhere inside them. Once I recognized that, it felt okay to let my opening paragraphs go on and on in the drafting phase. Given that, my advice is to let the opening paragraphs wander. What gets cut from them just might be the perfect addition to the conclusion.

There are several tricks to polishing your prose.

• Use the Find function to look for yous, shoulds, and musts. If the piece has lots of them, it will feel preachy.
• Use Find to spot that, so, and but. Too many of those might mean it has overly complex structure that is difficult to follow.
• Finally, use Find to spot I, my, and me. It’s really hard to scrub I’s from my writing since my style is very conversational. However, these probably shouldn’t show up when writing for someone else.
• When submitting the final piece to a publication, give them several title options that  follow the publication’s pattern. Include a subtitle, a one- or two-sentence summary, your bio, and links to the primary source for any data or claims that need support.
• Read backwards to proof. Don’t rely on built-in grammar-checkers. I often use LLMs for grammar checks, but always make sure to turn off Chat History and Training. It helps to clearly ask for inline grammatical corrections only. Otherwise it will take over the prose entirely, which makes it AI-generated instead of human-authored.
• See if you can spot the most frequently used word (besides and, the, if, etc.). If you can, you are probably using it too much. It might be fine, just make sure that it matches the reason for writing the piece.
• Look for sentences that everyone would agree are true. Then cut them.

Finally, use Verify My Writing to certify that your thought leadership is written by you and not AI. Right now, it costs about $20 for pieces up to 2,500 words. You’ll get a certificate and QR code the editor can follow to ensure your piece is authentically human.

DISCLOSURE: I’ve been working with Verify My Writing so I have a vested interest in making this recommendation, but it is a great idea and very timely. Editors need help wading through AI submissions. This is one way to stand out.

This was originally published in PR in EdTech on LinkedIn on May 21, 2026.