Over the years, I’ve become closely associated with LinkedIn. People sometimes assume there was one thing that made that happen, but there really wasn’t. It came from consistently writing, speaking, teaching and sharing ideas over a long period of time.
When I started my career in legal marketing, LinkedIn wasn’t my specialty. Like most legal marketers, I worked across a wide range of areas. Depending on the day, I could have been focused on business development, communications, recruiting, proposals, events, rankings, public relations or content marketing. My responsibilities were broad because that’s the nature of the profession. As a result, my content was broad too.
After several years, I started paying closer attention to how people described me. They knew I worked in legal marketing, but they didn’t necessarily associate my name with one particular area of expertise. That observation made me think differently about the role content plays in building a professional reputation. If I wanted people to remember me for something specific, my writing needed to reinforce that idea consistently instead of bouncing between every marketing topic that interested me.
I chose LinkedIn because I believed it was becoming one of the most valuable business development tools available to professionals. Lawyers, consultants, accountants, recruiters and executives were all beginning to use the platform differently, and I saw an opportunity to help them understand how to use it more strategically. From that point forward, I spent much more time writing about LinkedIn than I spent writing about almost anything else.
That didn’t mean every article had to be about profile optimization or posting tips. LinkedIn gave me a way to discuss business development, personal branding, networking, thought leadership, recruiting, employee advocacy and, later, AI visibility. Those subjects naturally fit together, so every article reinforced the same broader area of expertise instead of sending readers in different directions.
Several years later, people began introducing me as someone who specialized in LinkedIn. I never announced that title. I never added “LinkedIn expert” to my bio and expected people to believe it. The association developed because my articles, presentations, webinars and newsletters consistently explored the same subject from different angles. People reached that conclusion because of the work they had seen, not because I told them what to think.
The more I reflected on that experience, the more I realized it wasn’t unique to LinkedIn. I started noticing the same pattern in other professions. The people who become closely associated with a particular topic usually spend years answering similar questions, exploring related issues and creating content that builds on itself. Their expertise grows through experience, and their reputation grows because other people can clearly see that expertise reflected in their work.
Before You Create More Content, Decide What You Want to Become Known For
One of the first things I ask clients is what they want to be known for. We talk about that before we ever get into LinkedIn, newsletters, blogs or anything else. If you don’t know what you want people to associate with your name, it’s much harder to decide what you should be writing about.
I see a lot of people bounce from one topic to the next because they’re writing whatever feels relevant that week. Sometimes that’s industry news. Sometimes it’s a story they saw online. Sometimes it’s a topic that came up in a meeting. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but if every article is about something completely different, people have a harder time understanding what you actually do and what you’re an expert in.
Most people aren’t finding just one piece of your content. They read an article, click over to your LinkedIn profile, visit your website, skim a few more articles and maybe sign up for your newsletter. They’re connecting the dots. AI and search engines are doing much the same thing.
Every so often, I recommend going back and looking at everything you’ve published over the past six months or year. Don’t overthink it. Just scroll through the titles. If someone looked at that list today, what would they assume you know? Would they immediately understand what you want to be known for, or does it feel like a collection of random topics?
Before you write your next article, ask yourself:
- If someone spent an hour reading my articles, what would they think I specialize in?
- Would that description match the work I want more of?
- Which subjects appear consistently throughout my content?
- Which topics feel disconnected from everything else I’ve written?
- If someone recommended me to a colleague tomorrow, how would they describe my expertise?
I’ve done this exercise myself more than once, and it’s surprisingly revealing. Sometimes the content you’ve been publishing reflects exactly the reputation you’re hoping to build. Other times you discover you’ve been spending a great deal of time writing about topics that have very little to do with your long-term goals. Neither outcome is good or bad. It’s simply useful information because it gives you a chance to adjust your direction before you’ve written another fifty articles.
Your Career Can Be Broad Even If Your Content Is More Focused
This is the point where many people start worrying that choosing a niche means ignoring everything else they do. I understand the concern because I had it myself. Legal marketing covers an enormous range of responsibilities, and I had no interest in pretending otherwise. My job wasn’t becoming narrower, so I wasn’t interested in making my perspective narrower either.
What changed was the proportion of my content. LinkedIn became a much larger percentage of what I wrote because it reflected the direction I wanted my career to grow. I still discussed business development, marketing, networking, personal branding and communications because those subjects are part of my work every day. Readers could easily see how those topics connected because LinkedIn provided the common thread running through many of the conversations.
Thinking about content this way also solved another problem that people bring up all the time. They assume they’ll run out of ideas if they focus on one area. In practice, the opposite usually happens. Once you begin looking at a topic from different perspectives, you realize there are dozens, if not hundreds, of questions worth answering.
For example, writing about LinkedIn has enabled me to cover topics such as:
- Lawyer profiles
- Executive visibility
- Employee advocacy
- AI search
- Personal branding
- Recruiting
- Business development
- Thought leadership
- Law firm marketing
- Private equity
- Content strategy
Those are all different conversations, but they’re connected. Readers don’t see them as unrelated articles because each one builds on the same foundation.
The Same Approach Helped Me Build Visibility in Private Equity
After people started associating me with LinkedIn, I began thinking about another audience I wanted to reach. I was doing more and more work with private equity firms, and I noticed there wasn’t much content about how investors, portfolio companies and deal teams could use LinkedIn to support their business goals.
It wasn’t that LinkedIn was new to private equity. Firms had been using it for recruiting, business development, networking and raising the profile of their investment professionals for years. I just wasn’t seeing anyone writing consistently about it, so I decided to fill that gap.
I started writing about the questions I was hearing from clients. Some articles focused on executive visibility. Others were about recruiting, thought leadership, business development or helping portfolio companies strengthen their brands. One article led to another, and before long I had built a library of content around the intersection of LinkedIn and private equity.
Over time, those articles started showing up in Google whenever people searched for LinkedIn and private equity. People sometimes ask what SEO strategy I used to make that happen. The truth is, I was much more focused on answering good questions than chasing rankings. As the collection of articles grew, search engines had a much clearer understanding of what I wrote about.
That experience changed the way I think about content. One article can absolutely be valuable, but it’s a collection of articles around the same topic that really helps people, search engines and AI understand your expertise.
Search Engines and AI Are Looking for the Same Patterns People Notice
AI has changed the way people discover content. Search engines and AI are looking across your website to understand what you consistently write about and what you want to be known for.
Think about how you decide whether to hire a lawyer, consultant or accountant. You don’t read one article and make a decision. You click around their website, read a few articles, look at their LinkedIn profile, browse their bio and maybe even Google them. By the time you’re finished, you’ve probably formed an opinion based on everything you’ve seen, not just one article.
Search engines and AI are doing much the same thing. They’re looking across your website to understand the topics you write about consistently and whether you’ve created enough helpful content for those topics to become associated with your name.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve spent so much time writing about LinkedIn, personal branding, business development and, more recently, private equity. I wasn’t trying to create one article that would rank well or one LinkedIn post that would go viral. I wanted to build a collection of content that answered the questions people were already asking and made it easy to understand what I help clients with.
I think this is where a lot of people make content marketing harder than it needs to be. Every article doesn’t have to be your biggest success. Some articles will bring people to your website through Google. Others will get shared on LinkedIn. Some will answer a question a prospective client has before they ever contact you. Others may never generate a lot of traffic, but they still help people understand what you know and how you can help.
When you’re planning your next article, don’t worry so much about what everyone else is writing. Start with the questions your clients ask you every day. Then think about the next question they’re likely to have after reading that article. Before long, you’ll have a website filled with useful content that works together. That’s good for your readers, and it also gives search engines and AI a much clearer understanding of your expertise.
Common Mistakes That Make It Harder to Become Known for Something
I’ve made plenty of content mistakes over the years, and I’ve watched clients make many of the same ones. One of the biggest is feeling like you have to write about every trending topic. There’s nothing wrong with commenting on industry news, and I certainly do it myself from time to time. But if every article is tied to whatever people are talking about that week, it becomes much harder for people to understand what you actually want to be known for. The trends come and go. Your expertise should stay consistent.
I also think people worry too much about reaching everyone. I never approach content that way. I’m usually thinking about a specific audience and the questions they’re asking because those are often the same questions clients ask me every day. When you write with a clear audience in mind, it’s much easier to create content that’s genuinely helpful.
The other thing I see all the time is people giving up too soon. They’ll publish a few articles, not see immediate results and decide content marketing doesn’t work. In my experience, that’s almost never the case. Building a reputation takes time. The people who become known for a particular topic are usually the ones who keep showing up, keep writing and keep adding to what they’ve already published. Before long, people begin to associate their name with that subject, and that’s when the momentum starts to build. When you look at your own content, ask yourself:
- Am I creating content for the audience I want to reach or the audience I already have?
- Does my content reflect the services I hope to provide in the future?
- Could someone describe my expertise after reading several articles?
- Am I building on previous ideas or starting over with a completely different topic every week?
The next time you’re planning content, don’t think about just the next article. Think about what someone would naturally want to read after they finish it.
Think About the Library You’re Building
One thing that completely changed how I think about content was realizing that one single article doesn’t stand on its own. For a long time, I’d publish something and move on to the next idea. Eventually I realized people weren’t reading my content that way. They might find one article through Google, another from my newsletter or hear me speak at an event and then visit my website to see what else I’d written. AI works in a similar way. It isn’t looking at one piece of content in isolation. It’s looking across everything you’ve published.
That changed the questions I started asking myself. Instead of wondering whether one article would do well, I started thinking about what was missing. What questions hadn’t I answered yet? What topics deserved a follow-up? Where could I add another piece that made the rest of my content even stronger?
That’s exactly how I built my reputation around LinkedIn and later private equity. It wasn’t one article, one presentation or one LinkedIn post. It was years of creating useful content around the same topics so people knew what I talked about and what I was good at.
I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck. They put so much pressure on every article to be a huge success that they forget it’s just one piece of a much bigger picture. Every article gives people another way to find you. It gives search engines and AI another signal about your expertise. It also gives you something to build on the next time you’re looking for an idea.
When you start thinking that way, creating content actually becomes easier. You’re no longer chasing completely new topics every week. You’re expanding on what you’ve already written, answering the next logical question and building a resource that’s more valuable with every article you publish.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI, Content Strategy and Topical Authority
Does AI change how I should create content?
AI is changing how people discover information, but it hasn’t changed the importance of creating helpful, relevant content. The biggest difference is that search engines and AI are looking across everything you’ve published to better understand what you consistently write about. That’s one of the reasons it’s worth building content around a handful of core topics instead of jumping from one unrelated subject to another.
What is topical authority?
Is publishing one great article enough?
A great article is always valuable, but it rarely tells your whole story. Building a collection of content around related topics gives people more reasons to visit your website and a much clearer understanding of what you know.
How many articles do I need before I see results?
There’s no magic number. A website with 25 thoughtful articles around a specific topic is often in a stronger position than a website with hundreds of unrelated articles. Focus on creating content consistently and answering the questions your clients are already asking.
Should every article target a different keyword?
Not necessarily. It’s completely normal for several articles to relate to the same broad topic. In fact, covering a subject from different angles often helps strengthen your overall expertise because you’re answering different questions for different readers.
How do I decide what to write about?
One of the easiest places to find ideas is your own inbox, client meetings and sales calls. Every question someone asks has the potential to become an article. If you answer that same question more than once, there’s a good chance other people are searching for it too.
Can AI write my content for me?
AI can absolutely help with brainstorming, research, outlining and editing, but your experience, perspective and examples are what make your content worth reading. The strongest articles still sound like a real person sharing real expertise.
How often should I publish new content?
Consistency matters much more than frequency. Whether you publish once a week or twice a month, the goal is to keep adding useful content around the topics you want people to associate with your name. Over time, that collection becomes one of your strongest marketing assets.
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