How to Build Authority Through Writing with Jay Papasan

Welcome LinkedIn friends! Your weekly insight to grow your relationships and book of business.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jay Papasan , one of the co-authors of The One Thing, which was a major unlock for me! He joined me to talk about the power of consistently writing to your email list. Even if you don’t have an audience right now, starting a newsletter is something that will compound over time and provide you with extraordinary results.

Mo asked Jay:

“What’s your advice to people who haven’t started but want to start something? Whether that’s a podcast or newsletter, etc. I think it’s one of the best ways that you can build an audience and build an authority around your brand"

Jay responded:

“You may be asking yourself, “How do I become someone that people look to for information about the expertise that I’m a part of?” For years, in our first book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, my friend Gary was sharing with me how the idea came about. He said that Keller Williams was young and only had about 4,000 agents back then, and it wasn’t fashionable among the industry's top agents.

They were seen as a great training company that you would send the new agents to, but there were no big agents, which made it to where no big agents wanted to join. It was a case where the rich got richer, and my friend Gary wanted to break that cycle. His answer was to write The Millionaire Real Estate Agent.

So, in 120 days or less, we outlined, wrote, and had a manuscript ready to go. It was 360-something pages. Definitely was not a short book. I was basically the ghostwriter on that, even though my name appears on it. Dave Jenks and Gary Keller were the ones at that time who collectively had about 40 years of experience coaching top agents. They did some deliberative interviews to look for patterns, and they also pulled from all of their past training.

Guess what. By the time that book came out, no one else had addressed that problem. How do I go from being a salesperson to a business person in our industry? We just asked the question, "How do I get a million dollars in our industry?" Through the years after that, Keller Williams went from 7,000 and grew by 35/40% year over year for seven straight years. It went from being 14th in the industry to the top four.

Basically, writing the book is the authority we created around that book. Writing puts it on the record, and you can say that you wrote that and wrote the book on that. Ironically, a newsletter could also translate into a book. So many articles get feedback that says, “Wow, this could be the chapter in a book…” I think many serious professionals probably miss this opportunity because they tell themselves something stupid like, “Well, I’m not a writer.”

Dive deeper into the conversation around the importance of writing with Jay Papasan here.

Establish your authority with your audience by showcasing your experience and expertise. The initial stride involves simply beginning to write.

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Thanks for reading!

-Mo