Stock photography has a specific look. Two people in a bright office, mid laugh, pointing at a laptop nobody is using. It is polished. It is competent. It is also on four hundred other websites, and that is why your eye slides off it without registering anything. Written opinions do the same thing now, and almost nobody checks whether theirs has crossed over.

Take your last ten posts. Cut off the byline, remove the company name, strip any first person detail specific enough to identify you. Now hand that stack to someone in your industry and ask them to guess who wrote it.

Most people fail this test with everything they have published in the last year.

The swap

Here is a faster version if you want the answer before lunch.

Take your single best performing post from the last quarter. The one you were proud of. Now imagine your closest competitor published it, word for word, under their logo, tomorrow morning.

Would anything look wrong?

If the answer is no, you did not publish thought leadership. You published a Stock Opinion. Clean, polished, and available in identical form from every other vendor in …