Be the Gateway by Blank

#species/literature #status/seedling

Citation

Blank, Dan. Be the Gateway: A Practical Guide to Sharing Your Creative Work and Engaging an Audience. WeGrowMedia, 2017.

Quotes

Collations

Focus on reader experience and personal fulfillment rather than market performance and public milestones

Set creative goals based on specific experiences that you want your work to bring to specific people, with faces, rather than objects, tokens, or metrics. Focusing on the former provides the feelings of validation and success. Focusing on the later results to impostor syndrome.

Similarly, use reader experience as the benchmark for the value of your work rather than market performance. This involves focusing on one-on-one engagement rather than virality.

Focusing on reader experience also means that success is easier to achieve. You don't have to be a bestseller to make a difference.

Reader experience is how the reader experiences the world through your creative work.

remember names and faces, and moments with these people

think about specific experiences that indicate that you and your work connected with, and influenced, the lives of others

they don’t lead to the feeling of validation or success that these artists hoped for. Rather, they create a sense of impostor syndrome

Instead of framing the value of your work by how it performs in the market, you define it by how other people experience the world through your creative work—the stories and experiences you share, and the topics you talk about.

Instead of selling a product in a marketplace, you become the gateway for how your work can shape the world for others, and inspire them.

find success by focusing on the human side of that which engages people, what it means to have your work truly shape the lives of others, and what it means to feel fulfilled as a creator

help others make sense out of life

Don’t just throw “products” out into the marketplace; change the way people see the world through your creative work.

Being a gateway is about ensuring your work truly connects with others in the most meaningful way possible

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

When you build your gateway and walk someone through it, you are creating a fulfilling experience that provides long-term value.

change one person’s life with your creative work right now by crafting meaningful experiences.

Public milestones are deceptive

object

token

metric

they shouldn’t be the goal

they mask the true impact of your work

We calculate that objects, tokens, and metrics will ensure that greater success will now come with less effort, but that doesn’t happen.

they don’t lead to the feeling of validation or success that these artists hoped for. Rather, they create a sense of impostor syndrome

someone with impostor syndrome is riddled with anxiety that they will be revealed as a fraud, and that they can never live up to the success people now expect of them.

Even those authors who did find success with sales can still seem confused as to why the book worked, who their audience is, and how to follow it up. They feel naked and exposed, worried that they will “mess up” a success that they barely understand.

Achieving these traditional markers for success—objects, tokens, and metrics—can make someone feel more lost, because they assumed this process would unlock something new for them, and instead, nothing is different.

Focus on one-on-one engagement

Reframe success so it isn’t about seeking validation from massive audiences, but rather how you reach one person. The people I see who succeed focus on one-on-one engagement with other people, not on going viral.

going out and finding those who may love their work, and engaging them one by one, directly.

learn where these people hang out, what they need, what they love, how they like to engage, and then seek them out.

if you dig into the story of someone’s success “back in the day,” you find a web of relationships, of persistent effort on the business/marketing side, and, of course, a lot of luck.

This work is about you taking nice small actions that are totally within your control. Instead of launching a “brand,” you are simply seeking out small conversations, tiny ways of helping, and having meaningful conversations with people who will care about your vision.

This is about individual conversations, small moments, and a combination of sharing and helping, all filled with empathy. The payoff is that these things truly work to drive awareness of your creative work, and ensure it has an effect on the world.

Even knowing you reached one person on a deep level can radically change the momentum for what you create.

It is about extending the experience of your creative work to at least one person in a meaningful way.

Instead of “audience building,” focus on one person at a time.

Build your audience one person at a time. Do so by connecting with others long before you feel you are ready to “launch” your work.

Interview those who do what you would love to do. You can ask them everything you ever worried about in your own work, but also share the interview to promote them and become aligned with them publicly.

developing simple practices of reaching out and having simple conversations using what you have.

The goal is not to launch a campaign, but to identify one person you can help.

Learn from this experience, then iterate.

When you walk a single person through your gateway, you learn so much about their needs, desires, and preferences, and how they relate to your creative work. Perhaps you learn fifty percent of what you need to know to forge new paths to your gateway. Then, walk a second person through, again doing so with empathy and care. Really pay attention to them. Double down on these people—don’t look past the individual because you are so focused on engaging “an audience.” Invest in the people who are right in front of you and who are interested in your work.

Focusing on reader experience and personal fulfillment makes success more accessible

You can take action to connect with people who love your work via your gateway right now. You can take clear actions day by day, week by week, to reach the people who care about your work. When you create as a gateway, success immediately becomes more accessible.

Being a gateway is a higher calling than an object, token, or metric. It’s also more fun.

Writing to create an experience for the reader is ministry itself. A form of service.

Share your process and journey as it happens

identify how your story relates to the gateway you’re crafting

understanding the connection between what you create, why you create it, and how it will engage others.

building a path to your gateway

signals to people that it is worth continuing down because right around the corner is what they seek

it is about showing up each day to do the work. It is about building a habit that is practical and accessible.

they begin to feel as they are a part of the process.

When you share your journey, you are building advocates in the process; those who aren’t just aware of what you are doing, but feel connected to it in a personal way. When it comes time for you to release your creative work, you will have a crowd of people ready to help it spread.

sharing an authentic look at how their creative vision aligns with what their ideal audience dreams about

focus on sharing experiences you have, because this is indeed how stories are created. Focus on conversations you have, because this is where you are already connecting to others on that authentic human level. Focus on how you can connect with others today around your work. How you are curious, how you are developing your skills, how you are relishing moments where you feel inspired.

Instead of dreaming up some “big brand” you want to create, simply document and share what you are passionate about. This encourages you to be aware of how your daily life aligns to your creative work. It forces you to be accountable for attending to it. When you share what drives you and how you attend to your creative work, it prevents you from getting lost in the dream.

don’t sell me on your work by telling me how great it is; instead, show me the process, show me why your work matters to you, and how it can connect to what I care about.

Deconstruct why the type of work you create is special and take people behind the scenes to show how it is done.

share the process, the materials, the milestones, and educate them on the elements of what makes incredible work.

share what drives you on a deeper level.

Be a gateway for people to experience a worldview

She has become a lightning rod for belief systems, for a worldview. She has become the gateway for how her fans experience the world, experience each other, and experience themselves.

what you share within your creative work—and outside of it—can embody the deeper themes that drive you, and that engage your ideal audience.

find and tell stories that resonate with us. Become the voice for others … the gateway for them to share their stories with the world.

Three elements to be a gateway

  1. Story. Craft a compelling story.

  2. Creator. Become the personal way through which the reader experiences a larger topic.

  3. Topics. The issues, the narratives that your story digs into.

each level deeper and more personal than the next. This is what you should craft for your work

Extend a book by content

The platform you develop around a book should not try to re-create it—what you share online and in person should not just steal all of the stories you share in the book itself. Instead, it should tap into aspects of the story, and then extend them in new ways that the book could not

use it [social media] to tell a story—an original story—that opens up a worldview for people.

Effects of a gateway to individuals

• They experience a compelling story or experience

• They see the world in a new way

• They shape their own identity

You are a gateway to the identity that someone wants for themselves, or that highlights an aspect of themselves they want to be more clear, more in the forefront, more real. Even if your work takes years to craft, you can still be a gateway right now. Even to one person.

Opening up their world. Their identity. Their experience. Their connection to others.

You are not creating a “fan,” or a customer. You are providing someone something much deeper, which is a sense of themselves and the world around them.

A gateway where author meets audience is inevitable

Even when we find someone’s narrative that seems more “pure” about the strength of the art itself finding an audience, a gateway is still present.

Use your gateway to shape how others accept your works

Through your creative work, you get to craft the stories of how others find and engage with it. Your art, your craft is not objective—it will be experienced by different people in different ways. You get to shape that, and it becomes the gateway for others.

Help your reader build an identity using narratives

What does your audience want, more than anything? An identity

People don’t buy things; they buy the feeling that things give them. They are investing in the building blocks of their own identity, and how this helps creates narratives they can show others.

Your audience lives by narratives. This is how they express their identity. They want a narrative that makes sense of the world. It is not just a reflection on the world, but their place within it. It justifies their decisions. It allays their fears. It motivates their hopes.

you will be offering people a chance to align with the narratives that engage them.

A gateway is where the author's and reader's narratives converge

When you consider how you are a gateway for others, understanding your narrative, understanding theirs, and connecting the two is inherently what you are offering.

know what you stand for, and to share it in a way that truly speaks to others

It is how you craft and share your work with others

Provide narratives people need

When you understand the narratives your ideal audience seeks, you know how to engage those people. You know how to grab their attention, you know how to get them to lean in, and to become so enamored that they can’t help but tell their friends.

you are truly creating conversations around what you create.

Find your narratives by identifying your values

To find and align your narratives, I encourage you to identify what matters most to you across your entire life, not just in your creative work. You have only so many resources of time, energy and money. Too many people fail in their creative work because they don't accept and embrace that.

if you want to succeed in being a gateway for others, you have to hone in on what matters to you more than anything.

This is where many people fail. They come up with a clever idea for a craft, a book, or a business, and they shove it into an otherwise crowded narrative. It’s “in addition to,” not a core part of what matters most to them. They fail because they care about this idea only insofar as it is clever and represents a lottery ticket in their life. They dream that if their idea takes off quickly, they will invest more of their life in it. What they are hoping for is that if they develop it just barely enough, others will come in and validate the idea, help it spread, and turn it into a movement. In other words, they want quick validation where others make the path to success easier for them.

Why did this one person succeed? Because they believed in it more. It was more core to their personal narrative of what mattered, and where they could devote their time, energy, and money.

think about what you would fight to not lose. Those are your narratives. This is where you will put your energy every day, every week, and every month. It is where you will keep that flame alive long after others would have given up.

This is something you would fight for. Where, if the book failed to sell more than thirty copies, you move onto the next book about an underdog, or brainstorm other creative ways to help inspire others to find strength when they feel hopeless.

making choices about what you care most about, but also thinking about how you can use them to craft the narrative of who you are and what you believe. The gateway you craft begins with who you are.

Spend time on the things you want to be known for

If you want people to make time to experience your creative vision, then you have to make time to create it.

Is there a disconnect between what you do every week versus what you you want to be known for?

Your narratives are your values and practice

  1. The things in life that you care so much about that you would fight to protect them, and to ensure that they can reach their full potential.

  2. A practice. What you do every single day

Other ways to find your narratives

Consider what you love talking about. What topics could you sit at a cafe or bar and talk about for hours and hours? What types of people do you seek out and enjoy chatting with?

What are common traits of these people, what resonates with you about them, and they with you?

How to craft a mission statement for your writing

identify a simple sentence that focuses on the experience you want your writing to create for others.

think about someone who purchased and read your book nine months ago. How do you hope it shifted the way they think?

Nine months after someone reads your book, what do you want them to think quietly in their heads about the world you have opened for them? How does it relate to their life, their identity, their interactions?

Write down a series of belief statements—things that you feel resonate in your creative work. Sit with them for a week, reviewing them each day.

at the end of the week, choose one that you are drawn to the most. Don’t worry, just like paint, you can change it over time.

ensuring that you believe in your gateway with such clarity—such verve—that nothing can shake it.

Write a bio that reinforces your qualification for writing your works

Your bio is the centerpiece of the narrative that connects the work you create and who you are.

describe who you are and how your experience makes you the perfect person to write the books you are working on.

Your bio should embody not just a chronological view of your life, but the narratives that fuel you.

  1. A belief statement that your ideal reader would read and say “YES! This!”

  2. A description of the one thing you desperately want that reader to care about. (Hint: this should be your creative work.)

  3. Your credentials as they relate to your creative work.

  4. Your background and experience. Filter this through your creative work.

  5. Who you are as a person. This is where your hobbies, where you live, and your background come in. Only after you have hooked us with the narratives that we care about.

Bio Step #1: Start With a Belief Statement

Don’t start your biography at the beginning of your life and work forward. Instead, start with the present and work backward.

don’t start with you at all. Instead, start with me

If you want me to pause from what I am doing to give you and your work a chance, you have to create a bridge. That bridge is from the things I desperately care about and engage with to what you and your work are about.

If your goal is to have someone engage with you, you have to begin with empathy and start with them, not you.

This can take the form of a belief statement—the things that embody your work and your drive to create that would resonate with your ideal audience. This will be a version of the mission statement you crafted above. It can be what you are fighting for, or what you are fighting against. It can be a feeling that you want people to have when they experience your work. It can be a story that is shorthand for what your audience wants to align with.

Bio Step #2: Focus on Your Creative Work

There are two common mistakes I see people make at this stage. The first is (again), people start at the beginning and work their way forward. They tell the reader about their very first forays into their art or craft, and then walk us through it slowly working their way to the present.

The second mistake people make in this section is to list too many things all at once, as if each has equal importance.

slow down and focus first on the thing that matters to you in your creative work right now.

Bio Step #3: Your Credentials

build the case for why you are the perfect person to be creating the creative work you just described.

align to the narratives and stories we talked about earlier. This can take the form of a story as to how you got into your craft, or why it matters to you.

Bio Step #4: Your Background and Experience

go broader into other areas of your life beyond your creative work

filter it through your creative work

Bio Step #5: Personal Details

this is where you can place anything that didn’t fit.

Make honing your gateway a habit

Your gateway is a process not unlike your creative work. You will hone it via habits, keen observation, and experimentation. Day by day, it will feel more true, as if it is the thing that people have been waiting to welcome into their lives.

Hone your gateway by doing creative work each week

Insight: Gateway is content marketing.

Analyze whether every aspect that surrounds your creative work embodies your mission statement. This begins with the creative work itself.

Craft your gateway by doing your creative work each week.

Develop a simple personal habit of focusing on your creative work and how you share it with others. This is a critical distinction: you are not creating a product (a book, album, craft) that you are selling in a marketplace. That is simply a milestone. You are connecting other human beings to your stories and knowledge and, as a gateway, are opening them up to something new.

track your progress of developing a daily habit, establish a system to recognize it.

Be accountable to yourself before you ask others to validate and support you.

Identify the “single push-up” for your creative work each day.

have a practice of creating your work that focuses on your mission

Hone your mission statement by using it in conversations

just as your creative work does, it needs to grow and evolve. Say your mission statement out loud. Does it sound weird? If so, then craft a spoken version that aligns to the written version. Use it in casual conversations.

seek out these conversations to test it.

See how this feels to say it out loud to another person. Note where you lose them—where they don’t understand, where it falls flat, and what their follow-up questions are. Use this to hone the language of your mission statement so that it is not only clear to you, but clear to others.

Prepare for bad days

When developing your creative vision, plan for disaster.

When you lose faith and clarity in your own vision and work, prepare a “reset” that reminds you of why you create. This could be a quote from your hero, a photo that sparks your imagination on what is possible, a biography or documentary about someone who inspires you, or a song that centers you.

Create check-ins in your calendar—daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly—where you write down the progress you have made.

recognize and honor the things you do accomplish. This could be a simple statement each day that you write down

Have an “emergency call” list of three people who motivate you. These should be individuals you trust, who believe in the possibility of what you want to create, and would take your call without judgment.

Very often, our own internal fear of judgment will prevent us from reaching out to others for a moment of help. If you want to be successful in your creative work, you need to let go of that fear.

Aspire for sustainability

Do I want you to be wildly successful with your creative work? Sure. But what I want more for you is that you keep sharing your voice and your vision with new work; that this work, over time, changes the lives of others for the better; that you concurrently develop slow organic growth, but also increase the chances of serendipitous luck that connects your work to even more people.

Opening your gateway is finding your people and bringing them into you gateway

The goal should not be data; the goal should be a demonstrable impact that your work has had on someone’s life. To experience this, you need to open the gateway you have built.

Opening the gate is about finding your people. Knowing what resonates with them, where they hang out, and who reaches them. Then, one by one, bringing them through the gate.

Universal skills to find your people

develop the skills that are universal and timeless to find your people, know what resonates, craft a connection, and help them to find alignment with your creative work.

  1. Awareness

  2. Consideration

  3. Conversion

  4. Loyalty

  5. Advocacy

The top—the widest part of the inverted pyramid—represents the broadest possible message to the largest group of people. Each step down the funnel slowly leads those who are most interested in what you have to offer to deeper levels of engagement with you and your work.

Nurture advocates

the marketing funnel doesn’t end with a sale

For your creative work to grow, you have to envision the sale as one milestone in a much bigger process, one where people who buy from you tell others about your work.

For a creative professional selling their work, their biggest source of revenue is often repeat customers.

Really know your audience

find and explore the path that your ideal audience already knows and walks along every day

have empathy for who they are, what they already know, their habits, their interests, and who they trust. If you want people to find your gateway and walk through, you first have to walk a mile in their shoes.

understanding them and their marketplace, and using that to hone how to communicate about the work you create. It helps you identify where you need to be, what engages others, and who you need to know. It also helps ensure that this is fun and meaningful for both you and them.

Spend time “in the field” to learn about where these people are, who they are, and what engages them. All the while, take into account who you want to reach, your vision, and your goals. Primary research means figuring things out on your own.

The most effective way for you to engage with others is to have a keen sense of empathy, to learn about what drives them, and to craft conversations that connect this to your own drive and creative work.

establish a sense of empathy for what that experience is like, which will result in you making many small adjustments to ensure it truly engages others. Creative work fails to find an audience when the creator assumes a specific intrinsic value within it that their ideal audience is never able to see or experience because the creator didn’t make it clear to them. Walking someone through the gate is a process of helping others experience your work, by having empathy with how they see the world.

Position your gateway where your readers already walk

Instead of constructing your gateway out in the wilderness where there are no pre-existing paths, we are going to construct it closer to where your ideal audience already walks. Find the paths they know and love, so you can place your gateway in exactly the right spot. You are going to ensure the words you use to attract people to your gateway are understood by your ideal audience, engaging them and drawing them closer. Your work will speak to them when and where they need it; and when the moment is right, you can open the gate for them to pass through.

Perform direct primary research

do primary research in consistent and action-oriented ways

truly understand who the ideal audience for your work is.

You can put names and faces to them.

develop colleagues (others who work in your field, support the type of creative work that you do, connect that work to an audience, and are advocates for it)

Doing primary research lays the foundation for capturing the attention of your ideal audience in a way that is sustainable and meaningful.

Doing this allows audience outreach to feel meaningful to you, where every time you learn something new about your audience, it fuels a deep sense of momentum.

How to find your audience

use landmarks for you to move outward from where you are to understand the marketplace where your creative work will exist, and then, to find your ideal audience.

turning the same landmarks into guideposts to leave a trail for people to follow to lead them back to your gateway.

Landmarks are the examples of what you hope your creative work aspires to be like, which your ideal audience knows universally as the best example of the kind of work you do.

focus on the positive emotions people feel about similar work already, and redirect those emotions and attention to your own creations.

comps

consider how your audience reacts to the landmarks you identify, and how they can use those to become aware of yours.

use comps to help you understand how your work fits into the lives of your ideal audience, how others would describe it, to use as a model for success, and to begin uncovering the path that leads to your gateway.

How to find comps

Find Five Comparable Works

had some success, but if possible, not be the breakout hits that defined a generation.

/1. Begin with Landmarks

start with the big prominent names in your field—the people who everyone knows. Go to the marketplaces where this work is shared or sold.

For books online, go to Amazon or Goodreads. For physical books, go to libraries or bookstores.

begin with the landmark in your field whose work you feel has some relation to yours.

this landmark exercise is not about defining who you are, but simply understanding how the marketplace categorizes work such as yours.

/2. Find Guideposts

find the people who have created similar work to you, finding success in the process, but perhaps haven’t had massive breakout hits.

Go into Amazon and type in the names of the authors you have identified whose works are landmarks for you, or the names of specific books that you feel are guides. Now, scroll down to the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section and click on each book. Keep scrolling to see all of the books Amazon displays here. Amazon provides similar features that may be useful, such as “What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?”, “Frequently Bought Together”, and even “Sponsored Products Related To This Item.”

look for those that were published within the past five years, which have some reviews (at least twenty), and most importantly, that you feel resonate with the work you create in some way.

Write down the names of the books and authors whose work resembles yours in some way; note why that is the case.

seek out other authors who write in the same topic or genre as you do. Show up to their events, email them, support their work. Be curious about their readers. Ask them questions about what they love and why.

/3. Obsess About the Voice of the Reader

put you in touch with five local readers who loved it. Then, you are going to talk to those five people.

For the comps you have identified in the previous step, go to Amazon and begin reading through reviews.

We want to know what readers liked about the book, what they didn’t like, and why. Pay very close attention to the language they use. Look for trends in terms of phrases or focus.

For each of the comps you find, identify how others categorize them. You can look at the Amazon category rankings

make note of phrases you see again and again, or phrases you are curious to see pop up. Then, type those into the search box and see which occur more frequently.

Review “best of” lists each year, but also user-generated lists that are created on sites, such as Amazon for authors

Review how the artist describes their work. Look for phrases that resonate.

Do Google searches on the work that you do find, even on the most basic definitions of what that work is. Switch to a Google image search to see what comes up. Then do a Google video search. Don’t stop at the first sign that validates what you already know. Challenge your assumptions, and move well beyond the first page of Google search results.

Look for mentions of these comps anywhere you can find it—blogs, podcasts, within major media, and well outside of it.

When seeking examples to help guide you, the question you want to ask yourself is, “Who is doing work that matters and is succeeding at it?”

Befriend people who have experience in your field

These are the individuals who have already engaged an audience similar to the one you want for your work. Their own work embodies similar things that yours does.

you don’t just want to have a map of your marketplace, you want to befriend those who have deep experience within it.

Find mid-level doers

creative professionals who are mid-career, have found a sustainable way to focus on their creative work, and are a healthy mixture of aspirational and accessible.

You aspire to be able to do what they do not just in terms of the work itself, but the lifestyle they get to live, or the validation they have received from others.

They are big enough to matter, but not so big that you can’t connect with them.

Look for those who are advocates for the type of work you do. This could be as formal as media (newspapers, bloggers, podcasters), but as informal

Who shows up to conferences or events, workshops, and online chats? Whom does your ideal audience already know and respect in their field?

A particularly good place to find mid-level doers is podcasts in your field. The podcaster themselves is someone you should focus on

The list of people interviewed is a great place to begin in identifying additional mid-level doers.

See other creators as collaborators not competitors

Don’t treat other creators as “competition.” View them instead as like-minded people who share the same passion that you do for this work and how it affects the world. Their experiences can shave years off your own journey in setting up your gateway and carving a path to it.

Instead of feeling envy or jealousy of others, I would encourage you to overwhelm them with kindness.

Use social media for research

think of social media as the greatest research tool ever created.

observe and listen intently, and in doing so, better understand the people who will walk through your gateway. Use social media as an input, not an output.

Find your mid-level doers on every social media channel you can.

noticing which channels seem to be more popular for your creative field.

Observe which channels the mid-level doers are most active on, and have the most followers on, and then follow them there.

identify the one or two that really matter to them. Focus on those.

begin recognizing the practices that work for those in your field

see who they follow

See who these mid-level doers mention often in their social media feeds.

observe any @names that the person mentions again and again in their feeds. Look for names and faces.

look at who follows these mid-level doers, but also see who mentions them, by searching their @name in the search field for each social network.

Give yourself a week or two, and simply listen. Look at every social media update they share.

focus on the people and what they engage with. Let go of your assumptions and your own narratives here.

use a wide range of communication channels and methods, not just one social network.

Meet people in person and ask questions

focus your attention on the attendees. Talk to them.

Ask people why they came. Ask about what kind of work they love and why. Ask how they got into this field. Don’t try to impress people, and don’t try to sound too smart or savvy. Whatever you do, don’t promote your own work.

consider reaching out to those mid-level doers you identified. Ask simple questions that you need help with.

Look at brands as made up of people

If there are brands or media that you feel your audience knows and respects, I would encourage you to not think of them as publicity channels for your work, but instead as people with a shared passion.

Learn how the organization is structured, how many people are within it, and where they are located. For your specific field, see if there is a subgroup that specializes in it.

Stop pitching blindly to “entities” and start understanding these organizations as real groups of multifaceted people, who are just like you.

If you want to have a better sense of how marketing works within a big publisher, look these people up on LinkedIn.

do research to see what these departments and individuals truly look like.

Go to bookstores and befriend people there.

Use the Least Crowded Channel

Look for the people who surround the mid-level doer, such as a manager, an assistant, the support staff. If you are attending an event that one of your heroes is putting on, befriend all the people who are working on it.

You can do this via email (send questions, receive back answers), Skype for an online video interview, phone, or meet in person.

Interview people

interviewing the mid-level doers, the members of the communities you hope to engage, and the people who are fans of work similar to yours.

it also helps you understand the needs of your community.

you are creating maps. You are learning the existing paths, the people you need to know, the language your audience understands, and how to use that to connect your work to your ideal audience.

putting in the time to understand the communities they hope to be a part of. The core focus here is to consider the people who make up these communities, and create relationships with them.

Consider not how you can gain the attention of others, but how you can bring joy to them, and develop meaningful connections over time, because what lasts is what you create

Dedicate yourself to being present with others

being someone who is there when they need to experience joy, when they need to learn, when they need a helping hand, and when they simply need to know that there is hope. What lasts isn’t instant success, but that inclination to be present for others.

How to find and use the right channels

When choosing the channels you invest in to reach your audience, it should be a mixture of online and offline channels

use your research to determine the channels where your ideal audience is most engaged.

popular channels where your audience engages versus “the least crowded channel.” You should instead use both strategies in different ways, at different times.

How to build a website

If you are creating a website for yourself, do a survey of ten colleagues to see what their sites look like. Then, for your own, I would encourage you to keep it as simple as possible in terms of both content and design.

identify the core things it has to do and include only those. Include as few items on the navigation bar as possible; write in the first person and not in the third person to directly address those who do come

Simply be aware whether you are focusing your audience’s attention, or splitting it.

Be clear about what the main gateway represents, and why they would want to enter.

Consider whether you will create long-form content.

Use both a blog and a newsletter

Consider the difference between a blog and an email newsletter as “pull” versus “push.” With “pull,” you are hoping to pull your audience back to your blog again and again. You are relying on them remembering to come back

email newsletters are a nice way to “push” your content out to those who choose to receive it. They receive an email the exact moment you want them to

How to use social media

You can share your content, aggregate content from others, post status updates on what you are doing (professionally or personally) and, of course, directly engage with others.

Don’t just constantly share updates about your services and intrude on others’ lives. Instead, use social media meaningfully. Engage in real conversations, showcase your purpose and your process, and celebrate others who care about the same type of work you do.

Use research to craft social media posts that give your audience what they want to feel

focus on topics that you uncovered in the research earlier in this chapter, but also focus on the feelings that you give people.

understand the feelings people want to have

be inventive

To have people understand your work, you will need to become a student of those you hope to reach.

Tell other people's stories too

Generosity—with your time and attention, your talent and your enthusiasm—is a core way to engage others. If you do something such as an email newsletter, use it to tell other people’s stories as it relates to your vision, not just your own experience.

Actively direct people to your gate

Don’t wait for people to find and walk through your gateway on their own. Instead, one by one, bring people to your gateway and assist them in walking through it.

Share your work like you're sharing to a friend

Sharing should be a process that involves others: one that is social, and one that feels as natural as a conversation with a close friend.

tell them about your process, what motivated you, the roadblocks, and so much else about what drives you.

Sharing the journey is about developing advocates around your creative work that lead to word-of-mouth marketing.

Stop being distant and professional.

Write in the first person.

Share proper status updates that include the complex reality of your life.

Show enthusiasm for other people's work.

Your creative work and readers are more important that your ego, identity, image, and metrics

With your creative work, what matters is the work itself, how you have grown as a person as you develop your craft, and how your work affects the lives of others.

The four S

  1. Seek out others.
  2. Signal to others that you are like them, and are welcoming a chance to engage.
  3. Share things that represent your message.
  4. Shape conversations by asking questions.

Share emotions that drive you

share the emotion you want others to feel when they experience your work. This practice focuses on experiences, not “things.”

these do not need to be positive emotions.

Emotions of any kind act as a signal and give people a way in.

Find models outside your field

look for people whose work you admire who also share behind-the-scenes examples of how they have grown their career.

Treat your audience like royalty no matter how few they are

if you have sixty followers, treat them like the most special people in the world. They are the foundation for how your work will reach more people, and impact the world.

How to engage with your audience one on one

Connect with one new person per week. Take them out to lunch, email them, or set up a phone call.

focus on engaging more with the top ten percent, those who seem to be more supportive.

Send an email to a colleague—a mid-level doer who practices the same craft you do—and thank them for how their work inspired you.

Interview those who do what you would love to do. You can ask them everything you ever worried about in your own work, but also share the interview to promote them and become aligned with them publicly.

Develop a support system

identify collaborators

surround yourself with people who understand your work and trust you as a person

ensure your creative vision spreads

Consider how each person you connect with becomes a collaborator—someone who is part of your creative process

For collaborators, start small but intentional.

You simply need someone who can be a sounding board when you have questions, and keep you on track and accountable.

If you want someone to help answer questions, you have to be clear and concise in what you ask, and you have to actually be willing to act on that person’s advice. If you want someone to keep you accountable, you have to illustrate to them that you will do the work, even in the moments they aren’t prodding you.

embrace collaborators early in your process so you can learn what truly engages an audience.

Find mentors

shadow them, apprentice with them, or meet once per month

consider informal mentorships. Identifying people in your life who you can check in with on a regular basis, but without them having to agree to officially be a mentor for you.

For every second email, ask a simple question that you could use their input on.

asks nothing, but gives quite a bit

the small things you do ask for are framed in a way that illustrates the impact that they will make

Establish a mastermind group

Small group mastermind

One-on-one mastermind

Managed mastermind group

How collaborators, mentors, and masterminds help you

helping you better understand those you want to reach and how to effectively communicate and engage with those people.

telling you practical stories of what did and didn’t work for them

allowing you to gain perspective from another person of how they interpret the messages and work you are crafting

Experiment to make the social aspects of your work fun

my challenge wasn’t that I couldn’t engage with people; it was that I needed a safe context to do so, and one that had a structure to it.

To help people walk through your gateway, experiment with ways to make the social aspects of this fun and reduce the amount of anxiety you may feel.

Walk people to your gateway again and again

Walking someone through your gate is a process of finding out who that person is, what drives them, and how your gateway aligns with their own path. Don’t assume that once you have crafted your beautiful gateway and the realm that lies beyond it, people can actually reach it.

you are going to have to walk people again and again down the path that leads to your gateway. By doing this, you will learn new things about what motivates those you hope to engage, and you will learn where your “strategy” for engaging others with your work was, in fact, you being willfully ignorant of the gap between your intention and the needs or desires of those you hope to engage.

Use experiments to gain feedback from your audience to iterate your work

hunting for aspects of your work that capture the interest of others

adjust the work itself based on feedback from your audience

When I found something, I kept exploring it and growing it

multiple channels: my private mastermind, video, blog, email newsletter, webinar, interviews, private emails, and private phone calls.

view opportunities to engage others with your work as experiences you craft, and as a way for you to learn more about who you are hoping to capture and what drives them. Identify ways to experiment to find out what works. Put yourself in the position to have to ask your ideal audience what drives them, or find ways to observe them in action.

Learn more about what works and what engages your ideal audience by conducting many experiments.

Hold a literary salon

hold a literary salon in your living room, at the local library, or as part of a local organization. Don’t worry about promoting your own work.

experiment with what creates an event that attracts and engages people interested in books similar to yours.

Create experience, not content

change one person’s life with your creative work right now by crafting meaningful experiences.

While writing an article, creating a podcast, or creating a social media strategy may feel like “audience engagement,” it isn’t.

focus on creating experiences.

Seek out conversations and connections with individuals—something that is specific and truly social. It takes effort to create experiences. Too often, we hide behind the safety of content.

What experiences can you create around your gateway?

be ludicrously kind and generous to those who support your creative work or creative work like yours

Consider how you can give back to specific people in a huge way.

Create an experience and do it really well. Crazy well. The return on investment should be lopsidedly bad. Invest way more than you think you should.

Unprocessed

An audience lives according to narratives

This is how they express their identity. They want a narrative that makes sense of the world. It is not just a reflection on the world, but their place within it. It justifies their decisions. It allays their fears. It motivates their hopes.

Understand the narratives your audience live by so you can engage them.

How to be a gateway

Understand your audience’s narrative.

Understand your narrative

Align the two

How to find your narratives

identify what matters most to you across your entire life, not just in your creative work.

think about what you would fight to not lose. Those are your narratives. This is where you will put your energy every day, every week, and every month. It is where you will keep that flame alive long after others would have given up.

Your narratives are made up of two things:

  1. The things in life that you care so much about that you would fight to protect them, and to ensure that they can reach their full potential.

  2. A practice. What yo do every single day.

Craft a mission statement

identify a simple sentence that focuses on the experience you want your writing to create for others

Nine months after someone reads your book, what do you want them to think quietly in their heads about the world you have opened for them? How does it relate to their life, their identity, their interactions?

Write down a series of belief statements—things that you feel resonate in your creative work. Sit with them for a week, reviewing them each day.

at the end of the week, choose one that you are drawn to the most.

How to write your bio

  1. Write a belief statement that your ideal reader would read and say “YES! This!”

2. Starting with this instead of yourself shows empathy, which catches the attention of your audience.

3. The belief statement should embody your work and your drive to create. Examples:

4. It is either what you are fighting for or fighting against.

5. A feeling you want people to experience through your work.

  1. Write a description of your creative work.

7. Focus on the one thing that matters to you right now.

  1. Write your credentials as they relate to your creative work.

9. This can take the form of a story of how you got into your craft.

  1. Write your background and experience as filtered through your creative work.

  2. Share personal details: hobies, location, personal history.

Take small actions that are totally within your control.

Seek small conversations.

Seek tiny ways of helping.

Have meaningful conversations with people who will care about your vision.

How to be truly empathetic in engaging your audience

find and explore the path that your ideal audience already knows and walks along every day

have empathy for who they are, what they already know, their habits, their interests, and who they trust.

understanding them and their marketplace, and using that to hone how to communicate about the work you create. It helps you identify where you need to be, what engages others, and who you need to know. It also helps ensure that this is fun and meaningful for both you and them.

UNSORTED

The requirement to market one’s creative work can corrupt one’s creative vision.

Change the way people see the world through your creative work.

What conversations would you love to have with others?

Literature notes

Prompts