Below are some key points from Scott Ginsberg’s presentation entitled How to Package Your Thoughts into Messages and Messages into Money, presented at Blog World Expo 2010.
Everyone has a brand. Whether you know it or not, who you are and what you do contributes to your brand and how people see you. Take the time to develop a brand and stick with it. Your brand should stick to you like a name tag sticks to Scott, and you should take the time to keep it consistent. To keep his brand consistent, Scott hand writes each and every one of the name tags he wears, and those that are not consistent with the brand image are discarded. You need to take the same care and control in your brand identity both in person and on your website. Your website needs to become more then a landing page of information about you, it needs to become a destination for your user. If you do not take the time to sit down and make a name for yourself, one day someone else will come along and label you, and you may not agree with what they have to say about you. Your brand is worth your time and consistency and “consistency is far better than rare moments of greatness.”
Writing is the basis of all wealth in this world. The best word(s) to have in front of your name (besides “New York Times Best Selling Author”) is by. Having by in front of your name not only shows that you have something to say, it shows that someone else cares about what you have to say! You should be constantly generating ideas. Write down everything you see and collate it. By writing it down you now have proof that this event happened and you have an idea. If you write everything down and are a good listener you will never have writers block.
Once you have your ideas, don’t stress out about trying to organize them. Ideas are like little gifts that have the power to organize themselves. All you need to do is write them down and hold on to them. Once you spend some time staring at them, patterns will emerge and voila! The ideas organize themselves. Take the time to organize your ideas and what comes from them. Have a folder in your computer (and back it up!) with your ideas, whether they are new, developed or published. That way you can access them at the click of a mouse, if you can’t do this, your ideas will get lost and be worthless. Everything you have in your head should be written down somewhere.
Once you have these ideas or thoughts organized, turn them into messages. Don’t waste your time constructing books or lengthy essays, turn your ideas into messages or modules. These modules can then be collated into a book when the time is right. Once you have your messages, you need to get them out into the world. The easiest way to do this is by getting interviewed. Interviews are a simple way to drive traffic to your website and raise awareness about your brand. If no one will interview you, interview yourself! This gives you the ability to answer all the questions you wished people would ask you and gives you the freedom to have as much fun with it as you can.
Finally, outreach is important. If you are publishing content without getting feedback from your users, you are in the dark. It is great that you know what you are doing, but if your users cannot voice their opinions everything you do is worthless. Create a community through your site and through email to see what your audience wants, and use this community to get leads. Simply asking for a sale, either of a book or for a speaking engagement can often get you want with little effort. Every email is an opportunity.
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