Create Your Audience

After reading a blog entry by Rich Frishman, sent to me by a very dear friend, I realized that, unless you are famous, it is important to be your own press agent.

Many of you don't know that in 1997-98 I was a Press Secretary for someone in the DC political arena and I figured out how to do that job from zero because some serious tuition payments were pressing. (We were trying to educate the kids without debt and made it through college. Two had graduate school debt, alas.)

Way before it is necessary to have the audience, you have to build it, in my case, one reader at a time. As influential and interested people come across my mind, I reach out to them to see if they want to know what I am writing about.

I use a book by Lisa Haneberg in a class I teach for Middle Managers, High Impact Mddle Management. I have emailed here before because my efforts to download a template she recommended wasn't working. She responded quickly and the lesson I learned in 1997 was still valid. Don't let your perception of someone's importance prevent you from reaching out to them. Anyone is fair game.

She answered me then and she has answered me again, giving me a little encouragement. She even said she would look at the book when it's ready.

That's huge. She is a well-respected expert in the management and leadership training world with serious credentials. And she answered my email in less than a day!

So even though I am still in the infancy stages of Zip It!, I am "enlarging my territory" as Jabez wanted to do in Old Testament days.

If you have boxes of unsold books in your garage, or worse, your living room, start to daily and consistently enlarge your territory. Blog and relate what you have written to world events. Do this daily, like exercise and vitamins. Reach out to anyone who has ever had an interest in you and what you do, daily, like exercise and vitamins. Any place you have ever taught or lectured at is also fair game. Do that daily, like exercise and vitamins.

I think you get my drift.

A comedian once said that "Every day is the dawn of a new error." A pox on that kind of thinking. Every day is the dawn of a new opportunity.