Platform Building
The word platform is used these days to mean audience.
Engaging your audience is about giving. On social media, this means giving them tidbits of what you have. You can practice sending out gifts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn—and any other, if you choose.
Using Social Media to Attract an Audience
1. Inspire by publishing quotes.
The optimum length for Facebook quotes is up to three lines. You have 140 characters on Twitter.
2. Ask for engagement.
For example on one Facebook post I said, “My greatest goal is freedom. What is yours?”
It’s best if you make it so your audience can answer in just a few words.
3. Post an image: a photograph or piece of art
Be sure to give credit when you use others’ images.
Build an Email List
To do this, on your website or your Facebook Business Page, you offer a gift in exchange for their email address. If you don’t yet have a website, put this on your list of goals.
Steps of engagement:
Make contact on social media or in person.
People come to your website, sign up, and then you can continue your conversation.
When you publish a book or offer something, they might want to buy or join.
Get Published Immediately
The best way to do this is to blog. A blog is an online offering that goes out to subscribers. I recommend using WordPress as your blog platform. Simply go to www.wordpress.com and create one. It only takes a few minutes and it is free.
You post on your blog and then let your social media friends know about the post, and ask them to subscribe to your blog.
Blogging is a great way to
- put your writing out to an audience,
- develop an audience, and
- receive feedback in order to
- refine your writing.
It’s a perfect loop.
You become the creator with full creative freedom. Eventually, you can turn your posts into a book or eBook.
Publishing Books and eBooks
Having your own eBook
- Gives you something to sell and give away
- Helps establish you as an expert
- Helps define your direction, and
- Can act as a business card to promote your larger purpose
The 5 Keys to Writing Success
- Unleash your passion
- Find the Wow of Now
- Use Sensory Details
- Move into Action
- Inspire Love
1. Unleash Your Passion: Every success arises from great passion. Here’s how to infuse your writing with this powerful vibration, so your reader will be entranced with your words.
When you write, try not landing, but instead stay in flight. When the mind grabs a thought and says this is truth, it is landing, but if we let the truth be open to constant revision we are in the creative flow.
Find a turning-point moment and write about it. It may be a painful one. What’s important is that you be fearless—that you write as though no one were watching, as though no one but you will read it. It’s not easy to do but it’s a great practice to help your truth come through.
2. The Wow of Now: Make your writing and project sizzle with the intensity of the present moment, so that it sparks with courage and love.
Try writing in the present tense. This means rather than say, “I paddled my kayak into the raging rapid.” I write, “I paddle my kayak into the raging rapid.”
3. Use Sensory Details: Infuse your writing with details of what you see, feel, taste, hear and smell to put your reader there with you, riveting him or her to your message.
Bring to your writing the elements that the senses perceive. Your senses are: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling.
Be as specific as possible, by using proper names. Note that rather than saying splintery wood, I said the type of wood—pine.
4. Move into Action: Draw your audience into the land of stunning verbs. Your readers will have no choice but to keep reading.
Powerful verbs drive good writing. See how much variety there is in the verbs. It’s likely you tend to rely on a handful of them, whereas there is a huge basketful at your bidding.
Try transforming the verbs in your paragraph into active verbs. In doing so you may eliminate “to be” verbs. For example: “I am walking” may become “I stride.”
5. Inspire Love: Launch your writing into the higher realms where it will expand the consciousness of yourself, your reader and the entire Cosmos.
a. Be vulnerable
Being vulnerable doesn’t mean that we whimper and whine or pour out our deepest secrets. It does mean that we be our authentic selves in our writing, that we tell how we feel. It means we step away from being the invulnerable guru and be souls experiencing this great adventure of life.
Think back to how you felt during your experience. Write a few sentences that convey this feeling.
b. Step In
Readers want to feel the power of someone taking steps on their own behalf, even if those steps lead them into trouble, especially if those steps do, because the steps also lead them out of it and that is when beautiful realizations happen.
Look at your paragraph and be sure that you are not simply ruminating, but are actually doing something, stepping into action.
c. Overcome Fear
People want to be inspired—to climb a mountain, to bake a tart. What generates inspiration? Often it’s a sense of overcoming fear or forging a new path.
In your piece of writing show how you overcame fear and forged a new path.
If you would like me to comment on your paragraph I invite you to send it to me at Lesley@lesleysking.com. Or you can simply respond to any of the emails I have sent you, pasting the text in there.
My Extended Course: Write Your Way to Freedom
If you enjoyed this process and would like to do more of it, I invite you to attend a workshop that I am offering online. It will be like any workshop that you attend weekly. The difference is we will meet at our computer screens using webinar technology. So it will be as though we meet in my living room, but you won’t have to leave the comfort of your home.
Platform Building and Publishing
Each week in this course I will start by teaching about platform building and publishing. This will help you
- Create fun relationships on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube, and…
- Publish in various media, including magazines, online publications, books and eBooks
Writing
The second part of each workshop will focus on writing. I will give a writing lesson, like the ones today, and then participants will write and then present their writing, which we will lovingly discuss, offering tips for revision.
Remember, successful writing happens because of revision. And a great part of revision is getting feedback on what you’re writing. This will help you know whether on not you are on track. Once you get the hang of the revision process, it is very fun, each day meeting your writing with a fresh viewpoint.
Troubleshooting
The third part of each workshop will be troubleshooting. I will help you with your WordPress site, or recommend ways to set up your share buttons or increase traffic to your Facebook page. I will offer guidance on publishing options and help you avoid some pitfalls of Indie publishing.
Community
Above all we will create a loving community in which to nurture your writing. So much of the writing world is negative and harsh, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Rather than the old model, which is destructive and competitive, we can become better writers in a constructive, collaborative way.
Details
The course will meet once a week for five weeks beginning in late October. I will record the sessions so if you miss one you can make up the class. I’ve priced them reasonably, so that anyone who wants to should be able to join in.
At this point I want to ask you, What do you need to believe about yourself so you’ll be willing to take a risk and go for it?
Imagine
that you could be free to
- Write about what you love
- Set your own work schedule
- Travel as you like, and
- Have meaningful interactions with your audience
And you will have my support and professional guidance as you embark on this quest.
Sign Up
Now, if this sounds good to you, head to this website to learn more and sign up:
www.lesleysking.com/WriteYourWaytoFreedom
I won’t promise like many online business coaches that you’ll make millions of dollars—though you might.
But what this course offers is an opportunity for you to be your own creator, shining unconditionally on your life, and those around you.
It is a powerful ideal that is within all of our grasp.
As Goethe says,
Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.
Again, if this sounds good to you, head to this website to learn more and sign up:
www.lesleysking.com/WriteYourWaytoFreedom