The first English-language newspaper, "Corrant out of Italy, Germany, etc., was published in Amsterdam in 1620. I never knew that and I was born there! "Corrant", was a translation of Courante, which means running or stream.
Nearly 400 years later and we've all become publishers. Who would have thought that. Now we're all desperately looking to find readers of our published content. There are literally millions of us writing and publishing updates about our work, our lives and on top of that writing millions of blogposts all over the web.
Why?
There is only one reason and that is to get noticed.
We want to be found, to become more successful in our work, maybe to leave a legacy and some of us even want to be famous.
And by publishing content we believe that we may achieve these goals one day but we often overlook the human interactions that are needed for our content to be taken seriously. I am no longer active in LinkedIn groups because I see everyone posting their blogposts, not even asking for comments, not even asking a question about the content they are sharing.
To believe that human interactions with your content will just magically appear by what I call 'spraying and praying' is a crazy strategy and although you may experience a couple of successes here and there, in the long-term it will fail.
By all means write content, create eBooks and even become an author and then start finding your audience by engaging with them first. Find their content and engage with it by liking, commenting and sharing it so more readers will find it. Ask them questions about their content, you may even wish to be challenging at times or have a decent (virtual) debate about some of it.
The other day I was chatting to Julie Bondy Roberts and we agreed that all our time spent writing and publishing content is actually a marketing expense. So multiply your hourly rate by the hours you spend publishing your content, maybe curating content and even sharing your story updates across, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, plus all the others. I reckon most are spending around 3 hours each day, 90 hours per month (including weekends). Just multiply by your hourly rate and it's a very big number! Are you getting a return on that?
Just saying...
LinkedIn created a brilliant eBook with my favourite illustrator. @gapingvoid (Hugh Macleod) creates the most amazing messages through his illustrations. Read more about him and @gapingvoid here: http://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/team-members/hugh-macleod/
Each week I will share one of the articles and illustrations from the eBook and give you my opinion, insight and meaning of the words and illustrations.