Go Public With Your Process To Attract Like-Minded People
Are you pulling together a pile of personal and professional content that you might share in your online networks?
If you are, you might be realizing that mountain of stuff represents your effort and interest, and independent research.
Most likely, some of this material represents the things you chose to do because they make you feel alive. Think of all the activities you’ve poured yourself into and how you’ve retained the evidence of them. Anything that represents your experiences, your thinking and feeling on certain topics. All those photos of people and places and things that hold meaning and jog memories, yet haven’t seen the light of day in practically forever.
Some of it may represent projects, hobbies and pursuits. That might include creative failures. False starts. Work you didn’t exactly love. Ancient history. They might be useful to where you’re headed now. Include it all in the pile you’re sweeping together.
Maybe you’ve already gathered content associated with the life you’ve lived and the things you’ve loved and hated. Yes, hated. This is about your arc. As a solopreneur in the digital age, I have come to believe that all of that material is forgotten gold.
So, are you sitting on that mountain of content — and also wondering what you’re going put in your profiles at different online social platforms?
Are you sitting on that pile and trawling through free or low-cost stock images to illustrate on your blog? Rooting through the same shortcuts that everybody else is also using?
Are you sitting on that stack of your own material and wondering how you’re ever going to be more like you online? Are you starting to wonder if there’s any way to sharpen the lines around who you are in your business or industry? Are you thinking about how you can become prominent and more findable in your chosen field of interest or activity? How about feeling the pressure to produce content other people care about?
What might happen if you consider all that material as fodder for what you’re doing now, and what you want to do next? What if it’s all part of your process?
What do I mean by process? You are going somewhere.
If we consider that earlier output and experience not as failure or ancient history or a waste of time, but instead a chain of events that make us who we are today, then I think we can start to get an idea of the arc of our lives and how what we’ve done in the past can help us get where we want to go.
Entrepreneur coach Pam Slim just published a book devoted to this timely topic: Body Of Work. Jonathan Fields of The Good Life Project interviews her about it here.
Whether you’re positioning yourself to land clients or funding or business partnerships or you’ve got a product or service to sell, you need to be found. Sharing distinctive content is going to help you become findable.
But besides being findable online, sharing your content — especially meaningful bits that you wish you could develop further — is going to help take you to the next level. Whatever you want to do next, you’ll need help and support.
Gather support in your online networks by going public with your process. That’ll attract likeminded people and involve them in your journey.
If you share things from the past and talk about how it looks to you now or what you’ve learned since then, we get a new view into your trajectory. If you share your way of thinking and feeling both then and now, and let us in on where you want to go with all of this, you’ll draw parties who can help you develop your plan, the kind of peers and confidants and guides who will form the basis of your online community.
When you share your not-quite-there-yet ideas and invite us to co-create with you, you attract people interested in your vision. I’ll be talking more about building online community through content in this weekly series for Curatti. For now, what do you think about this approach? Would it work for you? Have you tried it? Do you see reasons not to go public with your process in online communities? Tell me about it below.
photo by Anastasia Ashman (materials from a 1998 web project)
Anastasia Ashman
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