Reach

Create the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause

Becky Robinson

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781523000876
• eBook ISBN: 9781523000890
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

"A how-to guide for creators in search of an audience . . .[Reveals] four key ingredients that will help you expand your following." —Ken Blanchard, #1 New York Times– bestselling coauthor of T he New One Minute Manager®

Anyone who makes the bold decision to put their ideas out into the world wants to reach as many people as possible. Unfortunately, too many think it's a question of numbers—the more people you can get in front of, the better. But true reach is about expanding your audience while making a meaningful and enduring difference that has a lasting impact.

Reach provides a clear and structured approach to creating a successful online presence that will create the biggest possible impact for any message. Becky Robinson shares a framework to cultivate followers that requires four commitments: value, consistency, endurance, and generosity. When you make these four commitments, you'll deliver memorable content on a regular basis while keeping the long-term view in mind.

Robinson offers guidance on having realistic expectations and meaningful goals, encouraging readers to reflect on what they want to accomplish and with whom they want to connect. Readers will also learn how to overcome discouragements, create and repurpose content, and focus on the everyday activities that will spread ideas.This is a long-term process—one that doesn't normally offer immediate results or guarantee the desired outcome. But, as Robinson reminds us, creating from a place of generosity can lead to benefits greater than you can imagine.

"A straightforward guide to building and keeping an audience through authenticity, perseverance, and generosity." — Kirkus Reviews

" Reach delivers a master class in how to create a lasting impact with your message." —Fauzia Burke, author of Online Marketing for Busy Authors

chapter 1

Evaluating Your Current Approach to Building Traction for Your Message

“Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous.” This was the title of a Facebook group Germanotta’s classmates at New York University started. Lady Gaga’s peers disdained her audacious dreams.¹ A few years later, in 2010, Lady Gaga gave an interview to reporter Neil McCormick, who described her rise to fame as rapid, inexorable, and global. She told him, “I have always been an artist. And I’ve always been famous, you just didn’t know it yet.”²

Lady Gaga’s story is not a common one. Her achievement of catapulting from coffeehouse gigs to worldwide best-selling artist status—she has won Grammys, Golden Globes, and an Academy Award, among other accolades and recognition—is unduplicated. And Lady Gaga didn’t have a wealthy family, famous parents, or other support to buoy her talent. Instead, hard work and unique talent, extreme focus, and flamboyant costumes all contributed to her rise to fame. As the artist told McCormick, “There’s a real art to fame.”

To rise from obscurity to renown requires the perfect alignment of many factors: talent, hard work, great timing, a message or product with wide appeal, and a little bit of fairy dust.

If you are prolific enough and well known enough, you don’t need to work to have your online presence match your offline contribution. The world will do the work for you. People who live public lives show up online through the efforts of others.

If you are not among those famous few, you will need to curate and cultivate your own story online in order to create meaning, impact, and reach over time.

Those of us who don’t aspire to rock-star status and are seeking a different kind of renown for our work need to realize that there is no easy path to gaining traction for our book, business, cause, or message. Hard work as a precursor to influence and significance is an unavoidable reality.

You will need to curate and cultivate your own story online in order to create meaning, impact, and reach over time.

Closing the Influence Gap

In my work with clients over the years, I’ve identified a significant gap that even very successful people must overcome to create reach. It’s the difference between how a person shows up online and how they show up offline.

Most people naturally invest more time, energy, and resources in their offline lives. However, an exclusive focus on offline life will almost always limit reach.

The only way to create the biggest reach possible for your work is to grow your contributions online and offline simultaneously. Whatever you do, do it out loud, sharing the story of your work publicly so people can learn and benefit from your work even if they don’t know you offline. Those who are on a journey with the goal of creating more impact need to maximize both their offline contributions and their online presence over time to reach more people. They need to share the value of their work both online and offline.

Categories of Online Presence

During my twelve years of working with people to increase the reach of their messages, I’ve identified four levels of expertise related to creating an online presence. Figure 3 illustrates these four levels. Each circle includes a globe icon (representing offline influence) and a computer screen icon (representing online influence).

Someone who has neither online nor offline influence is a beginner. Note that in the beginner circle of figure 3, both the globe icon and the computer screen icon are marked with an X, which indicates that both online and offline influence are absent. Someone who has influence online but not offline is a master of branding. In this circle, the globe icon is marked with an X, indicating that people in this category do not have offline influence. Someone who has offline influence that is not fully represented online is a traditional thought leader. In this circle, the icon for online influence is marked with an X. The fourth circle depicts true reach experts, the people who show up online in the same powerful way that they show up in real life. People in this group are positioned to create the biggest possible audience and lasting impact for their work.

FIGURE 3. Levels of Influence

The Beginner

If you are at the start of your career or at the start of creating traction for an idea, message, book, or cause, you likely are in the category of beginner. You could also call yourself a beginning beginner. You have neither recognition offline nor impact online . . . yet. You’re figuring out your brand position in life or figuring out your career journey. Or you’ve been in a career and you’re making a switch but have little experience related to your aspirations.

There’s no shame in being here. Instead of being overwhelmed about all that lies ahead, be inspired by the vision of what you can accomplish. There’s nowhere to go but up from here. Throughout the book, I’ll give you suggestions about how to start. Patience will be helpful on this journey, since starting to grow influence online is like planting a tree; it may be years before you enjoy the shade.

Everyone who is starting something new is in this group. In 2009, when I joined Facebook for the first time, I was in this category. I had stepped out of a job in a nonprofit organization when I had my first child in 2001. I didn’t have a specific career vision and I didn’t have any expertise to add to a topic or to a vision of where I could contribute. Even though I was approaching age 40, it would not have been a stretch to call me a beginning beginner.

It can be humbling to be in this place. After I started to take some freelance writing gigs, one of my clients approached me and asked me to write a leadership blog in support of the university’s online leadership degree programs. He framed the request like this: “How would you feel about writing a blog about a topic you know nothing about?” The topic? Leadership.

I remember feeling annoyed. I told my client about my role as president of our condo association, the preschool co-op I had started, and the church I had partnered with my husband to start. “I know about leadership,” I told him. But I really didn’t. I had to start at the beginning. I had neither expertise to offer in the real world nor anything meaningful to say online. I had to work to create both at the same time.

As a beginner who wants to create lasting legacy for your work, it is critical that you first consider the four commitments of reach. You’ll need to adopt a discovery-driven approach to creating value.

DISCOVER YOUR VALUE

After I entered online spaces in 2009, I acquired more learning about leadership by teaching one semester of undergraduate courses in leadership for an online program. This short stint gave me some additional credibility, but only a thin veneer.

Along the way, I began experimenting with and learning about social media marketing. In my freelance work for the university, I started and grew a Twitter account, then started managing Facebook pages. At the time, we were all learning about social media together and I learned a lot by exploration and experimentation. Increasing my expertise about social media proved to be much easier than increasing my learning about leadership. I had so much catching up to do about being a leader.

When I started my own blog in 2010, my path as a digital marketing professional was still not yet clear. I envisioned writing about several topics: leadership, relational connections, and social media.

I had to experiment with topics in my online writing and posting until I had enough experience to see the path forward. I discovered along the way what topics excited me, what topics interested the people who read my work, and where I could make my most meaningful contribution, including how I could carve out a profitable and purposeful business.

Newcomers in online spaces can experiment with content first. They can learn from experience to clarify and hone in on how they can best contribute value.

ADD CONSISTENCY

It will be impossible to create significance offline or online without consistency. Once you’ve identified how you will bring value, start contributing it consistently. So many people who start to build an online presence give up before they have a chance to break through to widespread success.

SETTLE IN

As you are getting started, patience is imperative. Without patience, you will not sustain your contributions long enough to create reach.

Humility at the start may give you some early momentum. If you are just getting started, own it. Tell people “I’m new here. I’m just getting started.”

When I started blogging about leadership in 2009, I spent a lot of time seeking out other leadership bloggers. Early on, I developed a friendship with several bloggers who’d been on the scene longer than me. I soon discovered that most of them had significantly more expertise than I did that added credibility to their contributions on leadership. I asked a lot of questions. I listened to and acted on their advice.

While I was establishing my brand, I had to ask for help—often. I remember an early win in May 2009. The blog I wrote at the time had been going for a few months. I decided to reach out to Dan McCarthy, blogger at Great Leadership by Dan, to ask him to host a guest article. When he responded favorably, I danced and shrieked around my house. I had no idea how these humble beginnings would lead to my discovery of a powerful new career.

When you are just getting started and can ask for help and humbly learn from others, you can fuel ongoing collaborative relationships. People will want to be helpful and will appreciate the opportunity to guide your journey. Starting strong will increase your chances of sticking around long enough to make an impact.

BE GENEROUS

One of the benefits of being a beginning beginner is that you are probably showing up in online spaces without an urgent agenda apart from learning and contributing. Because of this, you may have more time, energy, and willingness to promote others and their work. As a newcomer to online conversations on a certain topic, you can attract attention by amplifying the work and ideas of other people.

In this beginning stage and throughout your journey, be as generous as you can. Link to other people’s work, quote other people, participate in promoting others’ books or causes, write reviews of people’s books. If you’ve learned from someone, acknowledge their contribution. If you admire someone, shout it out.

Masters of Branding

It’s possible to build massive traction for your online presence without any substance behind your work, but any success that does not have value to support your brand will be short lived.

If you have achieved online reach before you’ve created depth in your content and vision, you can continue to fuel your online presence while you develop your ideas.

Often people who have online success without the offline significance to back up their online presence flare and then fizzle. Masters of branding may quickly grow a following or they may buy followers. They may look amazing on the level of surface metrics—the number of followers, fans, and likes they get. They may fill their feeds with beautiful photographs and messages that aren’t clearly related to a core message.

To create impact, you have to bring substance, not superficiality. It’s impossible to offer something meaningful if your work lacks meaning. I’m sure you can quickly think of people who are focused more on making money than on creating meaning. If you have a negative view of these people, it is likely because of their inauthenticity.

You probably bought this book because you have a real message to share and are motivated to offer value. You are in no danger of becoming a master of branding.

Traditional Thought Leaders

Many of the people I work with are traditional thought leaders.

These are people who have created value through their books, their businesses, their ideas, or their messages but have not yet worked to build a significant online presence.

This is often because their contributions predate the internet. They began their contributions at a time when people gained traction for their ideas through the traditional modes of publishing, speaking, teaching, traveling, and gaining exposure in major media.

Traditional thought leaders may have great reach in o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Whitney Johnson
• Introduction: How Far Can You Reach?
• Chapter 1: Evaluating Your Current Approach to Building Traction for Your Message
• Chapter 2: What Do You Want to Be Known For?
• Chapter 3: Creating Your Brand
• Chapter 4: The Four Commitments
• Chapter 5: The Reach Framework
• Chapter 6: Your Permission-Based Email List
• Chapter 7: Content, Your Flexible Asset
• Chapter 8: Going beyond the Basics
• Chapter 9: Writing a Book to Expand Your Reach
• Chapter 10: Reach for Marginalized Voices
• Conclusion: Reach as Far as Possible
• Discussion Guide
• Appendix: Planning a Launch Campaign
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author