Recently, I watched the author platform conference online. This was a series of interviews with authors, bloggers, marketers and other experts to help writers, speakers and bloggers be as effective as possible.
Below are the lessons from each interview that I watched:
- Create a connection with your book. Give something to people so that they make a concrete connection to what you are saying. At book events, he gave out tissues with the word Contagious: Why Things Catch On on them for his book and made the connection of “wouldn’t your like your ideas to be as contagious as the cold?”
- Be married to the outcome more than you are to the idea. This will allow you to enjoy the content you create.
- When it comes to branding, people think about people. The person sticks in the mind of people if you know who the person is.
- Books that sell come from authors that hustle.
- An author needs to provide value to the audience outside of their book.
- Writing a book is not like writing a blog post. Editing is by far the hardest part of writing a book.
- Just be you. Your readers and listeners will know if you are being real or not.
- Failures happen when people don’t listen to their intuition. Successes happen when we do listen to our intuition.
- Ideas are the currency of the 21st century and you are only as successful as your ideas.
- Most speakers fail because they don’t have their message down, they don’t know their story.
- The difference between a great speaker and a good speaker is the great speaker is always looking to improve.
- The 3 components to any great presentation: Emotional, novel and memorable.
- Activity always follows identity.
- Offline relationships still do matter in the midst of our social media worlds.
- A lot of people can launch a book well, but successful authors need to think about how to make it successful in 3, 6, and 12 months.
- The best way to promote yourself is to help others, to give a benefit to someone else.
- Content is not just about what you say, but how you say it.
- Know your audience, who they are, what their needs are, and what questions they have.
There was some incredibly helpful things in these videos.