Your ideas with your name attached, circling around the globe

I just did a presentation with Haythem Naji inside Full Circle yesterday, about email marketing.

And I had a few hunches about what might be best to talk about.

Which turned out to be largely correct.

But in situations like that, I also make it a point to go in without any assumptions and treat it more like a 2-way conversation than a 1-way lecture.

This provides two solid benefits:

One, I don’t have to prepare any boring slides.

Two, people get direct and specific feedback on how to apply what we’re learning to their own situations.

And to me that’s fun.

One of the things that came up was storytelling.

Haythem mentioned how he makes a point to write about his own personal experience and that his readers really seem to appreciate that. Which I’m really glad he brought up, because I have a tendency to stray away from that myself.

And I think we all do to some degree, because traditional academic writing dissuades us from using a personal voice, expressing ourselves, and trusting our experience as research.

So this was something I really had to work on consciously in order to get myself to do it.

And one person who had a big influence on me sharing more of my personal story was Colin Theroit. He’s a copywriting coach and educator, and I remember getting an email from him one time about storytelling in which he wrote:

“To become influential, it's a good idea to create material for people to copy from you and claim for themselves.”

And this might sound a bit counter-intuitive, and I won’t get into all the nitty-gritty details, but the point is this: when you take little bits of knowledge, tie them together, and put your own little spin on it, your people will begin to share those ideas with their people as well.

Sometimes as their own little revelations with their own little spin on it.

But occasionally, your name will get passed along with it.

Then your ideas begin to be shared with other people’s audiences.

And as a result, your ideas begin spread, and not always, but sometimes with your name attached.

One really easy way to facilitate more of that happening, is to the wrap the information you’d like to convey inside a story about yourself. And you can do that by asking yourself four little questions.

1. How did you learn it?

2. How has it helped you?

3. Where did you learn it from?

4. How have you applied it in your own life?

And voila, you’ve got a nice little tidbit of useful information circling around the globe with your name and your story attached to it.

And that’s how it begins to spread.

Anyway… this whole experience has got me thinking about bringing back some email marketing audits. Little one off sessions where I rummage through your brand a bit and give feedback to help you grow and monetize your email list faster.

Interested?

Just reply back, “INTERESTED” and I’ll get you the next step.

Talk soon,

Kevin Hood