Your platform is simply a way of thinking about how many people care about what you’re saying and might be willing to put some money down to hear you say more of it. It’s an indication of how many people are interested in what you have to say and feel it’s something they aren’t hearing anywhere else.
When you set out to develop a platform, the first step is to look at yourself. What are you good at? If you are naturally a good writer—and not too many people are—then you should start with a blog. You should write articles and get them published in newspapers and magazines. If you’re a good speaker, you could think about giving speeches or doing workshops. If you’re great on camera, you should get a webcam or have a friend hold a phone and record some things and start putting them on YouTube to see if people are attracted to your content. (What seems good in theory doesn’t always play well with a real audience; the only way to tell for sure whether something is going to be successful is to put it out there. But the great news is that what you have to offer could be a missing link, and the entire world could flock to what you have to say if it resonates at the right time.) Once you’ve determined what you’re already good at, build your platform from there. A platform is a huge thing, and it can be overwhelming to think about unless you break it down into manageable pieces. If you focus on just the part that comes most easily to you, you’ll find yourself building a lot of momentum. Then you can start thinking about things you’d like to do better—for example, maybe you’ve never been great at public speaking in the past, but you’d like to become more comfortable with it.
If you want to become a speaker and you aren’t one yet, how do you go about it? First, you want to figure out where your natural fit is. If you’ve written a business book for women, then women’s business associations would be the right place to start speaking. Of course, you don’t just wake up, pick up the phone, and call somebody, and they pay you ten grand to come speak. There are a lot of steps in the process, and it’s not rocket science. You have to figure out what’s unique, new, different, or better about your approach. Where is the public responding? Do a little platform building. Do some blogging. Do some article writing. See who writes back. See who comments on the blogs you’re posting. That will begin to give you an indication of where the market is, where you have market appeal. That’s where you should begin speaking. So if women respond, but they’re all retired women over sixty who are looking for second careers, then you should go to organizations that deal with older women who in business.
On the other hand, if you’re writing on a general business topic—let’s say marketing—and you just want to become a marketing speaker, there are thousands of them out there, so you’re going to have to find some way to distinguish yourself. You’ve got to figure out what about your approach is new, different, better, or more, and then start small. Start with venues near where you live. Call them up and say, “Hey, I’m a local speaker. I’d be happy to give this speech,” and see if you can even get a few bookings. At first, you’ll probably have to be willing to do it for free or for a very modest honorarium. If you get six to eight bookings in six months, you know you’re on to something. You can build from there.
Make it easy on yourself. I always tell people to start workshops in cities they would be going to in the next year anyway. Go visit you mom. My mom is in Chicago; okay, I’d give a seminar in Chicago. Do some marketing to let people know you’re going to be in that city, and then give up a day of your vacation to give a seminar if you get enough people to register. And if you don’t get enough people, either change your ticket or just go and have a nice time.
When you’re just starting out as an author or a speaker, it can be easy to believe the people at conferences who say things like, “You’re wonderful! This is going to be on Oprah. You’re amazing.” Who doesn’t like to do that? But the truth is, no matter how wonderful your book or your speaking event, your project isn’t going to go anywhere unless you have a finger on the pulse of the market. If you don’t have that, you shouldn’t call me, because no publisher is going to pick up your project if you can’t say who the target market is. If you want to make a consistent impression, you have to follow the market, and you personally have to determine where that is. I have a newsletter mailing list for the agency. We have more than five thousand people on it, and when I send out a blast, many of them pass it on. Before you know it, thirty thousand people know that we’re giving a webinar on building your platform. If you’re an author, you should build a mailing list of your own. Don’t buy one, because that’s not going to be a list that’s useful to you. Build a list of people who respond to your blog or people who write responses to one of your articles or come to your speaking events. This list has immense value, not only because you can contact those people about future events, but also because you can trade it with other people. You can offer to promote something on your list if someone else promotes your book or your event in exchange. There are a lot of other things to keep in mind when building your platform, but it all starts with developing your house list.