The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 77 Degrees
I stumbled onto the power of the media Platform over 10 years ago. Like most things I’ve done, it was a complete accident. It’s only AFTER I stumbled onto it did I realize just how powerful it was.
At the time, I was knee deep in my first do-it-yourself internet business venture. I was selling the oboe reeds that my wife was making for oboe players all over the world.
Every Sunday, we’d sit down to write the newest issue of The Reed Report, our weekly email newsletter.
We’d usually put a short introductory article from my wife in there. Sometimes she’d talk about the oboe, but more often, she’d talk about our kids or dogs or some other crazy thing that was going on.
From there, we’d go into a “reed tip of the week,” maybe a quote or something, and then we’d have a reed package/special that we’d put together for the week. “Order two reeds this week and we’ll throw in some sort of extra bonus,” that’s how simple it was.
Now I don’t know how many oboists there are in the world, but there aren’t many. You might not even know what an oboe is. So maybe there are 10,000? I don’t know. But we built a list of oboists that was in the thousands, so we were talking to a lot of them. And we were talking to them every single week.
Now back then, I was a church musician. My first job out of college, a good job, maxed out at $31K per year. That got me thinking that perhaps the numbers of my chosen profession weren’t going to work out in my favor.
That’s what got me into business: a steady desire to eat well.
So for us all those years ago, that weekly newsletter was a godsend. Because we could depend on hundreds, even thousands of dollars to come in once that Platform email went out.
That was a LONG time ago. But I’ve never gotten over that feeling… the feeling of impacting people with words and ideas that prompt them to take action.
I’ve refined the approach to using a media Platform to attract clients and customers a lot since those early days. And in a day and age where attention is rare, ask yourself who YOU pay attention to. Then ask yourself why?
The next Platform Lab session begins next Tuesday. It’s a small group. It’s basically an entire business consulting session in SLOW motion. We work through everything required to create a Platform that works.
This is valuable if you have no Platform yet or if you have one that’s not pulling its weight.
It just so happens that we work through some of the very same thought processes required to create a business that works. Think that’s a coincidence? 🙂