The Only Way to Spread Your Story is to Tell It to Everyone, Anywhere
Thoughts on why it makes sense to republish content 10 times, and travel to 25 countries per year.
Still at the beginning of my journey, I’ve had the pleasure to work on multiple great projects. Always re-learning that in the early days it takes a lot of pushing and scrubbing to get anything moving. Especially the word.
Absolutely no one else cares about you or your project before it succeeds.
Once big and famous, everyone wants to use your shine to get some glory.
But that is not what happens at the start!
First, one needs to do the work manually, and hustle their way to the top.
And there are two actions that have seemed to work the best for me, so far…
1. Generate a lot of content and spread it everywhere.
You must’ve heard it thousands of times that content is king. The reality is that sharing it is the god, and together they generate awesome results.
It is not just any type of content, tho.
For SEO purposes or as a clickbait writing 5 random articles per day might work. And same goes for posting inspirational quotes and getting likes under them. But this is not content people would love to consume. It’s just spam or a turd in a gift wrap.
I mean meaningful content. Perhaps teaching people how to do something useful like a post on luggage packing for a long trip. Explaining why you did something in a specific way, e.g. the story behind the design of your new website. Or revealing some new elements to your offering, such as new speakers and their topics at the conference.
But do not think too much about it, as there’s always something to write, film or picture-worthy happening. (Or if there’s not then think twice whether your offering makes sense)
The more important aspect, however, is often overlooked.
And this is the distribution of the content. As it is not enough to just post something on Facebook or send as a newsletter. Especially when doing it just once.
So my experience shows that make a list of all platforms, mediums, forums etc (at least twenty or more) and push every single piece of your content to all of them. While of course paying a bit to give it a nudge in some places, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.
PS! Don’t fear to re-post stuff. I’ve sometimes done that 4 times a day and it works marvellously. As people don’t scroll through all of the feed AND platforms don’t show everything to everyone.
That’s how we managed to raise over €500k in three rounds of crowdfunding without a lead investor with Shipitwise. We just posted a lot of stuff everywhere!
Better yet, try to generate some bigger stories and offer yourself to speak on those subjects at conferences or try to package ’em as press releases and send it to every journalist you know.
Just do more!
And obviously, at some point, you’ll know that some places or contacts don’t make sense. Thus being able to weed out the underperforming activities, and focus on those that work the most.
But don’t just focus on the stuff that scales.
At least not before you are big enough for others to come asking for stories from you…
2. Stop going to the same meetups and go travelling!
Something that works even better than distributing lots and lots of content is travelling.
At first, just going to every conference and expo there is.
But over time, starting to choose the ones that make more sense. However, without going to all of them once you’ll not know which ones work…
Because regardless of the amount of content you spread, your message won’t spread internationally before you’ll be BIG or just get LUCKY.
Thus it makes sense to be everywhere, telling the same stories over and over again, hoping someone hears you.
That’s how we managed to open 15 franchises, over 5 continents, for Robotex in less than 12 months without any prior contacts in most of these countries.
Meanwhile, I know that a mistake early stage companies do is not planning such costs into their budget. Thinking they can first become successful and then start travelling. But that is wrong!
The only way you’ll get successful, internationally, is by starting out as an international company, being everywhere.
