Build Your Platform: How to Show Youre the Right Person for Any Job .

正文如下

We all deal with the problem of needing to build support for our ideas. Maybe youre trying to sell your boss on a new program, maybe youre trying to get a loan or grant to start a small Business or to undertake a research project, or maybe youre just trying to get a job. What do you have to do to convince your audience, whoever they are, that youre ready and able to handle whatevers thrown at you?

Writers face this all the time. In publishing, the quality of the writing alone rarely speaks for itself. Publishers need some assurance that a new title will sell, and alas, that involves far more than just whether a book is any good or not. Readers dont know a book is good until theyve read it, which means quality doesnt play much of a role in getting them to read something. Instead, readers choices are made on the basis of perceived expertise, name-recognition, and familiarity the same factors we use to make most of our other decisions in life.

In publishing, the combination of all these factors is referred to as an authors platform. In Bill OHanlons book Write is a Verb OHanlon (author of 28 books)describes the following elements or planks that are part of a writers platform:

1. credibility
2. marketing abilities
3. marketing channels
4. mass media presence
5. media abilities and experience
6. track record in publishing
7. celebrity
8. reputation
9. unique topic or slant
10. borrowed planks

While not all of these apply beyond the publishing world, with a little tweaking we can adapt OHanlons description to just about any situation where you need to show others that you are capable of taking on a task or project.

The Planks of Your Platform

How Big is Your Platform?

As you think through this list, consider how your own experience and life details can be described in a way that contributes to your platform.  How can you describe your own experiences in a way that shows how credible, well-connected, successful, or unique you are?

Consider, too, the gaps in your platform what can you do to add planks that arent already there, or build up the ones that arent particularly strong? Its not necessary to have every plank above most people do well without celebrity, for example, and those with celebrity often do well without many of the others but the more planks you have, and the stronger they are, the more likely others are to see you as someone they can trust to get the job done.

And that means they are more likely to support you, whether by hiring you, promoting you, putting you in charge of a big project, offering you a contract, buying your product, investing in your Business, or whatever. In the end, this is about confidence give people a reason (or many reasons) to have confidence in you, and leverage that confidence to do the things you want to do.