The Complete Entrepreneur

I’ve got a great post for you today from my friend, Pete Williams. Check it out…

Guest Post By Pete Williams

One of the best ways to get yourself seen and recognized in your online market is to “stand on the shoulders of giants” as I like to say.

That means leveraging the celebrity and communities of people in related fields that have already done the work to build their rankings.

By partnering with these types, not only do you get nearly instant high-level exposure, but you also get added credibility when being represented by these giants.

Of course there’s a problem with this. Many entrepreneurs suffer from what I call “giant anxiety.” They worry about how they can even approach a guru in their niche, much less the chance to interview them or have them host some of their content.

Well, that’s a legitimate concern. And everyone feels it at some time or another. Even me.

Most important… Get Started

I do a weekly podcast with my partner Dom Goucher. Today we often chat with some of the biggest names in the online and offline business world.

Thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs now download our interviews and listen to them every week. But it wasn’t always like this.

When we started, we had no one to talk to.

We literally did our first 30 or so weeks of podcasts just talking to each other before we got our first guest. And that first guest was a friend of ours.

Now for some, reaching out to a celebrity in their niche is not really a problem. Some people can just walk right up to their hero and ask for an interview. (And getting shot down has no effect on them.)

But for the majority of entrepreneurs, it can be a bit of a barrier to overcome. Not to worry. I’ve got an alternative to share with you that will get you the same net effect, without the anxiety of that celebrity contact.

I call it platform leverage.

Rather than focusing on the communities that experts have built, simply go to the communities that technology has created. Places where everyone goes in search of valuable content. These platforms are ranked enormously high and get literally millions of hits every day.

This puts your content right in the middle of all the traffic you want. And that’s an important advantage.

Think about Nike

When Nike first started out, they began by working to build their brand and make great shoes. To get their name known, to get the offline equivalent of first page rankings on Google, they used a similar strategy. But they did it by reaching out to already established shoe outlets. Places where customers were already looking for athletic shoes.

The one thing they didn’t do, was try to build their own major shoe outlet and then attract customers to them. That’s the equivalent of what entrepreneurs online are doing every day.

Instead, Nike put their shoes – the value they created – out where the customers were already going. (Eventually they did create the NikeTown franchise, but by the time they did, people were lining up to get in…)

Today most entrepreneurs are trying to do too much themselves. They are trying to create their products, build their brands, and then on top of it all, build a platform that

Think about this. Where will more eyeballs potentially find your blog?

Under your own obscure, just purchased domain? Or on a site where tens of thousands of people already go looking for new content every day?

These platforms are all out there. And they’re inviting you in free of charge. Sites like Amazon, Kindle, iTunes, Newsstand, and many more. All of them draw enormous crowds for the media that they offer their visitors. All of them spend literally millions of dollars to attract that traffic to their platfroms.

Why not put that to work for you?

So here’s today’s action step: Find one platform that you can contribute to regularly. And then get busy posting every week.

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