DYFConf Notes: Sarah Bray – Share Better — A People Gathering Strategy For The Rest Of Us

Content I like has inverse relationship to content that added value to people on the internet.

Content either funny sometimes, informative sometimes. Haphazardly doing it.

Wrote a book: Gather the People. Decided to build a business around her book. Built a business that could sustain itself. Recurring income. Especially important when focusing on the next thing.

  • Grow faster than you shrink
  • Remain true to who I am
  • Simple to keep doing over the long-term. Like to experiment with multiple ideas. Two hard things about keeping things simple. We think these things are disjointed and are in conflict

    • Doing work for the client
    • Getting client to care about it
  • After you spend a ton of time in isolation building something, you ship it, and get results that you did not expect or hope for

    **Mental shift: **creating our work with people rather than for people

    share what you did, learned, made discovered. Sharing what you learned always worked.

    Remain true to who I am

    Your strength might be writing, it might be spontaneous talking.

    Sarah was told she wasn’t as persuasive in talking than she was at her writing. Stick to your magic

    Easy to get caught up in new platforms: podcasts, periscope. What platform will let me use my magic? What will induce that spark?

    Writing what is true to you.

    Grow faster than you shrink

    When you start to have any success with a product this is the key.

    When we think about growth, we think about **being out there more. **More podcast appearances, buffer, new tools, more articles. MOAR EVERYTHING

    Instead focus on making the next small thing. The next small thing that will impact your business.

    **Announce what you are doing and invite people to participate. **Do this before you’ve even made the landing page.

    Help them create their first victory moment.

    Share every small thing that you’ve discovered as you’re building the thing. Listen and watch what people are doing in reaction to the thing you’re building. Radio silence means something isn’t working.

    People don’t enjoy following business accounts.

    Share that energizes her and utilizes her gifts.

    Used this same approach for her clients at Small Nation. There are stuff you’re doing behind the scenes that you can share with your clients and your audience.

    Has there been any negative reaction from clients from sharing things happening behind the scenes?

    Talk with the clients first, give them a heads up if there is any hesitation regarding the content needing to be kept private.

    Further Reading:

  • Gather the People (some points from the preview)

    • “Because of the collaborative, community-driven nature of my approach, I used to describe it as building a nation.”
    • The brand that people adore, the website, the story, the top rated blog, the social media strategy, the products, the mailing lists all can make an impressive nation
    • A nation is people
    • Story about Waterside :(
    • “Focus on the people who that big vision is for”
    • “The process of collaborative creation led us to new and wonderful discoveries and took us down paths that were previously invisible to us”
    • two things hard about creative work: doing the work and getting people to care about it
    • We have to be willing to fail if we are to take the creative risks necessary to produce truly great work.
    • Kai Davis’s Notes on Sarah’s Talk
  • Site: https://gatherthepeople.com/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/sarahjbray