Reach: How to Grow Your Influence

DIGITAL marketer Becky Robinson brings her years of experience together in Reach: Create the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause.

The key foundational principle is that reach—your ability to not only expand your audience but make a meaningful and enduring difference—is never static, and it is the product of your work and its impact over time.

All leaders need to think about reach in the way that Robinson describes it. We have ideas that we want to share that we hope will gain traction with our audience.

We tend to think of reach in terms of followers. If I have a lot of followers, I have a lot of reach. But there is more to it than that. Do your followers open your emails? Do your followers engage with and act on your content?

To create reach that expands and grows, we need to make four commitments: deliver value, longevity, consistency, and generosity. Before you make these commitments, you need to do some homework first. It is critical that you identify your intended audience. “If you have a great message but focus on an audience that doesn’t resonate with your work, you haven’t identified the right of complete audience.”

Value:

Focus on creating value. Knowing your audience will help you to focus your efforts on creating content that will provide value to them—practical content that will resonate with them. Share your experiences with your niche market.

Longevity:

Take a long-term view of your work. “To create lasting impact, you need to have a lasting presence. The longer you last, the greater the impact you will have.” Don’t give up too soon.

Consistency:

Consistency is not easy to achieve. You need to implement a sustainable approach that works for you. A consistent approach rewards people’s expectations of you. “When you are consistent about creating and adding value, you amass a body of work through your online presence that is credible, valuable, and useful to your online audiences. You become a treasured resource.”

Generosity:

“Making meaning and making a difference is impossible without a desire to give to others.” Giving away content does not undermine your business success. It actually helps to build it as it creates trust. Generosity also means supporting the work of others online, whether or not they reciprocate the favor.

Value, consistency, longevity, and generosity are all important as you seek to achieve reach. Without value, you have nothing to offer and no reason for people to pay attention to you. Generosity is the vehicle for delivering value. The more value you give away, the more you draw people’s interest and attention. Without consistency, it’s difficult to get traction. You may get attention when you launch but fail to create momentum that will help you get beyond your own networks. Without longevity, you may create impact for a moment then fade into obscurity.

Robinson delves into the nuts and bolts of expanding reach, from creating websites, repurposing content, writing a book, launching a campaign, to building email lists. Woven throughout all of that are the four commitments using relatable examples of others who have successfully built their reach.

While you may be familiar how these four commitments that Robinson presents in Reach apply offline as well, she has adroitly applied them to an online world where you can take advantage of them to create influence like never before.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 03:19 PM
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