Be the Gateway: A Practical Guide to Sharing Your Creative Work and Engaging an Audience by Dan Blank

Author:Dan Blank [Blank, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: WeGrowMedia
Published: 2017-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

Befriend Guides

Now that you better understand the landscape and paths, it’s time to find some guides—the people who can help direct other people toward your path. These are the individuals who have already engaged an audience similar to the one you want for your work. Their own work embodies similar things that yours does. For instance, if you wrote music, the guide would say, “Oh, I see you love MUSICIAN X; then you have to listen to MUSICIAN Y.”

This work is different from finding comps because it is focused on the creators themselves, not just the creative work. This is the step that too many creative professionals miss. When someone wants to climb a big mountain, they likely prepare for months or years by studying maps, collecting equipment, and honing their climbing skills. While in many ways, they could be experts on that mountain, they may also hire guides to accompany them. These guides lead the climbers through aspects of the climb that you can’t understand just by doing research.

For your creative work, you don’t just want to have a map of your marketplace, you want to befriend those who have deep experience within it. Why? Because these people act like gravity to those you hope to engage with. They pull people closer to them with their work, their messaging, their events, and their network of colleagues.

You can think of this as market research, but it is squarely focused on people, the creative work itself.

1. Identify Mid-Level Doers

In the previous chapter, we discussed finding landmarks that your ideal audience knows. In some cases, this may include “classics” in your field. But now we want to turn our attention to what I call mid-level doers—those creative professionals who are mid-career, have found a sustainable way to focus on their creative work, and are a healthy mixture of aspirational and accessible.

•Aspirational. You aspire to be able to do what they do not just in terms of the work itself, but the lifestyle they get to live, or the validation they have received from others.

•Accessible. They are big enough to matter, but not so big that you can’t connect with them. These are people whom you could reasonably receive a reply from if you email them. If you tried to meet them at an event they were holding, you would be able to do so.

Mid-level doers are those in your field who are showing up every day to create more work and connect with more people. If you want to see practical examples of how others define their creative work, craft messaging around it, and identify their audience, then connecting with mid-level doers is your best bet to find out. What I find is that mid-level doers are an under-appreciated resource in any creative field. You can begin with the comps you identified in the previous chapters—the people doing work similar to yours, but who have achieved a point of sustainability in their career. Don’t treat other creators as “competition.” View them instead

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