The World Is Right Outside.
In the short time since Words And Things launched, it’s been visited by people in twenty-five countries. This doesn’t include my email subscribers (they get the full posts in email, so they don’t often visit the site). This is without putting a single dime into any promotion. All I have done is write, shoot, and share online. I created content that resonated with me and, if the numbers are to be believed, is beginning to resonate with others.
The moral of the story? If given a chance, ideas can resonate around the world but, some requirements have to be met before that resonance is possible.
What you create has to be authentic to your experience. The hardest thing to do as an individual is be convincingly fake longterm. You can pull it off for a while but, at some point, you will be exposed. Make things you can explain, justify, and defend in perpetuity.
You have to strive for quality. Note that I said strive. Your audience doesn’t need you to be perfect from jump. But they do demand that you are headed in that direction. If what you create is consistently low quality (however you and your audience measure such things) they will leave. We now live in a world where we buy unfinished products and get excited for upgrades and patches; our phones, tablets, and computers are perfect examples of this. Start decent and get better. Your audience will follow you to the bitter end if you do.
Kill your darlings. Everything you love will not work. That chapter, that verse, that photo, that scene may need to be cut to save the larger project. I rarely write a first paragraph that sees the light of day, and some of them have been BARS, but if they don’t fit into the grand scheme let them go. Cut the fat and save the meat.
And lastly, build first, monetize second. I have a sense of how I ultimately want to capitalize on Words And Things but now isn’t the time. I want to sell prints again, I want to create exclusive content. I want to sell LightRoom presets, but I have to build the walls before I can hang the decorations. There are donate buttons all over the site if someone is so inclined but that is a very soft sell. I’m fortunate that I can fund the site on my own. [Sidenote: When we talk about funding it’s not just the financial cost of the URL, the hosting, and the email campaigns. It includes the time spent writing, shooting, and editing the content. Just because there isn’t money coming out of your pocket for these things doesn’t mean that it doesn’t cost.] It may be difficult, but funding may have to come from sources outside of selling your creations at the start. Actually, I can almost guarantee that funding will have to come from elsewhere when you start.
It sounds like a lot because it is. But there is an audience that is spread out all around the globe waiting on you to start making the thing, even if they don’t know that thing exists yet.
