October 19, 2017

People need your help more than you think

Here’s a thread from my private Slack community that I want you to really think about (shared with permission):

Student:

For those of you that guest post, do you make the ask in your initial message to the blog/influencer? Or do you ask for feedback? I’ve connected with this person on Twitter, and we’ve had a couple Twitter conversations, so I think she knows who I am. I’m so gun shy about the whole thing, I keep putting it off... but I know these people are friendly.

Jonathan:

This might help with the fear: Don’t think of it as asking them for a favor. Imagine that they are under deadline and are scrambling for a piece that their audience would enjoy and/or find useful.

Student:

I like the way you reframed it. It’s definitely fear. This is the one major thing I’ve procrastinated on because writing has always been my weakness. But I did finally just send a DM to the person with the ask.

9 minutes later...

Student:

I just got the response! She said: “This makes me incredibly happy!!!! I would love to check it out!!!”

Jonathan:

💥 💥 💥 💥 💥

If you believe that what you do is valuable or helpful or improves people’s lives in some way, you OWE IT TO THEM to make them aware of it.

If you aren’t sharing what you do with people, you might want to examine whether you actually believe it’s valuable to anyone.

As Alan Weiss often says:

“The first sale is to yourself.”

Yours,

—J

P.S. Incidentally, my student ended up landing a three-part series of guest posts on a blog that has 2.5 million subscribers from that Twitter DM that she was “gun shy” about sending.