Introducing the C.A.R.E. Platform Building Process for Writers

1. Create Value
2. Awareness
3. Relationship
4. Exchange
5. A + R = "Flirting"
6. R + E = "Wooing"
7. E + A = "Sharing The Love"
8. C + A + R + E = "Your Website Personal Publishing Portal (the nerve center for your platform)"

Each of these eight spheres will be featured, in order of appearance, for an entire week at a time, in each of the three phases of this series (Getting Started: weeks 1-8, Intermediate: weeks 9-17, and Advanced: weeks 18-24).

On Mondays, I'll post theme-specific objectives and principles that will provide a context for the more DIY, get-your-hands-dirty, how-to style resources I'll share in the remainder of the week. Since each week we'll be focusing on a different part of the C.A.R.E. Process diagram, the first eight weeks will provide a comprehensive roadmap for accomplishing the most foundational, beginner-level objectives listed below. Weeks 9-16 will cover the needs of writers with a medium-sized platform, and weeks 17-24 will feature advanced platform building topics that apply to growing and serving larger tribes of fans and friends.³ Keep reading for examples of specific topics I'll be covering in the first 8 weeks (although what I've listed below is in no way meant to be comprehensive). And check back often for additions...^‡

[INSTEAD: I'm going to strike when the iron is hot...write these posts when I'm feeling passionate, irrespective of their specific theme or role in the C.A.R.E. process; in other words, in no particular order.  The more I've thought about platform-building (and I've thought a lot about it over the last several years), the more clear it is to me that it's not a linear process. So, why I should I try to make it linear by imposing some kind of artificial schedule way in advance? Frankly, my life is too unpredictable right now for committing to long-term road maps—yours probably is, too—and anyway, the internet changes too fast to plan for anything more than a couple of weeks away. 'Nuff said.]

(1) Create Value

• Objectives: Know thyself, know thy tribe, and get excited about all the ways you're about to start improving people's lives—and yours—doing what you love, and building lasting relationships with like-minded folks.
• Principles: Everyone has a superpower. Find yours.^♥ Everyone has a tribe, and there exists at least one tribe that desparately needs you.^♥ Passion and hustle are the great equalizers.^♥
• Tools: Exercises for finding your superpower.^♥ How to find your people using tools from Google, Delicious, and Reddit, among others.^♥ Identify your best medium (aside from writing) in three simple steps.^♥
• Implementation: Separate your passions from mere passing interests.^♥ Combine your superpowers, your true passions, and your best medium into a killer core message, and use it to form a splinter cell apart from your larger tribe.^♥
• Outcome: Test your core message out on friends and influencers in your audience and measure how well it resonates.^♥ Hone your best material into a personal tagline you can use in your email signatures and on your website.^♥
• Next Steps: Identify any bottlenecks in your work-flow that made it difficult to complete this week's material.^♥

(2) Foster Awareness

• Objectives: Establish a presence on the most important Awareness platforms^† and bring yourself up to speed on the conversations, issues, lingo, and influential players in your community, as well as the tools used to participate.
• Principles: Don't wait to build a platform until you need one.^♥ The 80/20 Rule.^♥ Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.^♥ Know the platforms and communities favored by your audience.^♥ Seek first to understand, then to be understood.^♥ Minimize the number of inboxes you have to check.^♥ Minimize multi-tasking & embrace the awesome power of batch processing.^♥ Segment your tools by attention span.^♥
• Tools: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Delicious, Reddit, and community sites.^♥ Social media management and workflow tools including Hootsuite, Twitterlator Pro, and Seesmic Desktop.^♥
• Implementation: How to create a compelling profile on all key social media networks.^♥ How to identify the most important and active communities in your niche.^♥ Linking your social media outposts back to your personal basecamp: the power of self-selection.^♥ Finding and subscribing to the best Twitter lists, and then curating them to create your own.^♥ How to leverage Twitter search for realtime Awareness campaigns.^♥ Connecting your social networks together: the power of cross-pollenation.^♥
• Outcome: Develop your own daily / weekly (manageable) Awareness routine.^♥
• Next Steps: Refine your core message and tagline from week one, and then incorporate them into each of your social media profiles in platform-specific versions tailored to the particular tool.^♥

(3) Nurture Relationships

Since each week we'll be focusing on a different part of the C.A.R.E. Process diagram, the first eight weeks will provide a comprehensive roadmap for accomplishing the most foundational, beginner-level objectives listed below. Weeks 9-16 will cover the needs of writers with a medium-sized platform, and weeks 17-24 will feature advanced platform building O.P.T.I.O.N.S. that apply to growing and serving larger tribes of fans and friends.³

• Objectives: Build out a minimal set of personal publishing tools to start sharing your valuable content with people interested in joining your tribe.
• Principles: Parkinson's Law (work and its perceived importance inevitably expands in proportion to the time allotted to complete it).^♥ Don't get it perfect, get it done.^♥ Relationships are a two-way street.^♥ The market for meaning is infinite. ^♥
• Tools: Posterous, WordPress, Expression Engine: recommended personal publishing tools in order of increasing awesomeness.^♥
• Implementation: How to setup Posterous on a custom domain for quick and dirty email-based blogging.^♥ How to install WordPress on your own domain in about five minutes for very little money (and why you might not want to).^♥ How to obtain a best-in-class personal publishing portal, built on the power of Expression Engine.^♥
• Outcome: Pre-load your blog and/or website with a core of ten killer articles that address your tribe's biggest challenges and most insatiable desires (bonus points for structuring the articles into the framework of a larger story).^♥
• Next Steps: Either start educating yourself in the basic graphic design, web development technologies, copywriting, and multi-media production techniques you'll need to build a professional website, or start hunting for qualified experts you can hire to perform this work for you (list of recommended resources on the way).^♥

(4) Facilitate Exchanges

• Objectives: Identify the single most valuable asset you currently have to offer the members of your tribe, and then decide upon a single package for that asset that facilitates a frictionless win/win exchange, ideally involving money. Everything else you have to offer, give away without expectation or condition.
• Principles: True art is a gift.^♥ Money is but one of many valuable currencies.^♥ Attention is today's most valuable currency.^♥ Always give more value than you receive in your transactions.^♥ Don't ask, and you won't receive.^♥ Make it easy to do business with you.^♥ Most of the value in having a Platform is intangible.^♥
• Tools: PDF creation and conversion tools.^♥ Media sharing portals.^♥ PayPal.^♥
• Implementation: Start / Finish / Refine the bread-and-butter project you eventually intend to charge money for.^♥ Identify what your audience is already buying, and also look for pains they're suffering for which there is no current cure, that you could make go away with your appropriately packaged asset.^♥
• Outcome: Setup a donation button on your blog or website using PayPal.^♥
• Next Steps: If you don't already have a business checking account at your bank, get one now, because doing so will make your life much easier in weeks twelve and twenty (I'll show you what to look for).^♥

(5) "Flirting" For More Fans, Friends, & Followers

• Objectives: Develop an arsenal of tactics to turn heads, instill curiosity, and cause others to seek you out—and then automate them.
• Principles: Don't be boring, be interesting.^♥ Don't be afraid to be controversial.^♥ Don't be a wandering generality, be a meaningful specific.^♥ Be an authentic, but extreme version of yourself.^♥ Be unexpectedly helpful.^♥ Opposites attract, but birds of a feather stick together.^♥ Don't dilute your message.^♥
• Tools: Facebook Connect.^♥ RSS Feeds & Feedburner.^♥ Landing Pages.^♥
• Implementation: Facebook wall posts for platform building playas.^♥ Plugging Facebook into your website.^♥ Using Feedburner to enhance your RSS Feed.^♥ If you don't have a list, you don't really have a platform: how to get started, and what are the best tools.^♥
• Outcome: Get your first subscriber.^♥
• Next Steps: Setup Google Analytics to test for your conversion rate on your landing pages.^♥

(6) "Wooing" Your Tribe To Give A Little

• Objectives: Get your audience used to the idea of paying something in exchange for your most valuable content / services / products / art. And while you're at it filter out the "free-addicts," those people who enjoy collecting free stuff more than participating in your community or enjoying your stories.
• Principles: Force people to take at least one small action in exchange for premium content.^♥ Attach a sense of belonging to the act of buying.^♥ Publically recognize members of your tribe who support you.^♥
• Tools: eJunkie.^♥ Donate buttons.^♥ Recommend this forms.^♥
• Implementation: The proper use of member-only email lists.^♥ How to get a merchant account.^♥.
• Outcome: Get your first customer.^♥
• Next Steps: TBD.^♥

(7) "Sharing The Love" With Word Of Mouse

• Objectives: Make it easy to talk about and share your art / service / product / blog by building in incentives to do so.
• Principles: Under promise, over deliver.^♥ Make what you charge for a conversation starter.^♥ Make joining your tribe and buying your stuff potentially profitable.^♥
• Tools: Affiliate software.^♥ Embedded links.^♥ Surprise bonuses.^♥
• Implementation: TBA.^♥
• Next Steps: TBA.^♥

(8) "Your Personal Publishing Portal"

• Objectives: Your homebase on the web should be a digital version of you and your brand. This is where you have the most control over the attention of your audience. Make sure your best stuff is only availabe through your website, and don't provide unnecessary reasons for people to leave once they're there.
• Principles: Claim responsibility and ownership of your personal brand, your content, and the leadership of your tribe.^♥
• Tools: Posterous.^♥ Tumblr.^♥ Wordpress.^♥ Expression Engine.^♥
• Implementation: Bring your website up to par.^♥ Integrate your social media outposts into your homebase where appropriate.^♥ Create a seamless social media workflow that leverages your content production workflow.^♥
• Outcome: A website and social media workflow that helps you do more, with less effort.^♥
• Next Steps: TBA.^♥