I don’t need a million followers. I need a hundred good conversations.
Cath Reohorn runs Kind Copy and writes Follower to Client, which is about exactly what it sounds like. She had me on this week to ask what’s working for me right now. I went in thinking we’d talk about marketing. We mostly talked about being a person.
Two things from the conversation are worth pulling out if you don’t have time for the video.
Most of us are running islands. For years I had a podcast with its own audience, this newsletter with its own audience, and a business with its own clients. Each one needed its own marketing, and almost nobody who knew one knew the others. Cath sees the same thing with the coaches she writes for. They add a blog, then a podcast, then a YouTube channel, and end up with what she called a set of islands with no bridges between them.
What finally connected mine was a book. The Lid started as four essays here. The stories in it come from nearly ten years of podcast interviews. The thread running through it is my own business. For the first time, everything I do sits in one place, and I can talk about one thing and have it lead to the other three. I didn’t plan that. But if you’ve been making things for a long time and none of it seems to add up, a single piece of work that draws on all of it might be your bridge too. It doesn’t have to be a book.
I’d rather reach a hundred people and hear from ten. Every tool we have now makes it easy to reach more people faster. I could scrape a list and email a million strangers and probably land one. I don’t want to email a million people to get one. In my day job we send maybe ten emails a day, because each one takes real research on the person receiving it. It’s slow. It’s also the only kind of email I answer myself.
On the day the book came out, a man I’d never met read the sample chapter, ordered five copies for his office, and wrote to tell me why. That one email was worth more than any amount of reach, and it happened because what he read sounded like a person and not a campaign.
We also got into whether everyone should write a book now that the tools make it easy. My answer is yes, if there’s a point of view in it that’s yours. Making the thing is getting cheap. Having something to say isn’t.
The full conversation is above. Cath is a sharp interviewer and a good follow: Follower to Client.
If you want the first chapter of The Lid, it’s free at thelidbook.com.
