Interested in Building Your Platform Online? Here’s Why It’s Important (Part One)

written by Vicky Lynch

At Guide My Brand we help entrepreneurs and authors secure publicity to help build their brand and establish them as thought leaders in their area of expertise online. Clients come to us in all the stages of building their online platform. We help clients who have thousands of social media followers, clients with established websites with 1.5 million unique visitors per month, and clients with email lists in the tens of thousands. We also help clients who are starting at square one. 

So why is establishing an online platform so important?

You have a built in audience for any product that you are launching. Most entrepreneurs or businesses will nurture an online presence so that they have a warm audience to market any upcoming products, projects or courses with. And while nurturing an active social presence definitely requires strategy and staying up to date on each channel’s algorithms and new features, the good news is that it’s work that can all be done anywhere from a smartphone. 

But remember, having a website and capturing emails is going to be just as important as establishing a social following. At the end of the day, your social followers don’t belong to you, but your email list does. 

Having an online presence helps you get earned media.  It used to be that if you were an expert, your publicist would pitch your credentials to a media list and they’d mostly base their decision on whether or not to have you one by looking at that (well and maybe a VHS tape that had been sent via snail mail.) 

These days, having an online presence – social media channels and followers that you nurture on a regular basis, online content, and a website with a blog that you keep updated with new content and backlinks can immediately legitimize your thought leadership to a producer. They don’t need to take your publicist’s word for it that you’re a big deal, they can trust your followers. Don’t worry, if you haven’t established a presence yet, your publicist can help you build it. 

Having an online presence helps you leverage media hits. Not only does your online presence help obtain media hits, but it also helps you leverage them to level-up your platform even more. Are you starting to see a pattern? Having an established platform online leads to capturing media attention, which leads to sharing that attention with your online audience (and your audience sharing it with others), which then leads to your platform growing. And then the cycle starts all over again. Your online platform and media hits compound on each other. 

Interested in establishing or building your online platform? We can help! Schedule a discovery call here to discuss your PR needs and goals.