6 Steps to Build the Opening Scenes of Your Romance Novel

August 4, 2016 by Lorna Faith

Planning and outlining any new romance story has a mixture of excitement and overwhelm for most romance writers.

You might wonder how to get started – what will expand that first idea you had for your new romance novel.

I was struggling with this too, until I starting asking myself what I liked most about reading romance novels. I realized it was the main character’s emotional journey – how they changed and grew that I find most compelling.

My favourite scenes when I read a romance novel, are the hero and heroine’s emotional character arc and how each of the main character’s change as a result of the romance relationship.

This focus on the deep emotional journey, is really what makes romance novels unique.

To expand that first spark of an idea into a focussed and captivating opening scene, there are 6 steps to take that will help you get a clear vision of the emotional journey your main characters need to go on to create a satisfying read.

6 steps to build the opening scenes

From Idea to Building a Framework for the Emotional Journey of Your Characters

Romance novels, because of the focus on the deep emotional journey each main character must go on, is a form of storytelling that isn’t really about the plot. It’s about the characters. It’s about how they respond in certain situations.

Something about the hero or heroine makes us as readers fall in love with them and connect with them on an emotional level. So how do we develop the opening scenes in a new romance that will captivate new readers?

Here’s 6 ideas that might help…

1.Explore and Expand a simple story idea that excites you and is as unique as you are. This is the fun part! You get to choose any type of story situation, type of character or setting – in any romance subgenre, time-frame or story world. And the great thing is all you need is a simple idea to get started.

Your goal here: to create a framework around your characters and the world they are in and then to give them the freedom to show their deep character traits, beliefs and growth within the borders of that framework. This is where you get to plan story like you’re playing in the sandbox…

I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm shoveling sand into a box so that later on I can build castles. Shannon Hale Share on X

To help expand your story idea, trying playing the “what if” game with your characters and situations. For example, a few months I ago I was browsing through old musicals on YouTube, and came across 7 Brides for 7 Brothers.

This sparked my imagination, and I asked myself: what if there were 7 brothers, whose parents had just died, and they moved to the foothills west of Calgary to start ranching? From there I had the idea to set the first book in this series of stand alone novels in the early 1900s. And the story has kindof taken a life of it’s own from there. So ask yourself your own what if questions. You might be surprised by the ideas you get 😉

2.Focus on only ONE Character to start with. Of course, there will be two main characters in any romance novel, but it’s helpful to start with the Main character. Many times, this is the heroine. If you ask yourself questions about what her background is and try to see the world through her eyes, step into her shoes and fall in love with the hero at the same time she does.

When you start with the heroine, you will get to the heart of your romance story as fast as possible. Dig deeper into the heroine’s personality and background, so that you know how she’ll act and react when the hero comes along and starts challenging her. Ask her soul search questions about how she sees the world around her and her place in the world. Ask her questions about her ordinary life, and about her dreams and about those things that she’s scared of.

It helps if you can find photos of actors/actresses, so you can see your characters ‘come to life.’ I did this as I’ve been writing this story in Scrivener – here’s a blogpost w/ screenshots of how I add pictures of characters and setting to inspire my writing. Having those pictures, has really me to imagine more details of what my characters look like.

3.Give your Main Character, one limiting belief that they need to overcome. As you start to dig into her background and how your heroine sees the world, you’ll start to what she fears and what holds her back from moving toward her dreams.

[Tweet “Internal conflict is the quality in the character that stops him from achieving real self worth.” Michael Hauge”]

As you look into your heroine’s past, choose one event which shapes the way she thinks about her life today. This is the wound she’s carrying and the source of her continuing pain.

It’s critical that the profile you create for your main character, is believable and understandable for your readers. The answers to the questions, will determine the decisions she’ll make during the story. It also, be a roadmap as to how her worldview will shift from the start to the finish of the story and how her romance with the hero will develop.

Give your heroine one main limiting belief – a wound from her past – that shapes how she lives her life today.

How does she stop that pain from happening again? By creating protective barriers, which creates the one rule she lives her life by – which is her limiting belief that becomes the major relationship barrier between the heroine and the hero.

As you develop the opening chapters of your story, it’s important to develop the internal conflict which will keep the heroine and the hero apart. As the characters enter the story, they will already have all these limiting beliefs in place, protecting themselves from pain. Then as the story continues, these limiting beliefs that the heroine has, will be challenged and overcome with the help of the hero.

In a romance, you need to especially dig deeper to understand the emotional internal conflicts – and often there are several layers to these beliefs – which you will show at the crisis points in the story.

4.Give Your Main Character ONE reason why she believes there’s she’s between a rock and a hard place when the story opens. Usually, this will be the one thing that your heroine wants at that moment, but feels that there’s no way she can accomplish it. Combine this frustrated dream that your heroine has, with the story idea to make your heroine come alive in that story situation.

It’s important in a romance, that the Heroine and Hero have a all-consuming short term goal as the story begins. It needs to be something that the reader can relate to and is easy to understand. And the stakes for reaching that goal, must be set high so that the reader is made to care about what happens.

When your readers sympathizes with your character and is empathetic to their situation and whether the main character reaches her goal, they will be drawn in to the story. This strong emotional appeal in romance stories, is what attracts readers of romance.

5.Create a Heroine or Hero who is going to challenge the main character and fall in love with who she/he really is.

It’s your main character who has the biggest character change throughout their journey in the story. Once you have a powerful belief for your main character, you can think about the other main character in this romance – your Hero.

As your story begins, you will have ‘big picture’ ideas of who your main characters are. You want to have just enough information about who your main characters are, to bring them off the page and into the story. You want them talking and challenging each other about what matters to them. The stronger the Heroine is, the stronger the hero needs to be. He needs to be equal to her in every way in order for the story to be compelling.

Also, if the Heroine has been betrayed in the past, the Hero needs to be really authentic and honest from the start. If you have one lie at the start of the story(unless there’s a powerful motivation), then the Heroine won’t trust him.

So, here’s where you brainstorm a few ways that your Hero will challenge the internal conflict that your Heroine is wearing as her armour.

6. Merge your story idea with your main character idea and get your main character onto the page and into the story world as soon as you can. This is a good place to try free writing. Just brainstorm and write down as many ideas as you can of how the story should go. Get the feel of whether this character is someone you really like and want to spend time with – for the next couple of weeks or months as you write the story. If you really like your main character, then develop them further after you’ve written your opening scenes. Of course, if you don’t like them – start from scratch or revise your character until you do like them.

It is here in your opening scenes, where you use your main character’s emotional conflict to sketch out the rest of the story.

When planning the critical opening scenes of your romance novel, use your main characters to drive the transformation, even though you haven’t written a word of the novel yet.

So, I hope you find these steps helpful as you begin your romance. Most of all, have fun brainstorming and sketching out your main characters and the setting of your romance novel. It is a little like playing in the sandbox 😉

What are your tips for writing the opening scenes for your romance? I’d love to hear your thoughts. It would be awesome to learn from each other!

022 How to Discover Your Calling with Jeff Goins

July 28, 2016 by Lorna Faith

Subscribe: iTunes | Android

I’m excited to share with you an interview I had with Jeff Goins. Jeff is an writer, speaker, a idea guy. His blog at goinswriter.com has had more than 4 million views since it started and he has helped many people in his writing and blogging online courses at tribewriters.com, intentionalblog.com and his newest online course artofworkbook.com. His podcast The Portfolio Life has so many great interviews with many creatives and thought leaders. In his newest book – a national bestseller – The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do Jeff shares what he’s learned about how to uncover what you were born to do.

In the podcast update I share some resources that I’ve found helpful. Books like James Scott Bell’s new book, The Mental Game of Writing: How to Overcome Obstacles, Stay Creative and Productive, and Free Your Mind for Success. Also, along a similar vein, Joanna Penn’s newest book, The Successful Author Mindset: A Handbook for Surviving the Writer’s Journey, is super helpful. Also, if you’ve been wanting to start your own self-hosted blog or transfer your blog to a WordPress website, I share in this post how you can do that right now for less than a cost of a latte per month.

Watch the Video Interview

Interview Summary…

“The lesson is clear. We can spend our days dreaming of a better life or do the messy work of getting started today. You are not just waiting on your calling; your calling is waiting on you. And you can sit around, playing the what-if game until you’re exhausted, or you can begin by saying that one little word that changes everything: let’s.” Jeff Goins

*Jeff Goins explores the meaning of the word calling: it’s the reason you were born; your life’s purpose; everyone has a calling – something that they were meant to do.

*He describes how many times we think a calling is something that you just know that you’re supposed to do.

Jeff takes a different approach. He believes a calling is what happens when everything goes wrong and you have to pull out of the wreckage of life circumstances. We all have things that go wrong sometimes.

What you pull from that mess is really what a calling is. It’s not the life we wish we could have had, it’s the life that we’re living right now as long as we can fully embrace it as it is.

[Tweet “Before I can tell my life what I want to do, I need to listen to my life telling me who I am.”]

*Most people think their calling is this thing they have to find, instead it’s the person you become – your true self. First you have to ask yourself who am I? The way you do that is by remembering what’s happened in your life. Pay attention to the themes – even in moments of pain or tragedy – that keep coming up in your life. It’s the art of listening to you life telling you who you are.

*He wrote this book and interviewed people, they all had pain – getting dumped, getting fired; having their spouse die – in the middle of the pain if they were able to redeem it and let go of what could have been and move forward, then they found their calling. People who dwell too much on the past or focus too much on the future can miss their calling.

Your past doesn’t dictate your future but it does inform it. If you’ve had a yearning or creative bent that you’ve never acted on that, then you should listen to that.

*It doesn’t always take a painful wake-up call to choose to follow your calling. But maybe that’s the wrong thing to focus on. The real question is are you willing to listen to the pain and disappointment and comfort in your life right now because it’s a part of life.

*As Jeff interviewed these people who found their calling, they experienced long seasons of failure. In order to only have a season of failure – you can learn and pivot along the way. The sting of failure of failure teaches you maybe there’s another way around it. So it’s not a question as to whether or not failure will come to you – because it does to all of us – it’s really a question of what you’re going to do with it when it arrives on your doorstep.

*Many people don’t find their calling until later in life. Like Jody, who saw all these people close to her die, who she helped them write letters to their children. Then her husband died and refused to write any letters. Her step-daughter asked her if her dad wrote a letter and was heartbroken when Jody told her that no he didn’t. So when her husband died, she felt like a failure. And she lived in that place for a year until she got a phone call from a lady who was dying of cancer who needed Jody’s help to write letters to her loved ones. When the family later called her and told her how much they appreciated these letters, Jody had an epiphany that there were two kinds of fears she needed to face. Failure, which was the bad fear. But the good fear – which was when she was afraid of not living out this calling in spite of the risks. At that moment, Jody said she was more afraid of not trying.

[Tweet “Most of us who attempt to do great things are shaking in our boots while we’re doing it.” Jeff Goins”]

*If we wait to feel unafraid to do the work we love, it’s never going to happen. Brave people have just learned to do it afraid.

*In Jeff’s book he mentions that the future is heading more and more into mastering a few skills that complement each other. The future belongs to people who can take a bunch of skills and combine them in interesting ways. This is what mastery is all about. Our culture is becoming more and more tolerant of this and it’s even becoming the norm. One study predicted that by the year 2020 over half of the work force will be freelance.

*To develop skills it’s not only about how many hours you work to develop your skill, but it’s important to remember it’s not always going to be easy and fun. The way you get to your ‘there’ is going to take some pain to get to the level of skill mastery.

*Your true calling, it is something you should be able to do to the point of exhaustion, then after a break, be excited to do it all over again.

To learn more about how to understand your calling read Jeff’s new release The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do.

Have you discovered your calling? I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this. Please share in the comments.

9 Simple Steps to Start a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog in Less than 15 Minutes

July 21, 2016 by Lorna Faith

It’s important to have a platform of your own to share your message and draw more readers to what you have to say. The best and simplest way to do that is to start your own self-hosted blog with WordPress.

With over 400 million people looking at blogs each month, it’s an amazing opportunity. Isn’t it time you took a chance and started your own blog? It has never been easier – or simpler – to connect with an audience and get your message heard… but are you joining in the conversation?

We all have something to say. Blogs not only make that possible, they make it simple to do.

Imagine if you had the chance to share what you’re passionate about with the world… what would you say? And better yet, what would happen if people read your words, actually listened?

Isn’t it time you started your blog?

Only you can choose yourself, take a risk and figure out what it takes to get your message heard and to watch as your causes spreads from one person to another, to another…

What have you got to lose if you don’t do this? Probably nothing. You’ll continue to get what you’ve had before. You’ll stay unheard and invisible. If you’re okay with that, then keep doing what you’re doing.

But if not, then it’s time for change…

Writing and blogging has made me who I am and can lead to amazing opportunities

I remember when I first started blogging in January 2012. It felt scary and risky, putting my thoughts out there into the world.

Alongside blogging, I started journalling almost everyday. Something happened. I started to see myself in a new light, my ideas forming clearly and developing and shifting to a whole new level.

So I started experimenting with ideas and started discovering what I was passionate about and soon learned what I loved – writing stories and helping others do the same – and I also learned what I was “meh” about 😉

Writing is Powerful

A blog is the easiest way for publishing ideas on the Internet for many other readers to see. It helps you get those ideas that you have in head, into the world, which in turn helps you to develop your ideas further.

I started blogging for fun 4 years ago. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but just wanted to share my ideas and what I was passionate about. Over time, my writing and passions have developed and I was able to begin to narrow my focus and understand what I loved to write and talk about and the way I really wanted to help others.

As you continue the habit of writing, it’s a super way to learn how to communicate, process your thoughts and it also helps you stay accountable to big plans and life changes, to build an audience and to understand the essence of who you are and the value you bring to the world.

Simply put, daily writing is one of the most powerful habits I’ve started and continue to do. It’s changed my world…

When I first started, I thought it would be super technical to set up a self-hosted blog. Surprisingly, it’s really easy to do. I do believe it’s worth investing a little money to be able to have full control over your website. I’m going to share with you screenshots of exactly what you need to do.

Here’s simple steps on how to make your own self-hosted WordPress blog in less than 15 minutes

In the screenshots below, I share what I wish I would have known when I first started blogging years ago. Seriously, it would have saved me a bunch of time and struggle. So I hope these steps help you to start blogging sooner.

Just a note before we begin: In this free tutorial, I share my affiliate link to Bluehost, which is a company I use for my websites and that I highly recommend that makes this process simple and easy. If you click the link to buy, I get a commission at no extra cost to you. Please know I only recommend products I use and love, and offering affiliate links is one way I can keep this blog going. Thank you ahead of time for your support 🙂

1. Click the green “Get Started Now” Button.

A web host, is where your website lives. You own it, but you pay a small fee to keep it online(sort of like paying property taxes to the government). In my experience, Bluehost gives you by far the best customer service and pricing of many of the hosting sites out there. They’ve also been a top recommended web host by WordPress since 2005.

I’ve set up screenshots to make this easy.

Click the green Get Started Now button at BlueHost to get started.

2. Purchase Your Hosting Package.

All you really need is the most basic option, which comes with a free domain(website address) of your choice. The only add-on you might want is Domain WHOIS Privacy ($9.95/yr), which keeps your personal information from being made public on your site. You don’t need any of the other add-ons or up-sells, such as Site Lock or Site Backup. All of those details can be sorted out much later. We want to keep this as simple as possible!

3. Pick your blog name(called URL or domain name).

This is part of the sign-up process with Bluehost. When you sign up for basic hosting, you get a website name for free.

I encourage you to keep it simple. Don’t put it off just because you can’t come up with a super amazing name. Using your first and last name(or something similar) works great… and might even be better if you don’t know what specific niche you’ll be focussing on. That way you’ll be able to blog about whatever topics you want to. Using your name can also allow the site to serve as a simple online resume… and it helps with your name’s google rankings 😉

On the next page enter the domain name that you’d like to use.

4. Fill out your contact details and payment information.

This part is easy. Just fill out the information – with your real details – so you can verify your account. In the screenshot below, you can see there’s extra options. I recommend you get the Domain Whois Privacy(to keep your contact details private), but don’t worry about the others.

5. Choose “I can do it”… if you’re wanting to follow these simple steps and install WordPress by yourself.

Of course, you can also ask Bluehost to install your website for you for a fee. This is the message you’ll see when you are inside Bluehost and you first get access to your cPanel.

6. Scroll down and find the icon called “Install WordPress.”

Blogging requires software, and the best I’ve found is WordPress. It’s easy, quick and best of all, it’s free. You can set up WordPress through your host(Bluehost does this for you for Free). Otherwise, you can go to WordPress.org to download the software and upload it to a host. Just a side note: Using WordPress.org is different than signing up for a free blog at WordPress.com. This infographic explains in more detail.

Click on “Install WordPress.”

7. The next screen asks you to write the name of your new website and add a username, password and email address.

Just fill out the details – your website name, your new admin username, your password(make this difficult for hackers), and then add your email. Click that you would like bluehost to automatically create a new database for this installation and click that you have read the terms and conditions.

After you’ve filled out your details, click “install now.”

8. Choose a WordPress Theme.

When you first start using WordPress, you get access to many beautiful blog designs(called “themes”), and many of those themes are free. If you’re just getting started and you want a free theme, I recommend Twenty Sixteen. It has a simple and elegant design. If you’re wanting a little more of a unique design – like this blog I use Beautiful Pro theme – you can find other themes at Studio Press by clicking here.

You can change your theme by going to Appearances in the Left Hand sidebar of BlueHost, and click themes. Up on the top you’ll find a tab called Install Themes, click on that link. Once you are there, you can use the search function to find a theme you like – from the thousands that are listed.

Or you can click install the theme design that you like best by clicking on install.

9. Log in and begin blogging.

Now you’re ready to begin to write on your own blog.

The URL for your dashboard(which redirects you to the login page if you’re not logged in) is yourblogname.com/wp-admin/. Once you are logged in, click “Posts” on the left hand side, and then choose “Add New.” Write a title and create some content for your new blog, and you’re ready to go!

That’s all there is to it. Now you’re blogging. This is really one of the best places where the difficult, but good work of writing begins.

What do you do if you already have a domain name?

If you already have a domain name registered with another service like Godaddy.com, but need a place to host it, there’s 2 things you can do:

1.Transfer the domain registration to Bluehost.

2.Change the name servers on your domain to point to your new host.

This video will show you how to do that:

If you’re ready to get started blogging with Bluehost, just click on the button below to get started 😉 They are a top recommended host by WordPress and have great customer service. I worked with them for a long time and have been very happy with the service.

Click Here to Get Started

If you want to share this with someone who would find it helpful, please do.

Do you have your own self-hosted blog? If you do, what do you love about it? If you don't, what questions do you have? Please share in the comments.

021 Blog Your Passion and Create Work that Matters with Jonathan Milligan

July 14, 2016 by Lorna Faith

Subscribe: iTunes | Android

Awhile back, I had a great chat with Jonathan Milligan. Jonathan is a husband, dad, career coach, blogger and podcaster and is passionate about helping people learn to blog and create products and grow their business online. You can find him at both of his websites, bloggingyourpassion.com and jonathanmilligan.com. Or you can connect with him on Facebook or Twitter.

If you ever feel like you’ve failed as you’ve started your writing business this interview with inspire you. In this chat, Jonathan shares honestly about how his failures helped him identify his passion for blogging and writing.

It was being involved in Jonathan’s Blogging Your Passion University that helped me get started and grow my blog 😉

Watch the Video Interview

Interview Summary…

*Jonathan shares his story. He started first as a High School Teacher – both his parents were teachers. He said he loves teaching and he is a learner at heart. He felt unsettled about 3 years into it. He wanted to use his desire to teach but wanted to explore another context. He decided not to renew his contract that was early in the spring after his 3rd year teaching. He didn’t have a plan… so he had the summer to figure it out. He had a wife and a young 2 year old. He landed a call summer job at night and during the day he explored his options – he wanted something in the entrepreneurial realm.

*After nine months he was fed up with just learning stuff, but was taking zero action. He says he got to the place where he was ready to go fail at something. For him the pain of not going after his dream was GREATER than trying something and failing at it. That led him to where he joined a startup entrepreneurial executive search firm, where he worked 100% commission – he did that for 7 years. This is what led Jonathan in to Blogging which is what he is doing today.

*Jonathan shares how discovering what he was passionate about – and what he wanted to blog about – kind of came over a period of time of discovery and considering his own gifts and where he felt he could contribute. He saw blogging as an opportunity to help people… and its also where he discovered he had a passion for writing. In college, when he took a persuasive writing class, he had a professor who discouraged his writing so he gave up on that dream for awhile. So blogging was a way to explore his passion for writing again.

*Jonathan talks a little about his new work in progress, The Gift. In his book the story of Mack – he is frustrated with his work and starts on a journey to discover his gifts. He says he spent 7 years as an executive recruiter …sitting down with 10 people a week who were stress out, that their work didn’t matter,… so Jonathan figured out from talking to these people that there were 4 primary areas that people were seeking help with.

*He wants others to understand that you are more than just a set of letters from a test or a personality group – you are very unique. In the story(The Gift), Mack is very frustrated with his work, and he goes through this process of discovery. Unexpectedly a piece of mail comes from his Grandfather who invites him out to Idaho… which will start to change his perspective. Long story short, he learns how to look inward and begin to mine for diamonds on the inside of him and in the process he’ll learn some important things about himself.

*He says many of the young people now are making choices for what they think are stable careers – but usually are not or the other option they choose is what will make them the most money. They end up getting their 2 car payments and house in the suburbs only to do all this work with people they don’t really enjoy and doing work they don’t really enjoy – to hopefully have weekends and a couple weeks a year to do what they want. But the good news is that now there’s more opportunities than ever doing something online. To use their gifts to help others and get paid to do it.

*In 2010 he’d been blogging for about a year and had about 1,000 people following his blog at the time and 500 people on his email list. He wanted to create a product. He’d explored a couple of ways to earn income on his blog. One was as a career coach ….and he also did resume help. But those were both trading time for dollars. So he decided he wanted to somehow use his expertise in a way that was more scalable.

*That’s what led him to create the course Job Search Mastermind which was a 18 week course that gave people everything he knew about Job Search from the beginning of designing your resume to negotiating your salary. Jonathan said he felt overwhelmed with thoughts of am I going to create this 18 week course and nobody buys it? If that happened, that would be a complete waste of my time. So he decided to release the course 1 Module at a time. He said at the time of launch he had only created 2 weeks of videos. Launched it and the opening weekend he had 15 people who purchased it… and 2 were from Australia. The people didn’t know that the entire course wasn’t finished when they purchased it. So he competed it. And was able to earn income from that course for a few years, without needing to add anything to it.

*Jonathan says he felt like a failure many times during this journey. The first time was when he worked nights at the call centre and he had a family to support and it seemed like he was sort of in that no man’s land wandering about the direction of his life. The second time was when he allowed a distraction to come into his building an online business.

*When bloggers/writers build an online business we often overestimate the short term and under estimate the long term. He decided to start Adsense on his blog so he explored it further and started setting up niche sites on topics that he wasn’t passionate about just because they were reported to be good Adsense earners. So he found himself completely scattered. And it wasn’t true to what he started out with – which was providing value and making impact on people’s lives. So he ended up selling those websites.

*Productivity Tips: Jonathan starts the night before writing his ‘to-do’ list. He uses Nozbe.com for his manager. And he starts in the morning with what he needs to get done that day and assigns a time to each of the tasks. He says over time he’s learned to add more time than he originally thinks each task will take. His mantra which has helped him be productive is “Do Creative work first; reactive work second.” Because otherwise we can get sucked into the latest happenings on social media, or reading the news or other distractions when what we really need to do is focus. He considers creative work to be anything that’s related to text, audio or video that he’s creating. When he focuses on that in the morning – he has more energy to get it done then in the afternoon when his willpower and battery power is lower.

*Step 1 for Creative Entrepreneurs is to accept the fact that you’ll never get everything done. We’ll never say “I’m done and I don’t have anything else to do today.” And we have to be ok with that. ..because we’re full of ideas. What we need more than anything is to narrow it down and focus on what we need to get done. Jonathan says the best advice he’s ever received is Clarity comes from movement– he says he needed to hear that because he’s a learner but what happens is that learners don’t take action right away. He says stop trying to get all your ducks in a row before you take action. The second piece of great advice he first read in Jon Acuff’s book Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work That Matters. He said he learned from reading that book, to be a scientist – because scientists don’t fail they experiment. This will get you unstuck from the procrastination trap and get you moving into getting started and believing you can improve it along the way.

*For everyone who wants to get their message out there – Jonathan recommends a home base. Even if you’re not a writer you still need a place where they can come back from social media to your website. So you need some information there. There are many different ways of getting what you have to say out there like Blogging, Podcasting, Vlogging or Videos.

*Realize that your audience learns in 3 ways: either Text, audio or Video. We’ve been moving away from the early Internet days of Attention Marketing (flashy big income claims) – and now we’re moving rapidly into teach and serve marketing. Providing helpful tips and producing a podcast/video for your audience, investing in them to the point where they would like to purchase products and services you have because they know, like and trust you. Jonathan encourages people to get started sooner than later in sharing your passion. As you move it will help you get a better understanding of your strengths and what resonates with people.

*If you feel you don’t have the courage to put yourself out there or you feel like you’re not good enough, check out this blogpost by Jonathan. Remember we’re all on a journey and you can’t improve until you start. You don’t have to have everything figured out. You can be a Leading Learner who is someone who has learned some things that they’re willing to share with others. You can help people where you are at right now.

*Check out Jonathan’s website for the free 30 Day Launch Guide on how to start a Mastermind Group.

Have you found ways to follow your passion and get your message out there into the world? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

*Some of the above links are affiliate links and help to support this blog

*Photo credit: Jonathan Milligan

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