One of the really cool aspects of being able to publish on the web is that of reaching your audience directly, without the intervention of middlemen services. A lot of professionals, smart specialists have been able to craft their own media company from their own experience, and their skillset; how do they do this?

Well, we know that mindset is critically important, how we think of ourselves, how we picture who we are and what we do pretty well determines your outcomes. This is the reason all those gurus devote so much of their narratives towards this end; people such as Tony Robbins, as one striking example, have made their personal fortune by helping people with their mind set.

Many people know about Blogging, and they maybe have embarked on setting up a free account on one of the public blogging platforms, posted a few hastily composed posts, uploaded some stock photographs and kind of fizzled out; this is not what today’s content producers do!

We need to understand that online publishing, and content production has now reached a very sophisticated level.

In order to derive a maximum bang for our media buck we need to be considering ourselves as our own PR agents, media organisations. The question of setting up your media platform has been obscured by many urban myths, and guru hyperbole, the ever present ‘make money online’ business area puts a lot of potentially valuable people off the whole idea.

I completely understand this, because I too have been seduced by the allure of online entrepreneurship in the past. There is nothing quite like experience as a teacher.

For the many people who are not familiar with the WWW, its many layers of community, the dense jungle of intense communication and the many ‘coaches’ who continuously nag us to listen to them, it can be a bewildering task, trying to make sense of it all and separate the wheat from the chaff.

So, what do we need to be mindful of if we are going to approach this independent content producer path?

1. We need to understand the dynamic of directness. The web has given us a considerable shortcut, straight to the people we seek to reach. The big problem of media reach has always been the obstacle, in the previous publishing ‘paradigm’ we had the publishers, the exclusive ownership of the means to produce ‘media’, we had to be accepted and taken onboard these few publishing entities and then they would bring their powerful resources of marketing and representation and production; we became their product. The message is, we do not need to follow this path any longer, this is taking much longer than you would think, to sink in with a great many people.

Old habits and patterns of thinking take a long time to shift; we are told that change and progress is always with us, but the truth is quite different, people cling to beliefs and assumptions tenaciously!

The ‘legacy’ approaches to publishing persist in people’s minds, the idea that you have to submit your work to a publisher, and await the inevitable rejections is a very strong ‘tradition’ and people are taking a long time to understand they do not need to do this in order to get their work out, and in front of their audience. 

We are trained, and nurtured to respond to authority figures, in our education systems, our life’s journey is always directed by deferring to an authority; if you look at this in terms of publishing the cultural conditioning we are all immersed in does not favor being self directed, self sufficient, or self determining. We are always seeking affirmations, reassurances that we are doing the ‘right thing’. The WWW has changed all that.

This makes things much harder in one sense.

Freedom, and self direction can be very demanding. Suddenly we are cast adrift, with no paternal figure overarching our destiny. This is actually what people find most difficult, not the technical requirements, not the means to produce, it is this terrible responsibility we discover, the dread of being exposed and assessed purely on what we can produce.

Becoming an independent publisher of content is very hard work, make no mistake; the idea of being independent has a great appeal and it seems like the sexy choice, but once people are confronted by the abyss of ‘the market’, it can get frightening very quickly.

The means and the resources to produce our media, our content is not the problem, you might be seduced by the technical kit, the systems and software, the high energy marketing spiel of the gurus (Russell Brunson, Jeff Walker, Tony Robbins all to come mind here), you might be enthralled with the soft focus emotional allure of their communities, but this is never the real issue, you have to be able to generate your own audience and to connect with this directly; this is what they don’t tell you in the webinars and the glamorous launches.

What I am trying to do here is provide for you, the genuine story, the benefit of my involvement with web media, the insights I have gained from my own journey.

If you look me up on Google, using a search string such as: “Mike Gorman digital media”, or “Michael Gorman Australia Internet” you will find I appear on the page 1 results, with my website ‘Webstruct digital media for a noisy world’, my photographs, and some of my social media activity, I am linked with the field of the World Wide Web, because I have been working with it for 25 years. I don’t tell you this to big note myself, or to brag, or crow about my success, I am simply demonstrating that I have a credible voice, in a world so richly populated with hype and overstated claims of merit, my own identity and ‘presence’ on the medium is firmly established.

This is the big goal for us all, to craft our association with our chosen field, splice ourselves into the web, to gain an audience.

I can’t really express this any clearer, I think we are all living through extraordinary times, we have the huge opportunity to get our work out there, to serve our communities, to help others, to progress in a self directed way that was completely impossible to do only 30 years ago. We have become blase about a medium we don’t even fully comprehend.

If you have taken a look at the world of ‘blogging’ (a massively misunderstood word) and understood the true scale of what is happening, you will be interested with what I am working with here, I am helping talented, skilled people to build their own path, to learn more about the WWW, to craft their specific media, to build an audience and gain true independence, this is my goal and what I set out to do, your intentions and your goals are important to me, I am an enabler, my talents are with communication and technology, I like to be able to help you.

I hope this has provided some clarity, I know the complexities of web media can sometimes obscure the big picture, and it is an ongoing task to explain, I am going to keep explaining to people, I am going to persist in my ambition to help people in their ambitions to create their own media projects and build their reputations, their distinctive contributions.