Howard Stern Worked His Ass Off – You Need to Too

Howard worked his ass off to get where he is.  To achieve success, there are not many shortcuts.  There are however advances that have made building an audience more accessible to everyone.  There has never been more tools to build a personal brand than there are today. Networking, blogs, and social media sites have given you a multitude of platforms to communicate with millions of people.

It used to be that people with a new vision for radio were forced to bust their ass at crappy radio stations year in and year out, working their way up the ladder. The farther up the ladder they made it, the larger stations they worked for until they finally landed at a station with a signal strong enough to reach millions of people.

Howard Stern worked his ass off so that he could reach broader audiences, as defined by the ratings his show got and the strength of the signal blasting from the top of the radio station building.

This is no longer the only way to reach an audience or build a fan base. It’s not even the best way to do it anymore. The web has changed the game. In traditional forms of media, you had to pay your dues for years in order to break through and give people access to your ideas. Now, you can achieve a breakthrough nearly instantly.

Don’t mistake this for it being easy, its not easy, the key is that it immediately accessible.

Over the next few posts, we’ll compare some of the old school methods of reaching and audience with the ways you can start doing it today.

Books versus E-books

Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted to write a book, you pulled out your twenty-five-pound Smith Corona (that’s a typewriter), typed a hundred or so pages of your best work, made fifty photocopies of the manuscript, went to the library and found the addresses of the top publishing companies, mailed your manuscript to those companies, and then waited for your rejection letters.

People who want to establish their brand using the power of the written word have much more power today. Discussions are taking place about whether the publishers who held all the power ten or fifteen years ago even have a place in the future of publishing. Talk about a seismic shift.

In today’s world, you can write your book on a light-as-air laptop computer weighing less than three pounds, never once having to pull out the correction fluid to fix an errant keystroke. Once your book is complete, you have infinite ways to promote and sell your work.

In addition to promotion through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, you can post your e-book on Amazon and make it immediately available from the largest book retailer in the world, one that has a website instead of a real storefront and whose customers use pencil-thin book readers to purchase and download books, every second of every day.

Jamie Troia is President of Greystack Digital Marketing and author of Stern Rules!