Connecting Others and Building Communities: Part of the ItStartsWith.Us Mission

April 25th, 2009 by Nate

Photo Credit: Remon Rijper

One of the things I’m very excited about doing with ItStartsWith.Us is giving people a larger platform from which to broadcast their ideas.

I’m online much of the day both for my job and as a result of my freelance projects. Whenever I come across an interesting article on a blog , I’ll set a reminder to myself to follow up and read another article in a week or two. If that article or the in-between posts are also of high quality, I’ll usually subscribe to their blog so I can get their future posts directly in my email.

In doing this for a while, I’ve come to realize something: there are a ton of people out there with amazing ideas, incredible stories, and great work ethics . . . who rarely get their voices heard. At least online, anyway. It depresses me a little bit when I find myself energized and uplifted by someone’s message, and then I go check their web traffic stats, and realize that they’ve had all of 17 visitors in the last month.

While disheartening, this is also quite understandable. For the most part, these are people who have a full-time job, and then they also have something they’re passionate about, which they work on during their free time. Usually for people like this, having a personal blog accomplishes two things: it helps them keep a record of all the stuff they’re doing, and it’s a way to keep friends, family, and the occasional web visitor updated as to what’s going on. They don’t have the time, inclination or knowledge to promote and market their site and build a large community around it. Their online message may just fizzle and die after a few clicks, instead of building awareness, gaining momentum, and having the global impact it deserves.

As I said, I’m not knocking them – they’re doing great work, and because of that, they don’t have the time to market themselves online.

But I do.

I’m going to be devoting my time to providing great content and building a strong community around ItStartsWith.Us, so as time goes on, every article that I post on this site will have a larger and larger viewership. I want to use that “attention capital” wisely, so I’m going to focus my readers’ attention on those people who have a great message, but maybe not a large platform from which to deliver it.

I’ll do my best to give a good summary of each person, along with the reasons I think they’re important people to listen to, and I’ll highlight some of their key messages. If you like what you see, become a part of that person’s community. Bloggers love it when you read, respond and interact with them. It’s a big reason why they do what they do.

Connecting people who share a common vision and generating awareness of important messages are two of the biggest reasons I built this site. I’m looking forward to helping others build a community around the ideas that they are passionate about.

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