Aside from taking the “Develop Your Audience” class (which you can still do, it’s all recorded–hint hint <g>), the best way is to start a blog and then point to that through the MPOW technique, developed by Internet marketing expert, Bonnie Dillabough. (Bonnie’s techniques snag more than a quarter of a million hits on her Yaktivate.com podcasting network–per month You can attend her Internet marketing classes for free on Saturdays; details here.)

MPOW stands for

Multiple Presences on the Web. First you have your focal point. If you’re a writer, make it a blog. If you’re a talker, make it a podcast. (More about this in my recent Publishing Coach Weekly article, “Are You a Writer or a Talker?“)

Then, you set about getting all sorts of links back to your blog or podcast. You put up articles at ezinearticles.com and other article directories. You comment on other people’s blogs. You start a Twitter account and get followers who would be interested in your message. You list your podcast in podcasting directories.

You make as many things point to your focal point as possible. And you keep adding good content to your blog/podcast on a consistent basis.

What this does is raise your rank in the search engines, enables people to find you, and if you do make a contact, say with a media person, when they google your name, it comes up with an impressive number of entries.

I just googled my name; 22,900 results. When I googled “publishing coach” one of my sites showed up in about half of the results on pages 1 and 2.

See what I mean about “multiple”? (I say this not to brag, but only to illustrate that it works.)

One more note about those results for my name: a good number of them are social network profiles. Another way to be “all over the Web.”

None of the things I mentioned cost anything, aside from the basics of having a web hosting company to host your site. You can get free software (audacity) to record your podcasts, so all you’d need is a microphone.

Over time, as you do these things, you begin to attract people who want to hear your message. Over time, you build your audience.

Did you notice I repeated something?

“Over time.”

As Bonnie Dillabough says often, “The Internet is not instant pudding.”

It does take time.

There are, however, ways to lessen the time it takes.

How to Lessen the Time

First, if you are very, very clear about your message, and you know it’s a message people want to hear, then you can build your audience quicker. (That’s what the Develop Your Audience class is all about. Listen to my interview with Russell Cox here.)

Second, you can use leverage. If you can get the media interested in you, or get interviewed by someone who has a large audience, that provides leverage and is probably both the fastest AND most cost-effective way.

So get to know the media. Sign up for helpareporterout.com, and you’ll get reports on what reporters and journalists are looking for–delivered to your email inbox–three times a day.

So those are my two tips: remember MPOW, and leverage what you do as much as possible.