Many of you are great creative thinkers when it comes to web, social media, and viral marketing. I would love to hear your ideas.

Now that my business is running well and my kids are no longer babies, I am able to return to my past passion for endurance running challenges/races. In fact, I plan to incorporate this element of my personality in to both my entertainment (to a degree) and my speaking (mostly the re-branding of my speaking) gigs.

I`m working my way back into ultra-marathon racing and have a 50 mile running race coming up at the end of October. I`ve been keeping to marathons the last couple of years so this is the next step. I plan to work up to 100 km or even 100 mile races in the next 1-2 years.

I wonder if you have any ideas on how to harness this training I`ve been doing and create some sort of interesting blog, video updates, news releases, website, social media campaign or similar for attracting interest in my personal challenges. Ultimately, I would want it to create some public visibility for me.

So...any interesting ideas...? I would love to hear your creative thoughts!

Two things:

First, since you are doing motivational speaking, you might want to find some way to motivate/create challenges for others over the internet. This will make it so that your viewers aren't just keeping up with you; they have some sort of personal reason to keep checking back into your site. Make it interactive.

Second, a lot of people can run or do other sort of endurance activities. I'm not sure how well you could stand out if you don't already. Maybe as a way to stand out you can raise money for some sort of charity and try to make it as public as possible. That way the people who hire you to speak are hiring a known figure.

Hey Scott, a few thoughts,

Honestly, I think video is over done for the most part. Everybody does it simply because they feel
everybody is doing it therefore it must be the right thing to do. For most magicians, the worst
thing you can do is put a video on your website. It can work against you just as easy as it can help you.
A video better be perfect, and most are not.

But I see you being more a speaker than a magic man, no question in my mind you can do video well.
Still, I would say your main focus should be on a blog.

Preparing to run 50/100 miles would make an interesting blog I think. Running is a lot mental, especially
a marathon, and I would think that your thoughts and true feelings could be captured in writing better than
on video. So I say go with a blog for certain.

Like they say, the best way to get to where you're going is to see where you've been. So a training diary
for a runner is very important. Training diaries can be a very personal thing, so I don't think a public blog
should be a private diary, but bits and pieces from a diary could make some very good blog articles.
Then too, it can easily be turned into a book later.

Social media, video, and sites become old news fast and nobody really likes reading old newspapers.
But diaries just get better with age.

Scott, as a distance runner in training, you have a unique and interesting story to tell.
You have an opportunity to prove that the journey really is more important than the destination.
You can, AND WILL BE, an inspiration to many. It's just a matter of finding that self development,
goal seeking audience. And you do that one person at a time.

Tom

Thanks guys.

Finding the story is the important part I agree. Referring about a lot of people doing endurance actives, I joked with my wife today that even if I decided to run across Canada one day it wouldn't be big news as there always seems to be someone doing this (someone had a 10 sec clip on the news today for doing just this - hardly worth the effort vs. reward it seems). I'm not out to be the ultimate anything (magician, runner, etc) nor a celebrity outside of my intended market but, rather, push my own limits and see where it takes me. It's in the personal journey (and the journey of those I meet along the way) that interesting stories, adventures, and lessons come.

The goal question for me is always the same: what about ME is interesting, quirky, intriguing, etc that people would find interesting or valuable and hard or impossible to replace.

This just happens to be a big part of me and not being done for the purpose of publicity. I do love the idea that I can make my other big passion into my job (professional athlete - cool!).

I did an event at an inner-city school a few years back where I ran for the entire school day (just over 6 hours) in their field and did a presentation before and after for them about believing in themselves etc. The kids got to run and interact with me during their gym class and lunch/recess breaks. I had 2 newspapers come out to write the story and had a local TV news personality run with me for an hour of it. Just an example of something normally a non-story (running for 6 hours) and making it interesting.

Those running 50 or 100 mile races are actually quite rare in my area (5 or less for 50M and perhaps 1-2 for 100M in my province currently active would be a realistic estimate). Of those people in my area who speak about it to corporations: zero. In fact, even a wide google search for such speakers reveals 2 high-profile in the USA and one of those mostly talks to groups of athletes (there may be others who are not as prominent). So, this could actually be a good point of differentiation in my local - and even national or international - area. Of course, just like how being a "magician" is totally non-newsworthy in that it's been done so many times before, it'll be the unique slant or positioning strategy that makes one interesting to my target market and the general public.

True running has grown over the past few years with all the health talk.
But those only run around the block.
I promise you, those who can run 50 or 100 miles are rare anywhere you go.
Far less long runners than magicians.

Around here, many of the smaller towns have the mile walks or an annual 5 mile run.
Most are tied into the local festivals. I would think those places would be good
to make an appearance and get some good write ups.

Tom