As you may remember, I recently wrote a post inspired by the great Darren Rowse. Something he said inspired me to refine and restate my mission, or rather, the mission of this blog. Said mission turned out to be the telling of stories in all their different facets and mediums: written or told stories, stories in pictures, on film, and the stories that our lived-in spaces tell about us.
I left it at that. It was a nice long post in which I waxed poetic on how stories are at the basis of everything in our lives and how much we all enjoy telling them and hearing them (or reading or watching them unfold on stage or on a screen). A few days went by and I realized, Dammit, I forgot to mention another really important part of my mission! So, drum roll please, seat yourselves so as not to be taken by surprise. Here is part 2 of my mission statement:

To bring the untold stories I find into the world, disseminate them, give them light and air, allow them to be enjoyed by any and everyone.
This includes unpublished novels, such as Scarborough Baby, by Amanda Ackroyd, which I am publishing serially on a weekly basis, short stories that may have won awards but never been published, poems that have been hidden in shoe boxes in the bottom of closets… you get the idea.
So my desire is not merely to tell stories that belong to me or that are already well known but I think merit another word or two. No, I long to help orphaned stories find the light of day. Or help people who are a little timid bring forth their stories.
There, that is the other half of the mission.

This brings me to today’s mission. The great Darren Rowse has launched a project (he has done it twice before, but it’s slightly different every time) called the 31-Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge.The title of the challenge is self-explanatory. The way it unfolds is that the participants receive a daily email for 31 days, linked to a blog post on Problogger, with instructions for the day. The registered participants may receive a few odd tidbits that the regular readers of the blog do not, but on the whole you may follow along by reading the blog every day almost as well.

So I registered for the challenge, and today is Day 1! Today’s task is to write an Elevator Pitch for our blog. This too is fairly self-explanatory. Imagine you get onto an elevator and you bump into someone whom you’ve been trying to reach but who never gets back to you, or someone you have never had the courage to approach (we’re talking about networking here). Well, this person is now your captive audience, but only for as long as it takes to ride the elevator up to whichever floor he is going to (if your floor comes first, you will of course skip your floor, get off with him, and then find a way to slink down the emergency stairs back to your original destination floor).

It’s a great idea to have this pitch ready, so that at a moment’s notice you can regale your audience with a 30-second spiel which enlightens them while also tantalizing them. They should get off the elevator feeling that they get the general idea, but also intrigued, thinking, I’m going to log onto my computer and check this blog out, it sounds interesting.

The main and best reason to have an elevator pitch is, of course, for yourself. It will help you become laser focused on your mission, so that everything you do is guided by the Primary Objective (I know, I watch too many TV shows). Over time, and not even too much time, this practice will give a shape and direction to your blog which will make it immediately identifiable to your readers. And this is good, because it begins to establish your BRAND.

Darren says all this and more in his post, but I want to add just one little thing. Another great reason to have an elevator pitch is to increase your ability to believe in yourself and what you’re doing. Blogging is only a little less lonely than writing books. There is some interaction with readers and other bloggers, but when you are writing in your own little room, you are all alone, and having the elevator pitch that you can repeat to yourself when doubt starts creeping in helpt tremendously. It makes you think, oh, yes, this is real. I am doing a real thing for a real reason. Lastly, but not leastly (hee hee), the elevator pitch, though brief and to the point, is not usually actually delivered in an elevator. So if you learn to deliver your pitch in 30 seconds (and you should really practice saying it out loud, because it is meant to be spoken, like epic Greek poems, and not read), without requiring a paper bag to gasp into at the end, then when the time comes to say it to someone you have just met at a conference or party, the pitch will be able to breathe, will come to life, and will make perfect sense to the person you are speaking to.

After all this, would you like to hear my elevator pitch for turtle^haus? Well, hang on to your hats, here it is:

Nice to meet you, my name is Ilaria and I write a blog called turtle^haus (that’s H-A-U-S). It’s all about stories. I focus on three mediums of expression: writing and speaking, architecture and design, and film and theater. If you like to hear, watch, read stories and look at people’s houses to understand something about their lives, then you should become a reader. I also help un- or little known storytellers find an audience.

I can deliver it comfortably, with pauses for expression, in 24 seconds. Please let me know in the comments what you think! See you tomorrow!

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