Imagine you meet your dream employer/client/angel funder in a lift (or elevator if you're not British).

You have 30-60 seconds to persuade them to give you the job/project/money.  That narrow band of opportunity, and how you use it to sell yourself, has come to be known as the "elevator pitch".

How do you go about this?

Well, here are 5 tutorials to give you a head start.

1: How to Craft a Killer Elevator Pitch That Will Land You Big Business - Dumb Little Man

2: Perfecting Your Pitch, Part One: Assume Short Buildings Fast Company

[K. Stone's thorough tutorial 1 doesn't just tell you what should be included, it gives you step by step instructions for how to write and prepare your pitch. Tutorial 2 - similar ideas to tutorial 1, but targeted at internet start-ups.  Worth a look just to compare.]

3: Is Your Elevator Pitch a Home Run? Freelance Folder

One sentence wonder.  As the link suggests, this tutorial is for freelancers who have to sell themselves and their skills to harrassed businessmen. Less of an elevator pitch, more of a "winning sentence about myself and what I can do for you."

4: Prepping for Warren Buffett: The Art of the Elevator Pitch Four hour workweek

This tutorial takes a completely different approach. It's target is simple: get you another appointment with the world's richest man. A man who hears elevator pitches every day of his life, and will never remember you unless you come up with something unique.

5: Skip, Scan, Stop, Save and/or Spread?  Life Beyond Code

...and finally the tweet. 140 characters of elevator pitch.  Some salient questions about the quality of your tweeting.

Feel free to add your elevator pitch as a comment to this post, or tweet me your elevator tweet.

Penelope Trunk is a fantastic blogger.

One of my favourite recent(ish) posts from her is entitled This is why all your goals are bad for you.

She says most of us set goals for ourselves that we want to achieve, but we fail to consider whether we will actually enjoy or benefit from the process of what we will have to do in order to achieve those goals.

But I don't agree with her conclusions...

Read more...

A collection of links about viral church - not necessarily all agreeing on terms or reasoning:

• http://movementseverywhererant.blogspot.com/2008/05/ideas.html Doesn't explain viral church but suggests planting 50 of them: small little viral things with 21 year old elders and you as the master apostle - thats with a little 'a' in apostle btw
• http://viralchurch.10.forumer.com/ Was once an active forum about Viral church.  Asks questions like could the viral church work?  and Can a viral church movement sustain growth?  It's worth looking into their discussions because they were talking about this stuff back in 2005; most of these other links are from the last 12 months 2007-8.
  
• http://chriscochran.blogspot.com/2005/03/viral-church-part-deux.html Chris's definition of viral church means one which adopts viral marketing pinciples. 
• http://neozine.org/inside/viral-church/ - for Dr Joal Hughes, viral means organic... "Uber-organic. We need to become a church that refuses to grow at one location beyond a certain minimum critical mass. Once we reach enough people to host a good baptism and a class worth driving to, we'll start sending out church planters."  I don't think he really means viral; I think he means "seed-bearing".
• http://jonathanbrink.com/2008/05/22/viral-church-growth/ - great example from China, with link to video, where this is how the churches operate: "Once you get over fifteen you begin to get attention you know from the government, so you just (start a new one)."  Again this describes viral church as one which quickly spawns new churches.  Maybe in this case it is the "church growth" that is described as viral rather than the churches themselves?
• http://nathandiehl.com/2007/06/28/the-viral-church/ I like this post. Quoting from Seth Godin's "Small is the new big"

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