 Aw, what's up, Brand Man Network? I got another exclusive and this video right here is the first video in a series on building a community. It's going to be an entire playlist on community building because we have so many artists who are like, yo man, I got fans, but how do I actually make these fans stay? How do I make them become fans that are going to create other fans? And there's three steps to this process. There's actually four, but this video right here, I want to focus on step three, right? So first you have to have an identity, then you have to build trust. And a lot of artists communicate that through having their brand or sense of brand that they have. That's kind of the identity part and then they build value or trust by giving value through the music, right? And you have that fan base and then the third level though to build a community and an engaging fan base is actually participation. You have to figure out how to make everybody participate, how to get them involved in loving you or loving the brand. How can they get closer to it? And this is another reason that this video right here is actually going to be in the mystery series playlist as well because people think that you have to show your face just to actually make people love you and really feel connected to you, but you don't necessarily need them connected to you. You need them connected to a brand, a movement, a cause, and that goes back to some of that identity thing. So when we talk about participation, what does that look like? There's three simple ways that you can help people participate. One of course, there's merch, right? Merch is just this thing where you can almost look at it as marketing for you. Because if I'm out and I like this obscure band or this obscure TV show and I have something on my shirt that shows that and then I'm walking around and someone's like, yo, bro, you like that show too? They didn't expect it. They don't know that many people who like it now, they connect with you, right? Because they see you as somebody who also connects to something else that they like. And that right there is a small way to connect with fans, but it's not always through merch like TV shirts and physical things. There's other ways you can get into merch, but we'll get into that in the merch series. Another thing that you can do is create inside knowledge. Now, a lot of this stuff is going to come from you just creating music, right? When you create music or you drop certain videos and series, that's going to give people a sense of having inside knowledge anyway because they'll know your lyrics like people who aren't your fans know your lyrics. But that's when you really start to create a community connection. You can do that easily online if you just have like a Facebook group or you have a Discord group or you just have a fans only page on Instagram. There's different ways that you can play with that. But the point is you need to create some kind of barrier and then having something exclusive inside that barrier so they can feel closer, not only to your brand, but feel an exceeding amount of value from you that other people aren't going to have. They're going to love that. That part is cool alone, but even greater when they can connect with those people in that environment, which is why I'm talking about groups and other things only for those people. That stuff is going to allow them to connect and build around each other. And that cycle is going to go back and forth. Because of course, they're already a fan, so they're only going to be talking good things about you for the most part in their own way, right? So that's going to build that sense of a community. And then thirdly is events. Events is another huge, simple way to help people become a part of your community, right? That's your shows, cool. But even some other obscure events that might be, I don't know, related to the theme of your song and related to some kind of VIP section. But I don't even actually like VIP events in that word. That's something is lazy, right? And it's an exclusivity and it's more about clout than anything else. Creating experiences for your fans that might be related to a B-size record, right? It's not one of your popular records. And you build out an entire concept and event around that. Creating, so then they really love it and they feel like they're a part of it. And you can do that digitally online. And of course, you can do events in the real world. There's so many ways that people sleep on creating experiences online for bringing your people together. But try your best to not just have some space online where, oh, I got to log in and I have your login code and I could look at this content by myself. Let's have a web conference where I can talk with my fans and I can have real conversations with my fans. But there's so many different ways to do this and we're going to go into specifics on so many of these other playlists. But just understand that building a community that they can participate in is the greatest way to actually build a strong fan base because now you have people becoming brand ambassadors for you. And when they have a place that they can congregate together though to reinforce their love and for you the value that they see in you. Because if they don't have something to talk about or people to talk about it with, then a lot of times it's not going to be able to ignite that fire again and again. They're going to start to spend more of their attention and time on things that they can connect with other people with. It's cool to have those things that you like that a lot of people don't know about, but people still want to be able to connect with somebody that knows about that thing. And you are in charge of creating that congregation where people could say, hey man, we're in on this, we're special because of this or we really love this person. Whether or not the rest of the world cares won't even matter at that point. So that's the first video in this community series, building a community of real fan base and just looking at it completely different. We're going to break it down and when I say break it down, it's going to be scientific almost in some of the parts of this course and this playlist. As always, any of the questions you have about building a fan base or some of the scenarios that you might be going through, you can do that in the suggestion area in the Discord group. Go to that section, make any suggestions that you might like to see or fan base situations that you're going through and we might be able to answer that through the community series and feature one of your questions. Other than that, let's get it.