 We're gonna give you tips to build your online community here on the journey This is my co-host nearly and why should I build an online community right an online community is in my opinion? The only way that you are going to elevate your brand to that next level It's really gonna help differentiate you from everyone else Because at the end of the day literally everything's a commodity, but a community is something that makes you stand out All right, so I know it's really important to not always be focused on selling rather take the time to position yourself as an expert This will be a great way to give back to your community your fans your customers So think about that when it comes to what you're focused on right and like you say and previous episodes if you've been following along You don't want to sell sell sell you want to tell tell tell super corny as it is It is the truth and while you're doing that and you're telling and you're positioning yourself as the expert It also gives the opportunity of really learning about your audience because you're engaging with them You're talking with them. You're learning about really what they're doing because of that you're figuring out cool What are their actual problems? What are they wanting? What are they needing then with that? That's free market research from your community that you can really dig into and figuring out cool What's next for your brand? What other services can you offer to really elevate that? Yeah? I mean your customers can show you a lot and enlighten you on a lot of things to help actually benefit your business in the long run That is a great point which leads me into the first tip and that's really to make it all about the people because Without people you have no business without business. You have no money and then you're broke and then you can't eat pizza all day It's a tragedy But you really didn't make it about them and figuring out what they need going into that I strongly encourage your group to share I often speak to this when talking about social media like hey social media is rad because it's not a one-way street It's not a walking billboard. It's a two-way street. So encourage Comments feedback just like we do here on the journey asking a comment below right and you can do the same thing Have polls especially with Instagram and how engaging stories are you can throw up a quick poll or a question or a quiz now, too Just ask your audience a random question that relates to your business gets them involved gets them engaged and now it's not just a one-way street We're just yelling out of the person. They're like stop yelling at me. We're actually talking All right now another way we can really encourage our community and build it and boost it is to recognize our group members, right? Good tip. They're they're putting in the work, especially if like you're a coach or if you're Teaching something online you have people learning how to do whatever you're doing right show their progress I know there's a person by the name of Lewis house and he has a Facebook community group and He has masterminds and inner circles and all that stuff and I'll talk about it in a little bit But one thing he does really really well is when one of his clients or his followers are doing something like just super great He'll give him a shout out like hey Margaret just launched her new book. Everyone give her a shout out And that's not something you have to pay for you're literally just giving a shout out saying hey I see you. I want to recognize you and I want everyone else to know how awesome you are so that that's super impactful and powerful It's just to give them a little kudos. All right So this is a perfect time to bring up the importance of setting the tone for the culture Leave a sample so don't go and ghost people on your social media Just cuz I get it you're busy because then you'll lose the engagement of your fans and followers So set the tone be sure to be engaging be present dish out some quality content Think about it even in your social life, you know You stop inviting your friends to go do things and you stop reaching out. They start to think oh This friendship. It's just done. It's done. So perfect segue, right? So leading into my next tip is to really be consistent with your audience And what that consistency is is really up to you. You don't have to post every single day But you do want to be consistent So if you want to make something where every Thursday I'm gonna do a Facebook live or every Friday. I'm gonna do an Instagram post or every Tuesday tip Tuesday I thought you're gonna go with taco Tuesday or motivational Monday. I'm still about taco Tuesday But anyways make it consistent and make sure that they can expect it now back to Lewis house He has what he calls an inner circle. It's a lot of people call it rather That's basically a little mastermind group of his community and once a month He goes on with his community on a video hangout, right? So he goes and they do they talk to each other They say hi how we're doing do like a little ice breakers Then he usually has like a special guest that goes on and like teaches his audience something super cool He'll usually have like a Q&A session with some randomly selected audience members. They can really have that engagement Super cool, right? But he does that every single month and his followers expect that so they know that this is happening Which also you keep doing it continue to do it so you get more and more people really bought into you because Man this person's sticking around there. They're about it and I want to be about it, too And it's like what I was talking about earlier setting the tone for that culture. Yeah another cool thing to do challenge your community There's this artist illustrator that I follow on Twitch and she does a whack Which is a weekly artist challenge and it's super fun because you get to see these challenges live And it could be something as simple as like draw a tree or Try oil paints or screen printing and then you get to check it out on the live footage and feed now with all this fun And game right what that comes with building your community all these challenges all this engagement There is the not so fun part and that is to set some ground rules and policies Because at the end of the day, we want this community to be a really a safe place for everyone So those rules they don't have to be super strict, but they should be more common sense, right? Yeah, so like if you have a chat room you want to make sure you're mediating that making sure that there aren't any trolls out there Block the trolls It's been a while since you heard that right I've never heard that totally derailed you but yeah I keep all the negativity out there You want your community to be inspiring and you really want the power communities like bringing people together with like-mindedness, right? We're all here to help each other and that's what that community should be about So those rules and policies are there to make sure everyone plays fair, but and don't call me a delusional optimist But what if I become too successful and I can't handle it all? Well other than partying on your yacht eating all the pizza from all that success, right? You're gonna need to get some help and that help is going to come from your community You've likely already have people in your community answering questions helping you out already It's time to go back to what we talked about earlier and recognizing them Recognizing all the help they've been giving and give them more of an admin type role in your community saying hey You've been doing an awesome job. I want you to keep doing it. Let's let's go ahead and make this official I want to make you my admin so now they're helping you with your community answering those questions talk to the people while you're partying on your yacht or growing your business even more and growing your community and And and just having fun with it. Yeah, and then they can all join me on my Absolutely, it's a forever one or there's also ways you can outsource this So if you don't have anyone really active in your community that wants to step up You can't hire admins to go in and manage that for you. All right cool. Nellisa now. I know how to do it, but Where do I do this? Wherever you want, but no there are a ton of options that you can use to really build your community and It's really gonna come down to what your community likes right because not every community is the same Your community might like being on Instagram or Twitter about others may just want an email But one of the first places you can really build that community is just with an email newsletter It's one of the earliest forms of community and simple as just sending a weekly email with all the updates And then they'll res maybe reply back to your email and really start that relationship there But what I would recommend for this is try to make that email newsletter, especially in today's world Almost exclusive right like that email newsletter is for this specific person trying to achieve this specific thing So if it's just an email for anyone, they don't really feel a part of that community. You know, definitely hear you on the email I'm definitely a huge fan of it with the businesses that I follow and engage with but also let's not forget blogs Blogs are a great way to also try it in shrew Get the information out and also make it really easy for your customers to share So one thing I love about GoDaddy is we have a great blog that we share a ton of topics Everything ranging from how to find answer your business to how to start a business to how to build a community description below Exactly or how to be a master on Twitter point is we put this information out there for the community And then we make it easy to then share across social channels Yeah, and another way we can really build that community is through a membership on your website Now if you're using WordPress or other popular applications, they're usually plugins that will help you accomplish this But Lewis house has that inner circle and that's a membership on a site that people go to that are just a part of his community We can share that content directly with them So it's something that you can potentially do to really build that community with them And another way to build your online community forms a great place to provide feedback ask questions and Talk amongst themselves exactly bond with the community Now probably my favorite way to build community and I'm a part of I kind of lost count is through Facebook and using Facebook Groups it's probably one of the easiest ways to connect all of your community members together Because let's face it. Everyone's already on Facebook already So it's one quick share one quick add and they're in and now you can add your posts your videos your images and Just anything you want to share with your community You can the good thing kind of like forums is your community can actually talk amongst themselves You can start their own conversations And I've seen lots of relationships build within the community because they're all like-minded people Some people end up becoming best friends to this community, which is awesome. Are you a part of any Facebook groups? Um actually just part of one. It's like vegans in Southern California, which is very common But I get to meet a lot of like-minded people It's also a great way for me to learn of different restaurants to try because I recently moved from LA to San Diego And it's a three-hour difference. A lot of people go that's not that far No, it's a completely different community And so it was a great way for me to learn about where to eat which farmers markets to hit it's super That's awesome in there that community is pretty specific to what you like and your business has a Specific interest group, right and that community wants to know more about what you do or the service you offer And just the rest of the people that are like-minded, which is super awesome. All right, so I've heard a lot about slack I personally don't use it to build my online community Maybe you could convince me otherwise, but what what's all about slack? What slack attack? So it's slack attack always throwing random things to throw me off Sometimes you should see how many bloopers we have but so slack is Typically a messaging app, but I actually am a part of a pretty big slack community out in Phoenix So as you know, I love WordPress I'm all about it and there's a lot of little WordPress meetups and community inside of Phoenix now Instead of us having a Facebook group or all these different things. We just actually have a slack group So the entire community in Arizona is a part of that slack group So we talked about upcoming work camps upcoming meetups just talking about new leads and work We try not to talk about that it's always gross right But we're always talking amongst each other only building that community there And that's just a more unique way to do that And it's a different customer base or a client base or whatever you call your customers So if slack works for you if your audience is already on slack, they're familiar with it It's a good way or a good idea to really build that community in a unique way. So I get slack I can see where that's I can see where that'd be beneficial to get together some like-minded people build the online community I'm a little bit more about the IRL. What's IRL in real life. Okay, so there's meetups I know that's been super helpful for some of my friends who've moved to new city As a way to like, you know meet new people and get to know their area I know my good friend Rai joined a meetup where it was like a paint and sip Okay, you get to like have a little booze paint a little picture and then get to meet people unless they're like really into their artwork and introvert then you don't get to know them at all, but It's a chance to meet people. I know when I first moved to LA LA's huge, right? So I also joined a meetup in a bunch of chambers of commerce went and did some cool events Which like arcades one of the coolest meetups I went to was just straight-up hiking and that was awesome because I not only felt cool I was out there getting active, but I met some people enjoy hiking. That's awesome and Sometimes having those meetups or those events are hard to plan What I've seen a lot of really successful people do is they'll piggyback on already big events So like big events like work camp is one of them. It's a WordPress conference People will have little meetups at the day after the day before that way people are already coming to that conference They're gonna basically piggyback on all that travel already Bring that community in and have their own little meetup if you will or little conference or they'll really get together They can really bring that community together have that face-to-face time and really just bond and connect Yeah Now my last point with really building your online community is maybe think about some Barriers to actually join the community because you may not want to have everybody come in Limiting people from joining it might actually be a good thing And there's a couple ways you that you can really determine how best to do that The first way is just have an open-ended question, right or a couple of questions I know that's super common with Facebook groups. They usually ask why do you want to join this group? Yeah, what are you gonna bring to the group things like that that way You're not gonna come in and just troll the group and then maybe have a price point to actually join the group that way You know the people that are joining. They're committed. They're committed They're serious about being a part of your community and you know that they're gonna put in the work Totally. All right. I hope this video inspired you to go out there and build your online community today We hope this video helped go ahead and smash that like button if you got some value out of this video Add a comment below. Let us know if you're building your community right now and be sure to subscribe Also, be sure to ring that bell so you are the first to know when our next video comes out. This is the journey