Building a Community is Vital For Success — Here’s why
5 principles and ways to grow your community here on Medium
A Community is a few individuals who are engaged with your content. These communities generally offer advice and opinions.
When thinking of new business strategies, I realized that making a community is a must for any start-up, including for writers.
A community is what makes you stand out from your competitors.
An excellent example of a writer with a community is Tim Denning. He consistently makes business articles and has a following of 117 thousand followers. Some of those followers actively read his articles whenever a new product/book is published.
In essence, this is what a community is, an active fan base that reads your articles and buys your products. So you may be asking how can you create a community to sell your services/products to?
First, we need to set up a few ground principles
- Add Value
- Analyze Your Typical User
- Be Honest
- Don’t Be Pushy
- Create trust
These are the five principles you must follow to create a high-quality audience.
Let’s investigate with each of these points…
Add Value
If you are not going to follow the other principles, you MUST listen to this one for your audience to follow you or even trust you. You must be able to identify their struggles and provide a solution to their struggles.
Otherwise, you are purely writing for yourself and not keeping the readers’ interest in mind.
Analyze Your Typical User
Analyzing your user means you need to think where they’re located, what their interests are. What platforms do they use the most etc? This is not a must thing to do, but it will undoubtedly help when creating your audience.
To give you an example, let’s assume you write about fitness. Most indefinitely, you will need to start at work out forums instead of body positivity forums. So, in essence, find your niche and locate where your customers or community members are located.
Be Honest
If you build your community upon lies and false promises, then eventually you will be caught and end up losing your business.
You can see this happening right now, where so-called business gurus are being exposed for lying about how much they make with their and more. Most of these gurus are currently having issues with gaining views unlike before.
To make it clear, be honest with your results, no one needs another fake guru to sell false promises.
Don’t Be Pushy
When I say pushy, I mean, don’t repeatedly mention your product or newsletter that they can subscribe to. This will annoy your audience and not make too much of a difference in your sign-ups/purchases.
A best practice is to mention it briefly in a few sentences on your offer and what they will gain in return (this is another form of adding value).
Create Trust
If you follow the previous four principles, then you are already creating trust with your audience. But there is also another way to build trust.
That is by telling them your personal life story. Talk to them as if you are talking to a friend.
When I have done this, the amount of support I got was unfathomable, where a lot of readers decided to follow me. I believe this is because I mentioned my story to them and how thankful I am for their support.
This was not a lie, but a genuine comment, unless your thoughts are not honest, tell your audience how you appreciate them. And thank them at the end of every article.
Creating Your Community
You can create your community by using tools like Mailchimp for people to receive your weekly emails or even sub stack.
Substack allows you to send emails and give you an option to get paid monthly if a subscriber decides to do so.
One other tool that you can use is using Patreon.
These are the three platforms you can use. Still, if these three do not interest you, you can always create a Facebook group or a telegram group to communicate with your community members effectively.
Conclusion
By following all of these tips, you will steadily build your audience. Remember, although it may be slow at the beginning later on your community will grow at a rapid rate.
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