Build an Online Community in 6 Steps | Getting Started | Step By Step | Tutorial

so you've heard all of this buzz about communities but how do you start one well i'm going to show you in six simple steps [Music] [Applause] alrighty welcome this is jono i hope you're safe and well so i'm gonna walk through the six steps for how to start an online community so let's first of all get our six steps written down and then we'll dig into each of them now importantly everything i'm gonna walk through in this video can apply to any community that you want to build it doesn't matter whether you want to do

activism or start a community for a product for your business or whether it's a hobby or an interest or a support group anything this can apply to every single community okay now step number one is where we first of all start thinking about our audiences okay who do you want to build this community for and it's really important you get crisp on this okay because fundamentally a community is a group of people who come together and everybody's got different ideas and perspectives and experience and insight and time and the real magic is when we get

that out into the open so we can all benefit from that kind of milieu of stuff okay but if you're not clear on who those people are going to be in your community then it's gonna be very very difficult to build one okay so now you're probably thinking okay well how do i figure out who those people are and what they want in the community okay so let's say we're talking about a community that wants to lose weight okay a lot of people want to lose weight so we're going to set up like a support

community where people can help them do that well what you're going to want to figure out first of all is what are the pain points that they have okay what do they struggle with as people who want to lose weight well maybe you know they don't like the extra weight and how it makes them feel maybe people make fun of them or it's impacting their ability to do sport or they're worried about their health those kinds of things okay but also what are the roadblocks standing in their way of success okay okay so pain and

roadblock so roblox could be they don't know how to get started with certain exercises they're not sure how to do intermittent fasting they're not sure how to count calories they're they're not sure how to break bad habits or to to deal with a lack of discipline that many people struggle with when changing any kind of element of their lives okay because when you figure out the pain and the roadblocks and you invert them then that gives you the value that your community can bring so let's say we're talking about uh with the pain first of

all right well let's say people um are struggling with the way it makes them feel and they're worried about health issues well a community can be an amazing support network where people can support people through a journey through a change through a transformation what about their roadblocks well let's say they're struggling to figure out how to do certain kinds of exercises well they can go to the community and ask questions and get tips and guidance and recommendations so that gives you a really crisp way of defining who your community is for all right now i've

included in the video description below a handy little handout handy little handout that's a thing uh that you can print out and it'll work walk you through exactly how to go through and figure out who your audiences are okay so make sure you check that link down in the in the video description now the second step is to figure out what your community platform is going to be now there's loads of these platforms out there you've probably heard of i mean there's obviously facebook you've probably heard of clubhouse and discourse and vanilla and chorus and

slack matamos and discord and gitter all kinds of promotions they all basically divide into three kind of types okay you've got chat you got forum [Music] okay and you've got social okay now let's talk about these very briefly this is a whole video in its on its own but i just want to kind of cover the core elements of this so chat is something like slack or matamos or irc or google chat something along those lines the benefit of chat is that it's really gratifying you can get on the layer you can talk to someone

in real time it's really cool the downside of chat is twofold one is that you need people to be online at that time to have a conversation with and that's difficult when it comes to getting enough people on there at one time and also difficult with time zones but also if you have an interesting conversation on chat it doesn't get indexed on the internet now most people let's say our weight loss friends here when they want to solve a particular problem they type something into google and ideally we want our community to appear in the

search results you don't get that with chat you also don't get that with social so let's talk about social as well social media is going to be something such as a facebook group or a linkedin group something along those lines okay now some social media networks are actually pretty handy for this facebook groups have become very popular okay so for example i've got a facebook group for my band baron carter and it's a great way to to stay in touch with people okay so social media is good because there's lots of people on these networks

there's a billion people on facebook the downside of social media is that it's a walled garden you know it's all around the edge of this okay and what i mean by that is that um is that all of the data the information lives on that social media network and they control what you get to see okay so if you post something to your community on facebook the downside is that facebook might not actually show it to your audience however if you go for something such as a forum okay and this is generally my preferred choice

for communities it's kind of a blend of the two in terms of benefits and disadvantages it's not as gratifying as chat okay but it's not as limiting as a walled garden such as social media so i find that forums such as discourse there's vanilla there's all kinds of different forums out there are generally a pretty good fit okay now let's go to step number three now okay and this is where we do something called a soft launch okay now this is where you know you you've chosen your audiences and because you've figured out the pain

and road blocks you now have a sense of what you can offer them in the community you've chosen the place where all your community members are going to going to go and hang out okay and that's really important now we do a soft launch we kind of kick the doors open but the big worry that everybody has i'm sure that you have got this worry is well i don't want it to be a bloody ghost town when people come in there right that's going to be a bit isn't it okay well that's a fairly reasonable

concern to have however i have got a plan that you can follow now i'm going to summarize it very briefly here but i've created a video and you can find the link in the video description down there where it walks through exactly how to do this okay basically what you do is you invite a smaller number of people people who you know into your community 10 to 20 people just to kind of get them in the into the platform get them having some conversations and importantly ask them for feedback ask them for their input their

guidance what they don't like what they do like because what that's going to do is is going to make them feel part of shaping something which is your community but it's also going to stop it being a ghost town because they're going to be having those conversations in the community and then you can maybe do that again do a second phase of that where you bring in another cohort of people and again you kind of kick the tires on it and this also helps you to fix some of the problems before you kick the doors

open more broadly okay so again this is kind of a more in-depth step in this you can go and check out the video in the description down there to find out exactly how to do it okay now step number four okay this is content and convos i know what you're thinking jonah what the hell is a convo right well let's start with content so when you've got your community now you've got a small number of people in your community you need to keep them there you need to build retention and we'll talk about promotion a

little bit later on but you want to keep them coming back okay because if they've got nothing to come back to and it's not very interesting then they're going to get bored and they're going to go and do something else so content first of all is a really powerful way of doing this okay so make sure okay i'm going to give you some specific homework here is that every week you have at least one piece of content this could be a blog post a podcast it could be a webinar i generally recommend blog posts because

they're fairly easy to kind of put together compared to other content mediums but make sure you've got at least one piece of content every week now if you're not sure how to do content or if you've struggled with content i have created a complete training course that walks through every step of how to do content well again go and check out the link in the video description below where you can find out how to get access to that course okay so that's going to be something to keep people coming back to the community focus they're

going to be able to keep up to date so if we're talking about weight loss then this could be articles with you know five tips for how to add fiber into your diet um you know five useful exercises to get started with if you've never exercised before you know it could be three fast food burgers that have got the lowest calories all that kind of stuff you might not like the five this the for that the three this okay but it's actually a really effective way of delivering content to people it's popular for a reason

okay now convos are conversation starters this is where every week you kick off discussions and you ask people for their input for their feedback because this creates an interactive environment and you want to get them used to engaging in your platform okay you want to get them used to posting okay now you want to make sure you put out at least two of these every week two conversation starters so it could be for example you know what are your favorite books on on stay and fit okay what are your favorite um scales for measuring yourself

in the morning it could be what are your favorite fitness trackers or we'd like to have a competition to encourage people to write fitness tracker reviews and we'll have the prize at the end of it but you've got to constantly be kicking off lots of conversations and when they come into the community and they reply your community members reply in those conversations keep the conversation going we need to build momentum think of it this way you wouldn't go into a restaurant on a saturday night if it was empty and there was no one in there

because it feels dead right however if you walk past a restaurant on a saturday night and there's a bunch of people in there and there's a table for you more likely to go in there we want the same thing for our community and that's the reason why the content and the conversations are so important all right now step number five okay you keeping up we good yeah you all right okay leave me a comment in the comments it's always nice to hear what you think of this stuff so what what makes sense what doesn't make

sense feel free to make fun of my hair i don't care but let me let me know let's make this an interactive relationship okay so the fifth step here is to promote okay this is where you get out there and let the world know about your community now again content is a really great way to do this so creating those blog posts and podcasts and whatever else and promoting them online and then mentioning your community in them is a great way to bring people in okay so blogging is a great way to get started with

that again the content course that i mentioned that i built you can find in the in the link in the video description down there walks through how to do all kinds of promotional uh promotion of your content okay but another great way of promoting your community is with social media so with these conversation starters in here in here can be a real goldmine of really interesting uh discussions okay so let's say you were to have a conversation starter which was what are your five favorite ted talks okay and then people go in there and they

start leaving or maybe not five favorites just your favorite ted talks people go and start leaving their ted talks in there then you know that whole discussion is going to be a gold mine of really interesting ted talks that people can go watch okay so you could share that in social media and say hey go and check out what our community thinks and the most interesting ted talks out there on the internet all right now i actually have a video that i put together that walks through how to take those community conversations and to promote

them okay check the video uh link down there in the video description okay all right so promotion is really important and then finally finally finally finally finally finally number six is where we measure and improve okay now if you're not measuring it you're not improving it it's the simple reality okay we have to measure everything that we do because it helps us to learn about what we're seeing and we can make good decisions based upon what we're seeing a lot of people are scared of measuring and i was you know for many years i didn't

measure anything because i was fearful of what the results may say about me you know i was worried that you know i wouldn't be very good at what i'm doing okay and that's that's stupid okay i'm going to be honest with you it's a stupid way for me to think okay so make sure you measure now the the challenge here with this video because i'm covering you know chat and forum and social is that there's different ways of measuring different things in these different platforms but there's four things you really need to care about when

measuring in a community i'm going to put these down here okay so the first one is views okay how many people are looking at your community it could be page views in a forum it could be people impressions in the social media network it could be people who were showing up in your chat channels but measure that because that gives you a sense of onlookers a lot of people who join communities they never register they just kind of browse and they observe and they enjoy watching the conversation occurring but they don't register okay and that's

youthful community output right so measure that that gives you a sense it should be always growing okay now the second one is going to be sign ups okay so this is how many people are actually registering for your communities you want to make sure that every month people are registering you've got more and more people kind of coming in it doesn't need to be you know a growing scale of signups ideally it will be but you definitely want to make sure you've got a regular stream of signups coming in in many cases for example you'll

have view lots of views growing but then you'll have a limit more limited set of signups and in that kind of situation um that would tell me that the community is interesting that lots of interesting conversation and content but there's not enough of a reason for someone to sign up and get started okay so this is where the improved bit comes in is that we look at this data and we try and find patterns and correlations between them and that helps us to make good decisions another one you should be checking here is active users

okay so this is the number of people who are doing something active not just browsing okay so this could be uh posting a new topic posting a message it could be commenting in a chat channel it could be liking something it could be having something that they've created liked uh it could be interacting with their with you know setting the avatar picture whatever usually most of these kind of platforms are as a means of tracking active users that is possibly the most important metric to track you want 20 to 30 of your overall community to

be active okay and then the final one is likes this might seem a little silly but this is a good way of determining sentiment okay if you've got a growing number of people liking things in your community it means that people are generally pretty happy they're appreciative and that's all good we want all of that okay now i do have a video for how to evaluate some of this in one particular platform but i'm going to be adding more links down there as i release more videos for how to do the metrics because that's something

i think is really important so let's just summarize this real quick okay first of all is you choose your audience okay think about who who you're targeting your community for identify their pain and their roadblocks invert them to find out what things your community are probably going to want to learn about and to dig into secondly choose your platform you know as a general rule i wouldn't recommend chat channels such as slack matamos things like that um uh social media is okay in certain scenarios as a general rule i would go for a hosted forum

okay then you do your soft launch remember there's a video linked down there where you can go and find out exactly how to do that step by step that's where you kind of kind of open the door gradually to the world step four is where you put out a regular stream of content at least one piece of content every week two conversation starts a week step number five is where you promote actively with content and social media again you can check out the content course that i've built in the in the video link down there

and you can see my video for how to take some of those interesting conversations and promote them on social media and then step six is that you measure every single week and you analyze views sign ups active users and likes and then you figure out what are the patterns you're seeing and you make changes based upon what you're seeing anyway that's it i hope you found this useful be sure to hit that like button and hit that subscribe button and that notification bell the notification bell is very important we love that bell okay let me

be very clear about that we love the bell click the bell love the bell romance the bell b the bell alright peace out [Applause] you