How to go From a Hero to a Host

This is one of the biggest mistakes that I see when content creators or course creators are making the transition from being the hero that their audience is following to a host where their role is to introduce members to each other. Hi, I'm Gina Bianchini. And this is People Magic, where I am showing you the easiest path to creating a $1 million digital business. In today's episode, we are going to shift from how to pitch your new digital business built on creating People Magic into how do you actually run one. Today's episode and the next 2 episodes will set you up for incredibly engaging online courses, challenges that people actually finish, and events that your members are going to be stoked to join. In this episode, I am tackling monthly themes. To recap how we got here to this episode of monthly themes, we started with your ideal member. This is the person who Who is in a transition that wants or needs your community the most right now. Then what we know is people pay for progress and they also pay attention to what they pay for. So we have the second component to creating people magic, which is the best year ever. This is the results or transformation that your members, your ideal members specifically want to get.

Plus.

Memorable details that feel exciting and stand out from the crowd of everything else that they're being inundated with today. So, you take the most motivated people and you add to the most motivated people who are in a transition, the promise of something absolutely awesome. And that gets you your big purpose or the pitch for your new purpose.

Yeah.

Community. Now, the next set of questions I get pretty much like clockwork are, great, Gina, this is fantastic, but what the heck are people gonna do together? Don't I need to have a lot of content? Aren't they showing up for me? And don't I have to have people that are running this? Don't I have to be livestreaming absolutely every day? Here's the beautiful thing about what we're gonna start with today. Is through monthly themes, a weekly calendar, and daily polls and questions, you have everything you need to take those ideal members and help them get their best year ever.

That's it.

You don't need 100 hours of content. You don't need events every single day. You don't need programming 7 days a week. You just don't need content because you've set up and designed your paid membership so people know why they're there to meet each other and how to do it and what they're supposed to be doing together. So what monthly themes, a weekly calendar, and daily polls and questions get you is an incredibly effective way of getting your members to meet and build relationships with each other. And yes, create that people magic, people magic that unlocks results and transformation that your members are never going to get on their own and probably won't get in other communities that are built really for the old world, that don't take advantage of what is possible today, especially around introducing people who don't already know each other. So the first of our 3 parts of running a membership or running a community that essentially takes care of itself is monthly themes. And monthly themes are there to get your members talking to each other, sharing their stories, their experiences, their ideas, not advice. Advice shuts a conversation down, and you want to focus in on encouraging your members to share their experiences and their stories, their ideas, the challenges that they're navigating. And when you do that, you will see more and more members participate. If you focus on advice, somebody's going to be like, oh, Thank you, and just not know what else to say. As members are contributing, the reason you want to have monthly themes is to also introduce novelty to your community. The same thing every week, the same thing every month can get a little stale. And we have now set up a big meaty goal with your ideal member's best year ever. That's your big purpose. And in doing so, you want to introduce monthly themes that all ladder up to that big purpose. So that can be goals and goal setting. That can be how to manage your energy, how you overcome challenges, how you reframe away from feeling like a failure into a space where you are learning and staying curious and growing.

Yeah.

These are all things that your members can absolutely talk about for a month. And in doing so, they're even motivated to talk about these things for a month. Then at the end of the month, you introduce a new theme and you've got a whole new set of things for people to be able to talk about. Now, one of the things that I think is important about monthly themes is if you're creating a membership, you don't necessarily want to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's great for a course, but for a membership, you want a kind of monthly theme that someone can dive into, whether they are brand new to the community or they are here in year 3. You can have monthly themes that you repeat. One of the things that we've seen time and time again is the conversation amongst whether it's entrepreneurs, creators, small business owners. There's some variation on how do you get members? Or how do you get customers? That is incredibly valuable. And yes, you can actually have 2 themes in one month. Sometimes I've done it where I've had the sort of fun, positive, exciting, sexy theme like getting customers or getting followers or getting members or, or whatever that might be, and then the really boring, dry monthly theme of how do you handle paying taxes. And so you can do those things together and use that next month's theme to bring people back. So as you're getting to the end of one month, making a little bit of a bigger deal, putting some pageantry around introducing your next month's theme, all of those things become so much fun to do, so much more interesting, and set you up to be able to design this all in advance. Let it run combined with what I'll tackle in the next episode related to a weekly calendar. And then the one after that, daily polls and questions, you are set up for an extremely profitable paid membership or course because your members are going to take this and run with it.

Hey Gina, I'm a content creator and my question is, how should I be thinking about monthly themes for people who are in my community?

So this is one of the biggest mistakes that I see when content creators or course creators are making the transition from being the hero that their audience is following to a host where their role is to introduce members to each other, to take an audience of followers and transform them into a community. Transform it into a network of people who are bringing value to each other, that are helping unlock new opportunities for each other, to be there to support, encourage, and even hold accountable each other in pursuit of results and transformation that they cannot get on their own. Your content and all of the things that you are building, all the things that I'm building right now as I'm making this podcast. On some level, some subconscious level, it's all work for somebody. It's work. Now, it might be work to listen to it or consume it when they're doing something else or making dinner or going out on a walk, or they're at work and they're bored and they have some time to listen to a podcast. But fundamentally, Relationships are more valuable than content. And the only content in the context of creating extremely profitable people magic is content that makes connections with your members. So if you, instead of spending a lot of time making like a 20-minute video for your members for that week or every week or doing even a livestream, there's absolutely a role for your livestreams. But instead, if you think about how that livestream is going to unlock that month's theme and have more and more of your members tell their stories around how they set goals, or how they started running and actually stuck with it, or how they tackled that first win in learning how to write a song. Or when they got stuck in learning a new skill, how they overcame it. Each one of those moments where you are the host facilitating your members sharing those stories, sharing those experiences, sharing those things that, that make them connected to each other. First of all, you're offering something that they cannot get Anywhere else. This actually happened, I think last week I was in a livestream of a new creator launching on Mighty, and I watched how somebody was asking in the audience of the livestream, I'm so overwhelmed by the communities I've joined because they all feel like such work. And what was implicit in that question, and then obviously, how was this going to be different? Fortunately, this creator had embraced people magic and embraced monthly themes, a weekly calendar, and daily polls and questions and said something really beautiful. She said, we are going to space things out. This is not about creating more work. This is not about the number of hours of courses I have or the number of things that you're supposed to consume from me. This is about how you Are the star, that your goals are the most important thing about what we're building here together. And my job is to help you find and build the relationships that are going to turn those goals, turn those dreams into a reality in your life. So it sounds a lot like ideal member plus their best year ever. equals a very clear big purpose that then is brought to life through monthly themes that are not about your content or creating more content, or that your members are paying for you to create a lot of content in a paid membership or even an online course. But rather, it is about how you as the convener and the host Of an amazing community that can show up as a membership or a course or a challenge or an event, that they can meet each other, that they can lift each other up and help each and every person think bigger and dream bigger. That is where the world is going. This is about creating something different. This is about creating people magic and monthly themes, Are the first in a 3-part, totally proven formula for how to do it with the most ease and confidence possible. And that is today's episode of People Magic. I'm Gina, and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to People Magic. Want more of a deep dive on today's topic? Well, check out People Magic Profit, my 9-part free masterclass on how to launch your own wildly profitable paid membership and community. Do you have your own burning questions you'd like me to discuss on this podcast? Well, I want to hear them. So leave your questions in the review section and keep tuning in.