How To Build an Online Community

So you've been thinking about building a community for your digital business, but how do you actually do that? My name is Heather and about a year and a half ago my husband and I went through the same process of building and launching an online community. And we're so glad we did. Being part of your community can be extremely valuable for your members. A community can also be really profitable for you as a business owner. Plus, they're super fun. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through five steps for building and bringing your online community to life. Let's get started. So step one is to establish your big purpose, which is the motivation for your community. You can think of your Big purpose as your mission, as the host for this community, as well as the reason why your ideal members would want to join and participate. So here's the formula to create your big purpose. First, who are you bringing together? We found that the people who are most likely to join a community are people who are either in transition or about to begin one. Maybe you're bringing people together who are starting a new interest or hobby, or maybe you're bringing people together who are looking to learn something. Next, we're going to skip to the other end of the big purpose and define the results. Why are you bringing people together? What will you be able to achieve together? What are the results that you and your members want? Maybe it's to gain a new skill or see success in something or level up in some kind of way. And lastly, there's the bridge. This is basically what you're going to be doing in your community to help your members make the transition to achieve the results that you're all working towards. Maybe your focus will be on learning and teaching or sharing stories and experiences. Here are some examples. I or we bring together first time engineer managers to trade ideas, define what's next for each of us and continue to experiment safely so that we can confidently take on this new challenge and realize our team's fullest potential. And here's BCom's big purpose. The BCOM supports small scale and backyard beekeepers with classes, workshops, networking opportunities and resource sharing so that we can manage our bees according to biology and our values. And this is Surf Society's Big Purpose, a global women's surf community dedicated to empowering women in the lineup through progressing our surf skills, building confidence and pushing ourselves in challenging surf conditions. Join us in virtual events with monthly themes, expert led discussions and community challenges all designed to help you graduate your surf skills while having the camaraderie of a community to cheer you on. So this may seem high level, but getting clear about your community's big purpose from the get go can make all the difference when it comes to creating a thriving community where your members will want to participate to creating a community that's struggling for engagement. Once you have your community's big purpose, you could use some version of it when you promote your community so you can add it to your community's landing page or talk about it in social media posts. And when an ideal member sees your big purpose, they'll know exactly that your community was created for someone like them. Now, developing your big purpose might come easy for you, but if you're someone like me, it might be overwhelming because it is the first step before everything else. What I would suggest is to take advantage of the new tools that are out there that can help you write one based on the earliest ideas of who you want to bring together. These new AI tools can just help you get the ball rolling so you don't get stuck. Next up, step 2 Choose your platform so the good news is that there are a lot of great community platforms out there. The bad news is that there are a lot of great community platforms out there. My husband and I did a ton of research. We looked at the most popular platforms and platforms that we had used ourselves as members, like Facebook groups and Discord. But we also looked at smaller platforms, platforms that I hadn't heard of before. Eventually we decided on Mighty Networks. But here are things that I would suggest you consider as you're looking for the community platform for you and your community. The first is what can you create on that platform either now and in the future. We knew that our community was not going to be absolutely perfect on day one. We knew that it was going to evolve and we were going to change and edit things as we grew. So something like online courses, you may not need that right now, but both my husband and I had online courses and we wanted to be able to just tack that on so that our members can have easy access and everything can be in one place. There's forums, chat, private groups. We didn't launch our community with a mastermind, but eventually we built that in. Also monetization. Are you going to want to charge your members for access? Either access to your community, access to certain spaces or private groups or masterminds or online courses events was an absolute must. I wanted there to be a calendar system within the community platform because I knew I wanted to do real time events like events on Zoom and live streams and stuff like that. Live streaming. Could you live stream natively in the community platform? In addition to scheduling events, could you schedule posts? Especially if you're doing something like what we were doing, which is every Wednesday we post Wednesday Wins and it's kind of the same post every time, so we wanted to schedule those in advance. Profiles and direct messaging was a absolute must. I wanted our members to to not only talk with us as the host, but also with each other. I think that's such a valuable part about building a community, is that we want our members to. To get to know each other since they're all on the same journey. Mobile access. Will you and your members be able to access your community via iOS or Android? Will you, as the host, be able to do admin things on the go when you get notifications, or will your members be able to, you know, watch online courses and respond to messages all in an app? Also, analytics. Will you, as the host, be able to quantify and measure what's working and what's not working? Cost is another thing to consider and that's cost to you as the host of this community. There's free options. There's options that are say 30 to 100 bucks a month and then there's options that are several hundred dollars a month or more, depending on how active your community is. Lastly, what is the signup process for your members? This could be a big barrier to entry. So is it going to feel easy for them? Is it going to feel like it's another thing that they have to sign up for? So there's a lot of things to consider and we thought about all of these things and probably a bunch of other stuff. Eventually we decided on Mighty Networks. And you know, this year is going to be going on two years that we've hosted our community on Mighty Networks and it's been the best experience for us. We have no plans on moving. They constantly updated it. I realize that you're watching this on the Mighty Networks channel, but I am still a paying customer of Mighty Networks. We felt that Mighty Networks was the best platform that met all of our needs, but was also a platform that could grow with us as we iterate as we evolved, as we get new members. I really don't think that there's one perfect community platform. I think it depends on your community's goals and needs. That being said, I will say that Mighty Networks has been perfect for us. Next up, step three. What will you offer? So how will your members make progress in your community? How are they going to make that transition, what are you going to offer? Maybe you keep it super simple to start by offering either a real time chat or a forum of some kind where the members that you've brought together can all connect with each other. And then you could take it a step further by doing live streaming. Maybe you could have a weekly live stream check in. Or you could do real time events this same way you would on Zoom so that your members can get some facetime. And then from there you can do things like create content or share content that's only available to the members of your community. You can host challenges, you could do monthly themes. You can build a resource library. There's all kinds of things that you can do once you've brought your people together. But of course that doesn't mean that you have to do everything. It's about finding what works best for you and your members. One thing you can ask yourself when you're figuring out what to offer in your community is what? What will your members be able to do in a year that they can't do today? Next, Step four Create Conversation Starters One of the best things about having a community is that you don't have to be the only one coming up with the content that inspires other members. And the best way to encourage participation and increase engagement in your community is through polls and questions. One of my favorite things about Mighty is that they do have an interactive polls and questions feature. So all it takes is one click or one tap which for a member to participate. And even if it doesn't necessarily lead to follow up conversation or discussion in the comment section, just seeing what the results to a poll are could be enough for someone to see things in a different way or to get new ideas. So come up with conversation starters. Come up with a list of polls and questions that you could regularly share in your committee once or twice a week. And maybe the platform that you pick will allow you to schedule these questions in advance to make it easier for you. And finally step five Launch and Promote I mentioned this in step one, but every community should have a landing page. Sometimes it's called a sales page, but a landing page is basically the webpage that someone would go to to learn about your community, see why they should join and be able to sign up. Some platforms actually have a landing page feature where you'll be able to design and publish a landing page right in the platform. And Mighty takes this a step further. So once you have your big purpose, they actually have a built in AI tool that will help you create your landing page if you want to use it. And once your landing page is up, you can create content that directs people to it. So you could share a countdown on social media. You could create blog posts or videos. We actually documented the process of building our community through YouTube videos and then had a big live stream to celebrate on launch day. Now, where to go from here? There are a lot of exciting things to look forward to and you don't have to have all of this planned out from the beginning. Your community is organic. It'll evolve as it grows. Lots of people will want to contribute content and some will even want to become moderators. But the first step is to bring your community to life and hopefully this video helped. And once your community is launched, one thing you can do to welcome new members is to have a quick welcome video for them to watch when they join. If you want to know how to record one, you can check out this video next. See you there.