Part 5- Becoming the Community Builder, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series

For education entrepreneurs, Chris and Jason stress the value of community building as a long-term commitment and a development strategy. A free community may be a very effective marketing strategy by fostering trust and authority.

A community may feel transactional rather than communal if material is delivered without interaction. Particularly in the beginning, when daily interaction and replying to each message promote involvement, consistency is essential. Support from teammates can help keep the momentum going over time.

Engagement should also extend beyond self-promotion; adding value, responding to inquiries. And taking part in conversations all contribute to the development of credibility and trust. Entrepreneurs may build a vibrant, active community that supports their educational company by striking a balance between content, interaction, and consistency.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the education entrepreneur mentor series. This is a five part series that goes over the five critical hats. That you need to wear or have included in your team’s skillset to be successful as an education entrepreneur. Teaching online, building an education based company. Those five critical hats are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, The technologists and the community builder.

This is the fifth and final part of the series where we go over becoming the community builder. Enjoy this session and be sure to check out all five parts of the series.

In this session, let’s talk about community building, and this is really. I think the least understood, hat, if you will. And a space of courses, coaching, and community. Community, I think, is the least understood, has the highest failure rate yet. In fact, it’s one of the things that’s as old as humanity, this idea of community. But I think we’ve had trouble translating community to the online world in many ways. It’s pretty new to online in terms of building education and really thinking about intentionally and design it. Let’s start before the product.

Let’s think about building free communities is a form of marketing community based marketing. In my opinion, is actually one of the strongest forms of marketing. If you can, in fact use your free community. Or somebody else’s free community to get traction for your ideas, build authority.

But first let’s imagine planting a community, like your own community. You’re committing to this strategy, I want to build a community that I can leverage for marketing. But a community always has more than just being an ends, a means to an ends. It’s something you really have to commit to. And in terms of planting your community. I think the most important thing is to plant the community where your avatar is, predominantly.

And sometimes if you’re an advanced subject matter expert, you may have, quote, graduated to some other kind of community where the professionals hang out. But it’s important to not lose sight of where You know your learners are. I noticed this in the early days of Lifter LMS and building community.

A lot of the WordPress people and the course creators were really strongly in Facebook and in technology. We ended up in like these slack communities and these more geeky, techie communities like Discord and and so on. And just remember where your people are. It’s part of your avatar research.

Where do they hang out? Both online communities and person communities. What conferences do they go to? Where are they socially gathering in the real world and on the internet? When I’m helping people with community design. I often have to go back to first principles and explain what social media is from my perspective.

I think a lot of people get this wrong. So I like to describe social media as really being two words, like there’s social and there’s media. Media, when it comes to building a social media community, a lot of subject matter experts are. Like I’m going to post content like every Monday in my group, I’m going to post this type of content.

I’m going to post links to My new course launch or do other kinds of marketing content. I wrote a new post, I published a new video, but that’s just media. So that’s not an online or that’s not a social media community. Just have a community that you post media to. And then there’s the social part. Which I think a lot of people get wrong where you actually have to be social and. Your community members need to be social for it to not be a dead community or feel like.

a pitch fest. So I think of social as conversation. So it could be commenting on somebody else’s post. It could be posing a question and not just like, all right, cool. I posed a question as my post for the day and walk away. If people start commenting, you want to engage and not just be like broadcasting.

This is a conversation. This is social. Building a community is a really big commitment and it’s important to, especially as the leader to not just do media and not just do social and just like react and stuff, but not post your leadership content, if you will, consistency is the name of the game.

With community. I think the best communities, especially in the beginning, it’s really a daily commitment. So if you actually get somebody who’s excited about joining this group. It’s probably best that they hear from you that day from their first post or when they join, you can send them a private message, welcoming them.

And then do that every day. In my experience I built a 10, 000 person Facebook group of. Course creators and web professionals who serve this market. And that was over the course of 10 years, but in the beginning, I was in there every single day. I had a rule that I would have nobody leave a post and not have a comment no matter what for me or the community.

So I was really committed to every single conversation and being consistent posting. And conversating on a daily basis. And as time goes on, I could scale back a little bit. I had team members get in and help facilitate in the conversations and the content. So I don’t, I’m not in there every single day like. I once was in my free community, but it was a huge commitment that I didn’t take lightly.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, I think some of that I can relate to is. The idea of not just posting in these communities, but also engaging in the social and having replies and. I forget what ratios are good. And I know Gary Vaynerchuk has a formula folks should look up. I think it’s called 8 cents or 10 cents.

Like you spend, you think of it like you’re spending pennies or maybe it’s 80 cents or something like that. He’s got some kind of math of but the basic idea is don’t just post your own stuff. If you’re on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, when the social media is like engaged with the community, answer questions. It’s important to not just answer questions about your own product or stuff you can sell. But like just be helpful in other ways to build trust and karma and affinity and stuff like that.

And I like your point about. Looking for your community where they already are, rather than trying to build something and bring them in. And I’m I think folks often either want to look for or build like the social network for blank. There are some, there are a few of those that are out there, but for almost every blank, Facebook is the social network for blank.

So you’re like, what’s the social network for car enthusiasts? Facebook, or Instagram owned by Facebook, something like that. It’s if they’re already on Facebook, meet them where they’re at is really useful. So I think when you’re building your own community when I’ve been building communities in the past, this has been the case.

And I think it’s true in some that I’ve, I’ve seen through our customers and stuff. We see that everything is support. People are going to use every communication channel for support, including your community that you built for them to talk to each other. They’re also going to ask support, like questions of you through that channel.

I think we mentioned this in an earlier discussion too. That’s like any way they can get ahold of you through a blog comment or a Twitter DM. Or they find your phone number and call you at two in the morning. Like they’re going to try to get ahold of you. And so that’s true in these communities as well.

And I know that we, so we. We struggle with that to just have our community and discussion forum devolve into another support forum. And what we do to combat that is we engage and redirect. So we don’t try to stop it. It’s going to happen, like it’s very natural and. It’s not every once in a while someone’s I don’t want to go through the official. I think I know better and not get faster support here.

But usually people are just, I’m here now. I have a question. I ask it. So allow people to ask questions and non support channels. Don’t try to like police that aspect of your community too much. And I think another tip there is to give the, once you’ve hit like a certain mass folks in the community. Give them a chance to talk about it amongst themselves before you come in as, the kind of know it all and say, here’s what I think.

And sometimes you’re surprised, like they’ll answer the question better than you would have. You’ll learn new things, like you don’t shut down the community to just make it like a really quick answer. And they feel good communicating amongst themselves. But sometimes it is like a kind of support question that only you can answer or you happen to be the only one watching in that case, like if you can give a short answer, like just a link, just one word answer, just one sentence answer, give it and move on.

Oh, I had a question. Here’s the answer. Cool. If it’s a more technical issue that like you would want to get on a call and coach them through. Or you need to follow up through some other. It means that you’ve set up for a support, just kindly remind people that like what the proper channel is for that.

And we get that, you use these phrases, like the best way to get help with that kind of thing is through this official channel. The fastest way is here. And and you can use this too. If you aren’t using that community for a kind of support. But people are still asking questions on Facebook or other social media, sprinkle in links. Back to your own community or the official community.

Thank you. If you’re in like a Facebook group that’s branded and has other goals, don’t, you gotta be careful about that. But if, push people back to your own community that you own. And then a side note here is to have a code of conduct. This is like a big topic that we could talk about forever too. But it feels related to this is like having a code of conduct.

About how folks should use your community, what they should and shouldn’t talk about. What kind of behavior will get you kicked out and enforce it. It can be tempting to try to have a very lousy fair attitude about things and it’s good to not crush the conversation and let it go. But if you let certain bad behaviors into your community. Like it’s going to be problematic and that’s another one where maybe we can share some examples of our codes of conduct that we use for our communities.

As a personal story the reason I’m thinking about this what happens, your discussion form becomes a support form is we went through that paid memberships pro support was originally like a, through a BB press online forum. Then we had the idea, let’s start a community forum for the folks to talk about like business issues and other things amongst themselves.

We’ll try to start a discussion. And we tried to. Participate every day. We weren’t going where people were like, so we weren’t on Facebook where there already was. We struggled to get the conversation going. And we were working on it, but even when it was going well, like eight out of 10 posts were just. They clicked the wrong button and posted support in the wrong channel.

Like it was very clear, like the support channel is right here and this is for non support things. We tried to enforce it no move here, go here. It was just confusing people. So we were like, we ended up shutting down the discussion community and we waited way too long to start it up again.

We have a version now that’s on Slack and going well. And we were motivated because we found like an unofficial forum on Facebook that we weren’t even part of that had hundreds of people and we’re like, someone else is running community. We should run one too. And now, so we, open that discussion forum and we’re doing a lot of the stuff you were talking about, the building community and being in there and spending the time for the whole team and just tackling the support issues because that’s a very common thing that’s happening with people who are trying to, build businesses and use tools.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think having the code of conduct. I just want to mention there’s this idea of having a safe space. So the main thing you want to do is protect your people. As a leader of the community, if somebody is, being insensitive or rude. Or any outside of your company values and a really negative way. You can pick them out of the community, particularly.

Any community, but the free community, there’s just no room for it. I see some folks get a little overly restrictive. When you join some Facebook groups, as an example, they’re often like, you can’t promote your own thing. No external links and it’s a, it gets a little restrictive. So I try to find the middle path of if someone like is helping somebody and says by the way. I actually have a business that does this cool, no big deal.

If somebody’s trying to answer somebody’s question and they drop a link to a resource that’s not ours, that’s. I’m not policing that. They’re not picking that out. It’s definitely a balance and something you have to learn by feel and a healthy community is like a, it’s a give and take. So you know, you’re figured this out well, when a solid community member will actually give more than they take.

Kind of like how we talk about email marketing, like value piece, and then maybe you pitch a product. So there’s like this overweight to being giving and helpful some to think about. And just one more pro tip is that. If you have an all star community member who’s doing really well in your community, doesn’t work at your company. You can deputize them and make them a moderator or ask them to do more. Potentially give them free access to your course, your membership, your software, whatever. Because some people just really shine in communities, both online and offline. And that’s a, it can be a real asset to your company.

Jason Coleman: It’s a good place to recruit from, even for more formal roles. And I think something I’ll say about that code of conduct that you touched on was. Making sure you preserve that open space for people to, so they can have discussions. And I think you might feel like if you’re writing code of conduct, don’t think of it as like we’re policing certain kinds of conversations just for the sake of it or because we don’t like it.

If you think there should be a goal for the forum. Have the water cooler random channel where you’re talking about, Netflix shows and stuff. Cool. But in the general section, it’s Hey, we’re all trying to build businesses here. Hey, we’re all trying to launch, courses here.

Hey, we’re all trying to talk about football here. There’s a goal for the community is if you keep that in mind. And then the second one is you want to encourage as much as possible discussion around that goal. That’ll guide you over the types of behaviors that draw away from if certain kinds of.

Yeah. Overly aggressive and, political or, different things that get posted, they discourage people from coming and participating. And that can guide you as you’re not picking I like these people, no, I don’t these people, I like this way of talking, I don’t this way of talking.

It’s I have a goal for the community, and if your discussion is pushing the goal forward, that’s good. And certain types of discussion that, like You know steal the air from the room and cause other people to be quiet. It’s you know, you want to handle that?

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about paid communities as like part of the product.

Like it’s in the pricing, it’s a line item on your features that community is included in your purchase. The big idea here is a concept I call finding the others. So if you’ve ever, and I guarantee that anytime anybody has had the experience of Oh I found my people, for me, I’ve run in like entrepreneur circles, climbing circles.

Dog sledding circles. I like find the others like, Oh, there’s these people that have the same interests and idiosyncrasies as me. That can be like a huge benefit and it happens for free in life, but it can also happen by design as part of a course. And often when you find a really good, kind of customer avatar, there’s actually like some negative emotion there, like loneliness or nobody understands me.

Or, I’m happy in my family or my friend group, but I have this like weird little obsession or hobby or interest or whatever, and then you find those other people that are like really into drones or starting companies or a certain type of fitness workout or yoga or whatever it is, and there’s this like excitement and energy giving experience of finding the others.

There’s a saying in our industry when. You build a great community and it becomes like this real viable business and it’s growing over time. People will often say the subject matter expert will say they came for the content, the courses, the coaching, but they stay for the community.

We’ve talked about recurring revenue in another session and having a functioning community can be a big part of that. Like, how do you do that and create that finding the other’s experience? You can actually look to the offline world in the communities you participate in, whether it’s spiritual or sports or some kind of fitness thing or some kind of food thing.

There’s often this concept of rituals. A group will have their rituals, like at a sporting event, there’s a series of events. If you do religious things, there’s like these series of events that happens. So like creating rituals in your community can be very helpful. I was in a community once where, I think it was once a month there was a post in a group about what are your top three wins?

And the community members, the most engaged members would be like, I accomplished one, two, three, then the other people would do it and then they would comment on everybody else’s thing. And it was a big celebratory thing. That was a really strong ritual. The other thing you can do is in terms of finding the others, there’s going to be like, you’re the leader of your program or whatever, but these other leaders are going to emerge in the community, maybe with like sub subject matter expertise, like some kind of specialty, or they’re particularly good.

And they’ve become so obsessed with your content that they know what you would say. And they’ll answer on behalf of you or Oh, check out. His training on this, or, Jason has a concept around not using exclamation points here. Here’s why you should not use exclamation points too much in your copywriting and stuff like that.

And then you can like, as the like community leader if that, if there’s an untapped resource in your community, a helper, and somebody asks a question and you can be like humble, this is where you’re the guide and not the guru. Which we talked about in another session, is you can be like, Hey, here’s a couple thoughts on that question you just asked, but we actually have this community member, Sally, over here, who really knows this aspect really well, and you tag her, and she comes in and helps, so you’re conducting your community like an orchestra.

And then the other thing that happens when you build a strong community, it’s working, and that’s great, but one of the challenges that presents As part of your, the community aspect of your product is particularly if you have some long time members, they become power users. And they’ve been through all your material.

They love it. They’re here. They’re maybe at the next level of your training or whatever. So you get the graduate students mixed in with the freshman class. And sometimes the new people feel a little overwhelmed and it actually makes their imposter syndrome worse. So they’re like, Oh my God, all these folks in here are already so advanced in mind the right place.

I don’t want to look immature or I don’t know what I’m doing and stuff like that. So design around that, have a process for. Welcoming new members, making sure they feel welcome and seen, and set the expectation, particularly with your advanced users in the community that like, Hey, there’s an expectation to help the new people coming up.

Kind of like that little brother, little sister kind of thing. And I just want to mention that Jason and I are here as business partners because we met at some. Paid and free communities, events, pop up events, and things that happened over the years. We got to know each other by investing in paid and free communities.

It’s amazing. What happens is when you have a strong paid community. I’ve seen it in my free and paid communities where members become like. They do business together, potentially all the way up to business partnerships, so communities can be really powerful and focus on this concept of helping people find the others.

And I just want to spotlight a great book on this topic called The Business of Belonging. I forget the author’s name, but it’s something to check out to, dig deeper into this concept of intentionally designing community.

Jason Coleman: David Spinks.

Yeah. So the author of that business of belonging, how to make community your competitive advantage by David Spinks. So that was the book you were thinking about. I’d like to put a pin in a couple of things. One, like you talked to, we met at an in person event and we do so much work online. The majority of what we’re doing and we’re talking about is online communities.

And we even stressed how that’s amazing. Cause there’s, thousands of people for every niche. Around the world, but if you can get in person, there’s something about even if it’s just with some of those like key people who come up out of your community on a small scale, or you tag along to another conference, let’s all meet up at this other thing.

Like we did through WordPress events. Meeting in person is just obviously like another level and another level of attachment and friendship and, honestly, that, that happens with folks in your community. And then another part of the we talked to how like the free community, you can think of it as marketing.

It can be used as marketing for products. And then you specify like the paid community as a product. I found that’s important. And as we’re building up this community that we have now, which is free, but eventually have a pay component, I think about it like we have a bigger team. So there’s literally like a marketing team and a product team.

And because the marketing folks have communication jobs and. Online communities where you’re talking feels like a communication activity, the same people who do like marketing and sales are like leading the community. They have this like skill set that transfers, but we have to be careful about that.

It’s actually like a different, when the community itself is the product it’s a different skill set. And you’re like, you don’t have to sell anymore. I’m already here. You have to deliver. We, we potentially should have the same way in our, when we develop other products and, sprints or quarters or.

Sessions that we plan, what are we going to do, how are we going to improve it? We’re going to add features. So having that same mindset of we’re building the product itself and it will help you I think, really engage in a community in a constructive way to make it better.

What is the goal of the community? How do we make it better? What do we, we changed? And not that, marketing people are great and obviously like they communicate well, but you’re not just, you’re not marketing to them. They’re already there. Another issue that comes up with these paid communities is I don’t know, you call it like the chicken and egg situation.

So there’s a few tactics to, to help with that. And what’s, I guess a, another big idea to think about the spotlight’s a reason why these paid communities are useful, so that we, you can build content that’s one to one. That’s like coaching, like we’re talking together. Or one to many, that’s like maybe like a paid course and video that they watch and you distribute or through a newsletter.

Or you can have this kind of many to many integration, interaction with your users where they’re talking amongst themselves. And that’s also value that they get. So that’s the main value. That’s one of the values that folks can get out of the community. Maybe it is the main value, like that the people are talking amongst themselves.

And, but that needs a critical mass of people in there talking to make it, but then, and it’s the what is, it’s someone’s number, someone’s law for as the community gets bigger, it gets more valuable. But how do you do that in the beginning when you don’t really have anyone in there if you’re trying to build something new?

So a couple of tactics I’ve seen work are free trials for paid communities. And so either start up and say, everyone’s welcome to come. And at some point you say, Hey, we’re going to be free for the next three months and then we’re going paid. Probably better if you can do it up front as much as possible.

So people know, and it’s like a trial. So perhaps they purchase your course. They do the course, they get dumped into the community in some sense. And you’re like, Hey, you can hang out here for three months and then it’s X dollars per month. And that gives them time and give them some tasks and motivations to participate in the community, send them on a quest rituals.

I love you talked about rituals earlier. It’s so such a powerful psychological thing for humans. And so then they get addicted to the community and it’s not a lot of money or it feels like a good value for them and they stick around. Another thing I’ve seen that’s pretty cool as a way to get people into a pay community is that you can pay to get in or there’s some way to get in for free, either because you’re like a VIP or you seed it with certain people or like the first 200 are free and then you cut off.

One of the more clever things I’ve seen is Ian Castle, who has a community that talks about small cap stock investing. It’s called Micro Cap Club, and I’m not sure if he still does this, but he has like a, it’s quite, it’s investing at a high level. It’s a pretty expensive community to get into.

But folks can get in for free if they provide research. So I, I don’t know if he does it anymore, but it’s very clever. It was like either pay a thousand dollars or whatever the price was. Or if you give us five pages of research on a stock of your choice and we like it, we’ll let you in for free. So it’s Oh, like either you’re paying to get in or you’re volunteering to get in.

You could think of clever variations on that. And I’ll just finish these are some ways to build a paid community from scratch. And like a warning is that I’ve always seen this a couple of times and we have, we should get this guy on the talk about it because it’s wow, you made this work, but I’ve rarely seen at work where someone built a paid community for someone else’s community.

Like they have to be part of that community and also like in a pretty deep way, like already connected. So they know everyone or they’re like the ideal avatar. So they just build it for themselves and then make sense. Usually it’s a very extroverted person who can make all the connections and encourage people to join.

Sometimes you’ll see a community and you’re like, that’s a cool community and they have money and I can build this for them, or it’s adjacent to mine. I’ll build it and try to get people to come and there’s something about that. Like it, it’s just, it’s harder if you’re not building it for yourself.

Chris Badgett: And I know we’ve been talking a lot about consistency and showing up, but you can test this idea by doing a pop up community. Just have a one time event as like a market test. It could be an in person conference. It could be. Like a special workshop that involves working together. I remember Jason and I were at an event together called Cabo Press that our friend Chris Lemma put on.

And I think I went the second year it happened, and then I went, I believe, five more years after that. I enjoyed it so much. It was once a year pop up mastermind retreat in Cabo, Mexico. With a really interesting format. Like the sessions were in pools, half the day was scheduled. Half wasn’t some like lunch group seating assignments or whatever were assigned, other things were free form.

It was a really well done community, but it wasn’t like something that recurred every day or anything like that, it was like an annual event pop up event for a certain type of customer avatar. And that was just a great experience. And I remember when Chris said that. The first time he ran it, he didn’t know if anybody would come and 10 people came and then I went on year two and 20 people came and then on year three there were like 60 people and now he has a, like a application.

He’s always done it by application because he really wanted to protect like the want to make sure the right people were coming. It wasn’t just something that like anybody can come if you pay me, this is for this specific type of person. So he had his screening mechanism. At LFTR LMS one time I brought in a subject matter expert in instructional design and like creating MVPs, minimum viable products, where we they did the workshop.

I just held the space and we were using a software tool called Miro for groups to collaborate together. And we had a couple of people we built, platforms for and help them flesh out their idea as a group over the course of three days. That’s called a bootcamp. And it was a great experience, but it wasn’t like we were committing to doing that every month.

And it was, you’re getting on this treadmill of commitment. So think about you can test community in the same ways as you can pre sell and test other things without the recurring commitment. And let’s talk about community design and management.

Jason Coleman: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: There’s a saying. I like to say about community, which is if you build it, they will not come.

It’s not about getting a community software. Like I signed up for a Facebook group or I use, I have installed the Lifter LMS social learning plugin. I now have a community. It’s true. You do, but you built the house or you’ve scheduled the thing, but are people going to show up or are they going to keep showing up?

I think of it as like holding space, like you really have to, this becomes a part of your life. You have to lead it. And you got to make the space for it. You got to protect it. And in terms of leadership, what I mean by that is you this is one of those lead by example things. And you got to post useful content.

You have to like actually be social. You have to like help and highlight the people that are really outstanding in your community. If, like a spammer comes in or somebody’s behaving inappropriately, you have to kick them out. You have to protect the community. And I think it’s also cool to be human in community.

Like it may be like a professional business related community or athletic advice or health related advice community. Let a little bit of the humanity and sometimes you’ll see community members support each other, if something bad happens or helps, they might celebrate a birthday, even though they’re not, they’ve never met in person or anything like that.

And in terms of community design and management. I’ll talk about Dan Martell’s SaaS Academy community, which was really well done. He had a Facebook group. This was a two year program I was in for software founders. And there was courses and content and stuff, but there were also, the Facebook group was very active.

And like you said, Jason, Dan was very involved. He was in there, he was posting content, he was answering people’s questions. He was being that, doing that humble thing where you know what? We have this community member who’s really the best at subject matter X tag, that person, I think he called that signposting and it was a great experience.

And then the the in person events he ran big cities around the United States and Canada three times a year. We would fly out to that, stay in a hotel together the actual conference room had round tables, not just like chairs in a, auditorium style. And he would intentionally design, or he and his team design who sat with who for all three days.

So he’s trying to help develop relationships this person needs to meet this person, this person is at a similar revenue stage. This person is really good at marketing. This person’s really good at product. This person’s, really good at sales or whatever. And his group, his table groups were like, awesome.

I just remember being like, wow, I had that experience of finding the others. He had scaled his company, beyond his size. And he had a great team that was very much involved, like doing these duties of community design and management. Ultimately he brought in. It wasn’t just him talking from the stage, he had a top expert about pricing who we’ve both studied, Marcos Rivera.

That’s how I met Marcos. And he’s one of the top software pricing experts in the world. So Dan guided us to Marcos and held the space for that, knowledge transfer to happen.

Jason Coleman: Some of the key themes are like. Being intentional about it, being committed continuously working on it. I like how you pointed out being human in the community and especially for those like online, versions of community where it’s hard to remember that or you feel like you’re interacting or in a certain way.

But just remembering there’s a human on the other side of the screen will give you like the grace to work in moments, allow them to have mistakes and get closer. I mentioned outside these people, if you interact with them enough, they become your friends. Like we live like quite a bit of our life online.

And I don’t know, probably a few people like that. They’re just like, Oh, you’re friends with them. Yeah. Hey, when was the last time you saw him? I’ve never seen this person in my whole life. Like they have a frog avatar and I don’t even know what they look like or whatever. But yeah I’m, that’s a fan, that’s a core value of ours about being human that helps guide things.

Yeah, and maybe so something I’d like to talk about around designing your community because I’ve seen folks struggle with it is to make sure that you have a concentration of your discussion or put another way, don’t dilute the discussion. And what I mean by that is minimize the different channels or categories or forums.

Like until absolutely necessary. So if you’re familiar with a forum that can have multiple sub forums or Slack has multiple channels. Or you’re, if you’re using a posting mechanism and you have different categories what I would recommend is start with one channel or as few as possible.

And it’s okay if it’s noisy, you you want it to feel like there’s a lot of people here, it’s bumping, there’s a lot going on. If you spread that out across a bunch of categories too early, it becomes like the wild west and like I see like little dust balls flying by the, it’s like where are we?

And you also, if you have too many categories spread out too thin, too, it confuses people about where to post. They’re like, I have an idea, but I don’t know if that should be in general discussion or special discussion or, news. Is that news or is it discussion? I’m not sure. So let the new channels and forms or categories come up organically.

You’ll, if it’s noisy in that channel and there’s one channel where everyone’s talking, you’ll start, oh, this is a common thing, oh, every day. Or these people like to talk about this. We need a special, place just for this kind of conversation because you want to avoid what’s called like the paralysis of choice when you’re posting.

I mentioned there’s too many options. You don’t know where to put something. Another part of like channel category design that can throw people off as if you use. Like jokey, clever names. And we used to call this like a web design if your menu was like mystery meat. You remember that term?

You, everyone wanted to say what is this called? It’s called like Jason’s Garden. And you’re like, it’s your about page. People know these things are called about pages. Just say about, and that’s what the title of the link should be. It’s the same thing when you’re, labeling your categories and channels.

You want to use descriptive names that explain, what kind of conversation goes there and have a sticky post or some kind of note that’s this is what talks here and lightly police it, if you have a support channel or like a development channel and people start talking about development and you just quietly nudge them Hey, you should talk over here.

Yeah. Minimize the in jokes. You talked about how there’s like these like PhD level, after a while experts who are in your forum, they’ve been there and they start building like a cabal, like this, like force of nature. There are different, those folks who’ve been on your forum for a while are like, they’re, they work in the forums in different way.

And they have these like in jokes that develop. That can be a source of community, but you want to be conscious of like when new folks get onboarded that they don’t just get hurled into this maybe even just have a one pager, here’s all the jokes and terms, but avoid naming your categories after those things.

I guess like a personal story to like nail that home is I’m part of a, like a small investing group on a slack. And I think there’s six folks in there right now, but there’s 12 different channels. So it’s only six people talking, but 12 channels and and a lot of them do have this kind of like mystery meat name.

There’s stuff like the CFO’s office, rat race or big picture. And I’m often like sharing news about something and I’m like, is this big picture news? Or it’s about my job cause I found it while I was working or I take the CFO role in my business. So maybe it’s CFOs, like it’s confusing where they go and it’s confusing then even just literally the user experience of using the Slack app.

I get a notification, I’m like, that looks interesting. And if I click on it and Slack kind of breaks, it doesn’t take me to it. Then I go into the root of the form and I’m like, wait, I don’t know which channel that would have been in. And yet, so like you want to minimize that kind of like hunting and pecking and and this is like a small group of people who know each other, mostly offline anyway, and we’re willing to put in the work to talk to each other.

But if you’re trying to build a community in charge for access and grow it like this kind of friction is, it’s going to be counterproductive.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just another pro tip. If you just do have one channel, like in Facebook, as an example. You can use, you still have, just have one channel, but you can add a hashtag and you can train members like, Oh, if this is like your wins post, put hashtag wins on it.

Or when you start the thread, put the wins thread on it. So you can create some filtering with hashtags. And another cool thing is some communities are more serious or focused than others. And one cool one that we do is called the water cooler. So for example, in Slack. Whenever you start a Slack instance, it comes with a general channel and a random channel.

So Slack knows this, that like these two will happen no matter what, likely. So

Jason Coleman: When I said one channel, I was thinking the one channel and the water cooler general random channel. Yeah. Yeah. It’s important.

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If you’re like if it’s really serious, you want like the subject matter to really stay focused in the general channel, you can use that random channel or that water cooler is the, not junk drawer, but like everything else over here, personal life over here.

If you’re like really on mission and you want to keep your main channel or main key channels really focused. Let’s talk about online versus offline communities, in my opinion, and experience as both a user or a member of communities and also a creator of communities, I think hybrid is the best where you have some offline and some online, now it’s really hard if you.

Sell training courses and coaching all over the world to create an in person event. But if you can, or at least do it in your home country, or if you’re big enough in your own city or geographic region I highly recommend it. You can all, one thing you can do to add an offline community, if you’re like small and you’re not sure if you can pull it off is you can actually tag on to an existing offline community that.

Your people are already likely going to. There could be like a professional conference that happens for the industry that your people are in, or maybe it’s a sporting event or something, so you can just like, either right before, during, or after, it could be as small as like a two hour let’s meet up at this location.

Grab some drinks or some food and, just get together and chat and meet each other in person. It can be that simple. So there’s ways to hack your way into the momentum of where these people are already hanging out. And that’s why it’s good to be clear on who your customer avatar is.

And you can. You can also test communities. So similar to marketing and doing pre selling and things like that. It’s good to run some tests. So you may think that your main community is in a Facebook group, like that’s pretty good guess. But there may be this other opportunity that you don’t know about crypto people are on discord a lot.

Techie people typically are working in Slack for their company, so you could have just like another Slack group. They’re already in Slack, so you’re right there. There’s all kinds of different ways to think about it. I do like the idea of staying focused, but it’s good to test. And one way you can do it is just test yourself as an individual.

Join somebody else’s community that has the same avatar, see how active it is. over there. And sometimes you will find oh wait, I could have two communities, or maybe my community’s migrating over here to this platform. I might want to try that. I might want to try having it on my website and see if I can make it work.

So it’s okay to do some tests, but I definitely recommend not. Just finding as many community platforms as you can and starting them all at once is too much to manage. It’s also not the end of the world to shut down one with heads up like, Hey, we’re, this community is moving here. You mentioned earlier you were on a forum and you, I think shut that down and moved over here.

We actually started at Lister LMS with a BB press forum as well, decided that it was better. Through a support ticket system and our live calls and things like that, our office hours. But I want to tell a story about the Lifter LMS community. Like our main original, customer avatar is a DIY course creator, coach, subject matter expert.

That’s where trying to wear all these five hats we’re talking about in this training. But what I noticed is no matter what I did. This other avatar was always here, which is, I build websites for clients, the, the WordPress professional, the agency, and then within that avatar is also on Facebook.

But within that, the people that were more engineering developer focused, they did not like Facebook. They weren’t that engaged with it. So what we ended up doing was testing out Slack channel, a developer community on Slack for Lifter LMS, and then that became like the developer spot and like the conversations are so different.

What’s happening over in the developers versus in the Facebook community. And to your point earlier about, marketing isn’t always the best to facilitate the product side of community, what is happening is like the marketing folks are better with the Facebook side, but the actual Lifter LMS engineers, the developers are engaging more in the developer community.

So it’s interesting how you get, you can try to control community, but it’s also just going to happen. Like you mentioned, there was a. Community about your product, a Facebook group that you or none of your team were even in and you found it and then you joined the community about your product.

It’s funny.

Jason Coleman: We’re like,

Chris Badgett: this is cool. Can we join?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, that was pretty awesome to discover. It made me feel good. It was like, wow, there’s like hundreds of people working on this thing. I don’t, I still don’t know what the status is though. We’re competing with them, but they’re on Facebook.

We’re on Slack. One thing I liked about your like the Lifter LMS developers community is it had a test or like a form you had to fill out to get in.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jason Coleman: And Discord does this really well. They have these tools to build these like checkbox mazes. You have to go through to make sure you get it.

And Facebook groups will have questionnaires. You have to fill out an application process. I know I’m paid memberships, pros directory, or we have an approvals. Plug in and there’s ways to do that. That’s that’s an interesting tool and especially for these like online offline community hybrids where and we’ve seen some crazy ones like you have to live in one of these like 12 houses to be in the community.

So you had to prove you live there. We were like talking with someone. Over like the technical challenges of that. But yeah, it’s I find like the honor system goes a long way of just ask, you can ask people, we have an alumni association, Facebook group, and one of the questions is what year did you graduate?

And people like don’t answer or they don’t, it’s like they could, it’s very easy to make something up, just pick a random year. But people don’t do it. And then you’re like, you can filter on that. Like they definitely aren’t alumni if they don’t remember what year they graduated from or chose not to fill it out.

It was like an automatic spammer or something. Yeah. and that’s good enough. And then you police it retroactively if people come in and they’re not actually like for these I’ve seen lots of these communities that are focused on like a physical space or like the, mountain association or homeowners association or something like that.

And you want to make sure, or even on professional associations have applications are you actually a nurse? Are you actually a police officer? Another thing that comes up in my communication with these kinds of offline communities that are coming online for the first time. And I thought we could chat about it a bit is I remember having customer interviews with a bunch of these and the same conversation kept coming up where they would say, what I really want is a place for my members to be able to collaborate.

And I’d be like, Oh, cool. Like collaborate on what? And they often like, couldn’t really answer to Oh no, just like collaborate. I was like what does that mean? And I think a lot of times I. Back then I have a guess, but I was like, I really don’t know, they, a lot of people talk about collaboration, and it depends on the context of the organization, but I’m like, I think I I don’t know what it means, or is it like this weird buzzword that people feel like they have to have?

But one thing I do realize is it’s a kind of, a lot of them are part of an association where there’s one person who does all the work there, it’s a, it’s like a nature preserve and there’s people have membership and some people donate and some people are members because they bought a brick on the path or something.

But there’s really one person who organizes and maintains it all and does all the work and maybe what they mean by collaborate is get more people to help out here. And I was like, and I don’t actually have the answer for that. I was like, I don’t know how to have technology force people to participate more.

That’s a really tough question. I don’t know if you have no tools about that. And the other thing I could come up with then briefly is like in like a board situation, that same kind of thing that comes up sometimes one person is handling the technology and like they want to talk with each other about things.

And that’s almost Oh, I want to train them on how to use Google meet to or like a kind of web conferencing software to talk online and how to use Google docs or some other system to keep track of notes. So these are maybe like ideas for how to productize that, like within our scope for some of our customers when they, but I was curious, like if that came up with you, like what do folks mean by collaborate?

It seems like this fuzzy term people use. And these challenges of like offline communities, like trying to get more participation and like collaborate through online communication.

Chris Badgett: It can be unhealthy when the idea of collaboration is I want more people to work for free for me. Yeah. And I think this comes to that holding space and leading the community, setting expectations around.

All right, I want you to, you’re here, you can ask for help, but, for every ask try to help three people or just try to help one on one, like even the balance in the universe. Yeah. So it doesn’t become like platform. For where everybody’s just trying to take, cause then it’s not a healthy community.

Yeah. Do you remember like early

Jason Coleman: MIR, IRC forums and you would like share files. It was like you were a leech and you had to upload so many files before you could take. I’ve seen that and I’ve definitely seen in codes of conduct for communities. They talk specifically about like how to give back and give them back in certain ways or helping out.

If you’ve been here a while, help out the new folks. Make sure you do that. Like they encourage it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And it’s sound like a Reddit, I believe you can’t do a post until you’ve commented a bunch of times. So they’re like getting you to, help or contribute. Before, posting your own thing, let’s talk about other people’s communities.

If you’re a subject matter expert, yeah, you’re trying to build a thing, but you’re likely not in a vacuum. There’s existing other communities around your idea, either very closely or tangentially related by communities of where people are before they’re ready for your community or where they might go after.

So there’s this idea like in marketing is an example where. You can leverage other people’s audiences. And so that means even if you have zero email lists, as an example, you can go to somebody who does have a big email list, create like a training or a free resource. And you take their stage and contribute to their community and maybe get Some people over to your community or your offer.

The way I think about this is just the general idea of being a helper give before you get, so for example, even in the Lifter LMS space, I’d be in like a general, let’s say WordPress community. And someone’s literally having trouble with one of my competitor’s softwares. And the question they’re asking is not like exactly about their software, but I’m like, okay, this is a website that a competitor has, but I actually know the answer to what this person is asking.

Like, where should I host my videos or whatever? I’m still going to help them. So giving with no expectation of return is super powerful. Joint venture partnerships are a really interesting one. And I’ll tell a story about that in a second, but what a joint venture partnership is in a perfect world is you have an audience or community.

This other person have an audience and community. They may be exactly the same or similar overlapping. And it’s like an exchange, okay, I’ll do a webinar for your community, you do a webinar for my community, we’ll both email our lists we’ll invite the people in, and there can be an offer at the end of the webinar to get the free thing or sign up for the paid thing.

And those can work really well. So an example that I do at Lifter LMS there’s two, the two audiences of the course creator and like kind of the website building professional. There’s some people that I do joint venture partnerships with that have like really just the course creator.

They’re not like techies at all. And I have a bunch of techies that you know, but also course creators. So we’re not, our products are not in competition. This person is selling. Coaching and courses and stuff. I’m more in the software side, but we have a lot of overlap in your audience. So once a year, we basically do an email exchange and email to whatever the the main offer is and some, something like that.

And we’ve, this person I’ve met with, I’ve been, I’ve gone offline and I’ve been to their house and your home. I’ve been to mastermind events that they’ve put on it. And we just developed. Partnership, we’ve become friends, we ask each other for just business help from time to time.

And we have this kind of business relationship where we just do this exchange once a year and it’s, I’ve probably done that for six or seven years at this point. So that’s a joint venture partnership. Then there’s affiliate partnerships, which are a little more straightforward in the sense that you can set up an affiliate program where.

If somebody promotes your course or your membership they get a unique link that’s trackable and there’s automated systems for handling this. So they can promote your program to their community the affiliates, the affiliate system man measures and tracks that link click. And if ultimately within 30 days or whatever, that person ends up buying something.

That person earns an affiliate commission, which in the core space is typically anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of the transaction amount. So that’s a way to introduce an affiliate program to your online education platform. It’s a way for other people to essentially sell for you to their audience. Collaboration point.

Story with LFTR LMS but around the same time as we introduced our Facebook group, there was another popular software called WP Fusion, which connects your website with LFTR on it and other popular software to CRM companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and so on. And we’ve integrated our softwares together.

They work really well together. I help out in the WP fusion Facebook group. Jack, the founder of WP fusion, whenever somebody has like a marketing automation question or whatever, he comes over to our Facebook group, he helps out. So it’s just like this partnership where we’re leveraging each other’s community, but it’s a triple win.

It’s good for, me, it’s good for Jack and most importantly, it’s good for the user. They’re getting the help from that, that outside expert and the outside expert is also now getting exposure, potentially new customers. We recommend each other’s software. We both use each other’s software.

It’s just a strong partnership where two communities are working for the benefit of all.

Jason Coleman: So many good options there for how to think about these other communities. And you talked about adjacent communities that come before, after in the journey. And I think that like a phrase is like, what’s next is.

Is this one that can be used in a sense of if someone takes a course and at the end of it, they’re finished and you don’t have a community, if you don’t have your own, what’s next, it’s what’s next, maybe you pass it off to another community that, and you become an affiliate of theirs. Or you give someone sales leads for an even bigger course, or you could be on the other end of it where you reach out to some of these other products and communities.

That have that kind of what’s next moment, like they finish this thing, they graduate from that, but that person doesn’t serve that user anymore or have an upsell. And but you do, so it’s a good way to through these affiliate relationships. Cross pollinate between products and communities.

Yeah, I’m,

I’m thinking about interacting with community communities like Reddit in the subreddits in social media and places, or if you’re in someone else’s Facebook group and you, he gave some of the polite ideas around how you should interact there, like you should be helpful, you shouldn’t, always be promoting, you help people, even if they’re your competitors.

Another one. Like a way to think about it when you’re interacting in these communities online is to be yourself and very clearly make it clear, like who you are. I think there can be a temptation, for example, when you’re on a subreddit and someone says, what’s the best LMS to almost and you’re like, I have one to just like almost pretend you’re someone else or just answer and not be clear that you’re the owner of the product that you just linked to.

Because it, that feels more potentially more authentic to the moment or it’s like awkward to out yourself, but I think that’s troublesome if you don’t declare your biases and aren’t clear about who you are, these like internet sleuths will go through your history and be like, wait a second, this is Chris Badgett, you like, and they’ll think you’re up to shady stuff, even if you just felt a little awkward, you don’t want to make it awkward.

You just had a good answer for someone. So it’s almost yeah. Be a little obnoxious about it. I have a bias cause I’m Jason Coleman, the owner of this thing, but we have a really good product that answers that are really good blog posts that answers this question. Even on, on some sites, if they allow it in a signature or some point, put it in the footer, use your clear, your real name, stuff like that.

Declare that you’re biased about what you’re, how you’re responding. And I think people appreciate like on something on like Reddit where you can upvote and downvote. I’m always worried when I do this, it’s like, all right, I’m biased because I own this thing, but we have a really good solution.

Here’s how it works. And that, I think I’m worried people would downvote it. Cause yeah, you can’t trust that. There’s this, like in some of these forms, like Reddit knows the bias is there and they’re sensitive to it and they don’t want to talk to you. They want to talk to other people. But if you’re there and you’re like, Hey, I’m biased, but here’s, and you’re just useful.

I’m surprised you don’t get as many downvotes and people who know about your product might upvote it. And so people respect the honesty. So like another case of this is paid memberships pro, we have a bunch of free open source plugins and a lot of them are hosted on wordpress. org and wordpress.

org had their own support forum system and we had ours. And this has always been a little bit of a challenge because you. If you don’t support people in wordpress. org, it actually affects like your ranking, your search ranking, and there’s no way to disable it or just say, we don’t support it here.

We support it over here. They’re like, Hey, if you host on wordpress. org, you have to support on our system too. So actually there’s a support for them and I would pay people to monitor that and answer questions. But it’s still from time to time, as this happened, at least a couple of times, someone would give us a negative review either on wordpress.

org itself, or even on a third party type review site. And they’d be like, Paid memberships pro charges for support and they wouldn’t answer my question, but I went to WordPress and WordPress answered my question and I’m like, Oh, like WordPress didn’t answer your question. Like I paid someone to answer your question.

Like that person works for me, that person is part of, as part of paid memberships pro and it just wasn’t clear because it’s called wordpress. org. The website is a big WordPress logo everywhere and folks who, beginners mindset, they’re interacting with it. They’re confused about how they’re getting support.

So they just, all they saw was. When you go to slash supported payment, just pro we offer paid support. And now we, that forced us that feedback to we should more prominently focus on our free support. And especially now that we’ve moved outside the. org repo, we have to make our free support more prominent.

So we don’t lose people who just think you have to pay. But yeah, but what we did, so that’s one thing we did was like, Hey, made our phone free support through our our email and contact forms more clear. But we also on wordpress. org would put in our signature every time we help someone, Jason Coleman, owner of Paid Memberships Pro or your title at Paid Memberships Pro to try to make it a little more clear Hey, this is a Paid Memberships Pro person interacting with you.

There’s so many benefits to just like. Actually being yourself and being clear about who you are and being one human being per account rather than playing games and trying to, be a character or pretend you’re someone you’re not.

Chris Badgett: And that completes our session on community. And if you enjoyed this, I just want to say I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Jason, and this has been a great conversation around community.

I’d encourage anybody who listens to this to think about. All the five hats in addition to the community hat, the expert, the entrepreneur, the technologist, the teacher, and the community builder. And if you’re really into this stuff, you’re not alone. So in many ways, Jason and I are really into this stuff.

We’ve been in it for over a decade. And finding the others, like we found each other through the internet. So if this is your niche and you’re feeling the vibe from, of this community you’re not alone. I just want anybody who hears this conversation to really think about that.

And Jason, I appreciate the great discussion we’ve had. Yeah, thanks.

Jason Coleman: Awesome.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.