Tom Ross shares actionable insights on building thriving online communities. He emphasizes the importance of understanding your ideal community member, combining both hard and soft metrics. Personal conversations can yield deeper insights than surveys. Strategies for pricing entry and attracting members are explored, alongside the emotional challenges of transitioning from free to paid memberships. Effective onboarding and moderation enhance engagement, ensuring members feel valued. Ross draws on his experiences to help others cultivate communities that are both fulfilling and sustainable.
Onboarding new community members should include clear instructions, a sequential path, and manual outreach to help navigate the community.
Converting community members to a new platform can be done through various channels, promoting clear value propositions and exclusive content.
Start by building a minimum viable product (MVP) community with a smaller group of founding members, then personalize engagement and outreach as the community grows.
Deep dives
Onboarding and Managing Content Overwhelm
When onboarding new members to your community, provide clear instructions and a sequential path for them to follow. Use features like pop-ups and designated sections to guide them. Additionally, consider manual outreach through direct messages to help members navigate the community. To manage content overwhelm, create short videos addressing common questions or challenges and make them easily accessible through a keyboard shortcut system.
Converting Community Members to a New Platform
To convert community members from one platform to another, promote the new platform through various channels like emails, social media, and direct messages. Provide a clear value proposition for joining the new platform, emphasizing the benefits and engagement opportunities it offers. Consider creating free content or resources exclusive to the new platform to incentivize the transition.
Starting with an MVP Community and Scaling
Initially, focus on building a minimum viable product (MVP) community with a smaller group of founding members. Leverage your existing audience to attract this initial group. As the community grows, personalize member outreach and engagement, ensuring each member feels valued and heard. Consider providing success stories and free content to drive further growth and word-of-mouth referrals.
The Future of Communities
Communities are gaining more importance as people seek interactive and meaningful connections. Platforms that support many-to-many interactions, such as Circle, Discord, or Slack, are popular choices. Community leaders should reverse engineer their platform choice based on the specific needs, preferences, and behaviors of their target audience. As communities continue to evolve, the focus will be on providing valuable and engaging experiences that foster deeper connections among members.
Creating Valuable Content to Sell Community
The podcast episode discusses the importance of creating valuable content to sell the idea of a community in a non-salesy way. The speaker emphasizes the need to showcase the knowledge and success within the community to attract wider audiences. Examples of effective soft-selling strategies mentioned include hosting clubhouse rooms and sharing success stories. The speaker also advises against setting an extremely low price for community membership, as it may lead to providing less value. Instead, they suggest starting with a more reasonable price to prioritize members and avoid resentment or burnout.
Determining Price Point and Providing Value
This part of the podcast explores the mindset behind pricing a community membership and the pressure to create content that reflects the price. The speaker recommends avoiding the strategy of starting with an excessively low price and expecting to increase it later. They argue for starting with a price point that reflects the value provided and suggests charging $50 per month for a community that offers individualized attention. The importance of setting revenue goals and reverse engineering the number of members needed to achieve those goals is discussed. The speaker encourages focusing on providing value, access, and convenience to justify the price and attract the target audience.
Tom Ross returns for the second of our two episodes about building online communities. In this episode, Chris and Tom discuss the things to focus on when developing and honing your community - asking who your ideal community member is, how to price entry for a paid community, and how to attract people to your community. Tom provides a deep dive into creating a comprehensive profile of your ideal community member, highlighting the need to consider both hard and soft metrics. He emphasizes the invaluable role of personal conversations with potential members, explaining how these dialogues can offer more profound insights than data from surveys ever could. After all, a community is driven as much by the people in it as it is by the person who has organized it. Creating an online community can be a long and complex journey, but Tom Ross has built up a fair amount of experience in the field and is sharing it here. Tom’s goal is to help people build communities that bring a lot of value to members, while also being personally fulfilling for the one running it.
