◯ PHASE 1 – Why you NEED an online community in 2024
→ 1.1 – Introduction: audience building & communities
→ 1.2 – Owning your traffic, platform & data
→ 1.3 – Selecting the right platform
→ 1.4 – Integration to your current funnel
If you already own a community, this phase might be a bit boring but don’t skip over it. You might learn something you didn’t know yet.
Who is an online community good for? Quick answer: everyone.
The caveat is that you really have to believe in your brand and the longevity of what you offer. If your sole goal is to chase sales, a community isn’t for you. But if you stand behind what you’re building and want to really connect with potential customers/prospects, really anyone can have one regardless of your business.
In the next phase of the training, I will be sharing different online communities.
The problem with most people today is they treat their followers as cashcows without creating genuine connections. This may be good for short-term gains, but in the long-run you will have created no real impact to people and will get bored of the capped income.
The other truth is that you’ll profit WAY less in the long-term.
Let’s take Hormozi for example.
He’s richer than your favorite guru but you don’t see his ads 24/7, you don’t get a DM from his setter, and his content looks like he’s doing it for fun.
Moreover, a few months ago when he dropped $100m Leads and had a webinar with 200,000 people watching, he could have announced ANY program from $1000-10,000 and printed MILLIONS, not just a few but rather a few hundos of them.
But he’s in it for the long run, and dropped a little $30 book instead.
In the webinar, every strategy he broke-down and related to people watching. Rather than explaining why you should do something, he broke down how it works (ex: cold email) and let the viewer understand why its so good.
Watching his content provides genuine value to people’s lives and he’s not here to tarnish his legacy with a new offer every other month.
Now am I saying you should follow the same strategies he does and give away everything for free? No. Don’t do this.
But you do need to be seeing the BIGGER PICTURE. What I am saying is that, by trying to provide true valuable and GOOD content to your audience and not just posting for follows and quick sales, you’ll position yourself as an authority who could sell them anything.
This means that by giving value overtime you generate ATTENTION, and warm up your audience properly so they constantly consume your content.
And by giving them genuine value, people will in-turn level up their own game, and be able to financially pay you more since its like they are in debt to you.
One thing I HATE about the online space is people trying to target solely people with X amount of money. Instead, you should have something for everyone: a low, mid and high-ticket pricing offers.
Because with this you’ll be building a ladder where the “low-ticket boys” can eventually become high-ticketers, regardless of what country or tax bracket they’re in and you sell to them for life on a recurring basis.
The best way to do this today is by launching a community where your audience can really get to know you and what you’re about. And where you can communicate with them directly, not just through posts.
For most of this training we’ll be using “Discord” and “community” synonymously depending on the context. You’ll understand soon why that platform is Discord.
The following might be a basic premise to many of you, but a necessary discussion regardless.
The reason so many of the services we use are “free” is because instead of paying through monetary means, you and others are paying with data.
By signing up on a platform like Linkedin, you’re exchanging your personal data for advertisers to be able to acquire your information and pay for the platform to keep running “for free”.
That’s why when Elon bought Twitter, and a lot of advertisers cutback or left he introduced a Twitter blue subscription to cover previous revenue lost.
More on that, wether you supported Elon buying the platform or not, it leads me to my next point.
The social media platforms we rely on are ever changing and fickle. A new owner tomorrow means brand new rules, and changes that could make or break your business. Political changes even ban access to using the platform.
For many of you, the following screenshots may be a source of trauma, so I apologize in advance.
For those who aren’t familiar, this is what the kiss of death looks like when you have any sort of presence online.
Waking up to a permanently banned account after generating thousands of dollars, followers and views. Usually for no reason at all. Your only option becomes to harass the world’s worst support teams that have ever existed and submitting endless appeal forms that may or not even be read by a human being.
Or, starting over, posting into the void and praying it never happens again (even though you don’t even know why it happened the first time).
This is why an online community is necessary for everyone.
By using a platform like Discord with no fyp or feeds, the censorship is little to non-existent, since there isn’t an algorithm policing what should be posted or agenda’s deciding what gets seen. You get to control what goes on and also don’t have to compete with your competitors on news feeds or media buyers placing ads.
Meta has many of you by the balls and losing an Instagram account would be one of the worst things that could ever happen to you (side note: if you ever do get banned, hit up your boy and I will help you).
Anyway, that’s why you’ll hear many people preach the importance of building an email list. Which leads me to my thesis of calling online communities an “email list on steroids”.
If you keep the community engaged and provide value, I can guarantee to you that you’ll be getting WAY more traffic than any newsletter you’re running.
Let’s crunch some numbers: A good open rate for emails is 20-30%. That means the other 70% goes unopened and you have to compete with spam & promotions folders.
Let’s compare that to one of our managed Discord communities with just under 10,000 members:
5290 readers (viewers) in the last 28 days
Within this month, over HALF the community has checked out a channel or two.
Now I’m not saying an email list is a waste of time, but rather you should using it in conjuctation with an online communities to maximize eyeballs.
That’s why some of the biggest brands today have cracked this code and are now leveraging online communities:
If you haven’t noticed thus far, we do have a clear bias for Discord. And that’s not because we are being paid or have any incentives to be using it.
As a community building agency, we’ve extensively tested where people should be hosting their online communities.
Excluding Discord, the big four are: Skool, Slack, Telegram, Facebook Groups. Below will be a breakdown of each platform, and why I believe Discord is still king in 2024:
Here’s how Discord wins:
- Far more customization for branding
- Ease of use for onboarding and joining
- Completely free to use and grow
- Without a doubt the best mobile app
- Consistent new updates for a better user experience
- The most used platform (relatively speaking, not counting Facebook overall)
And the biggest reason: Discord’s API.
For those of you who aren’t technical (like me) an API is like a “middle man” between the application and your needs. Meaning you can use the company’s features for your own intended uses. Think of what Zapier does between applications.
Ex: in combination with Twitter’s API, you can have a feed of tweets that go into a Discord channel every-time you post. This isn’t a native feature with Discord, but is doable with using custom code/bots.
The different possibilities of custom work you can do on the backend makes all the difference in terms of sales driven tasks (later in the training I will be diving into this further).
Here’s the REAL truth:
Most people DO NOT use Discord the right way and end up having a negative experience with it.
There is nothing wrong with Discord as platform, but rather people usually create terrible servers and offer no reason for it to be successful. It only works if you do it the right way. But lucky for you, this won’t be a problem since you’ve came across this course.
How does an online community co-exist and join your current working funnel? Let’s first explore a typical funnel that most online coaches use:
Most people’s funnel will look something like the above or be a derivative of it.
How and why should a community find its way in here? Well, if you have a platform where you have zero-competition and have your audience’s full attention, you can now leverage the same action tasks that you were already doing on other platforms, but you now have the community and can achieve even better results. The same way you sell on IG through Instagram stories or tweets? You would do that in your Discord too.
Here’s a NEW and improved funnel with the addition of community:
What we did was instead of making the final result selling to your audience and praying they buy again, we did 1 of 2 things: 1) Create a recurring revenue stream through a pay to access subscription community.
2) A better place for your ecosystem and where they can get to know you.
Instead of “reworking the wheel” you get to recycle your existing content and strategies meaning.
- Newsletter → also goes to the Discord
- Youtube video → promoted in the Discord
- Lead generation → collected from the Discord
- Appointment setting → contacted from/in Discord
So you still get to continue selling your high-ticket program, but also have a down-sell available for people who aren’t qualified, in the form of a subscription community for $30-200/mo.
Think about it for a sec. If you pitch someone on a $5k program, and they aren’t budging. What are you left with after the call? Bend on your price, follow up until hell or just lose them? F*ck that. With a down-sell like a subscription it will be a no brainer for them and you still keep them within your ecosystem.
BTW - if you’d like a custom made funnel for your offer, send me a DM with the word “Funnel” and we’ll send you a free one.
The next phase will be outlining how to craft your offers and what niche to select..
