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building and indie business in the centre of venture capital I'm Alex Edmonds and this is the building and indie business podcast okay so this episode today that you will be listening to is how to run a community and the reason why I wanted to do this episode is because I had how to grow a community and I didn't talk about anything else about a community and so I'm going to be talking about the benefits of a community the problems that you will run into with the community the don'ts of community or random tips I'll talk about how to grow community and I'll talk about that last because I I have some new ideas or new things that I'm doing to grow community but I will talk about the old stuff just to give people a refresher and introduce it for people who are new to the podcast okay before we start the survey is in the show notes if you want to fill that out I really appreciate it thank you okay so the benefits of running a community for your podcast the first benefit is you get easy feed you can easily get feedback from your listeners you can let's say you have a telegram group you can say hey the episode is out now if you have any questions or feedback let me know and as soon as people see that and listen to the episode you can get feedback almost instantly or within 24 hours which is something you wouldn't be able to do if you didn't have a community built around your podcast okay another benefit of having a community is the members of the community can be your support system so when you're having problems with your podcasts or you're down about it um you can tell people in the community about your struggle with the podcast or whatever and they will help you out with your problems which is very nice to have the final benefit of a community is you can create online friendships and take those friendships to the real world so let's say you have you're traveling to a different city let's say you're traveling to New York if you have a listener in New York you can say on the podcast like for your announcements that you're headed to New York and if any of your New York listeners want to hang out with you get in contact with you and that way you're creating real friendships okay now to leave problems that you will have running a community okay the first problem that I've run into with my community is spam they're people that create accounts to send people links and that's all they do so they will send a link out to the community and they want people to click on it to make money so one way you can prevent people spamming the community is you insert a paywall to the community this adds an extra layer and some people some spammers might not want to pay to spam your community so one way to get real users around this is you can add them manually or give them a code that will bypass the paywall okay another way to avoid spam is make your most active users admins to the community and as soon as they see spam they can delete it as well and this creates less problems or it's something that you don't have to think about one less problem to think about okay another problem that I've run into which is not a big deal but I see it is people lurking the community and one way to handle lurkers is recurring posts so when someone is a lurker the reason why they are a lurker is because they feel like they don't have much to contribute to a community so you can give them examples too of types of posts that they can add and they can contribute so one example is a post about milestones so let's say you run a podcast community okay that's really interesting where I get that idea from anyways you run a podcast community or a podcasting community on one post one recurring post that you can do is milestones so every time you reach a milestone in your with your podcast you can post about it in that thread so types of milestones would be number of downloads total for your podcast or per pod cat or per episode so let's say if your episode reaches a hundred downloads that's one milestone that you could talk about one another recurring posts that you can do is weekly new episodes so have a thread where people can post their new episodes if they had a new episode that week okay you can also have a monthly thread to welcome new members of the community in that way those lurkers can view that thread and be introduced to new members and if they have something in common with a new member they they can interact with them okay the next recurring posts that you can do is ask members it have a thread asking members if they're having problems and if worker is having problems they'll want to share about it to to contribute to the community and have their problem fixed okay you can ask for advice specifically from someone you know is lurking and that way you're directly addressing them and they will feel the need to respond okay another way to fix your lurking problem is to share your threads on different platforms so share your thread from your community on social media and that way your your community will get more visibility and more people will come to your community okay on the final way you can deal with lurkers is gamification and so what gamification is is giving community new members points for contributing to the community and that way if there are lurker they might keep posting or post just post in general to um to gain points I don't really like this method though because it's kind of it's tricking the members or it's like a gray area to me at least so yeah that's one method another problem that you'll run into is people so the way you want to avoid problems with people or people in the community is by set an example for the type of conversations that will be that are okay in the community and the way you can do this is by being active yourself in the community or have a set example of conversations that you want in the community like penned in your community and that way people know what kind of conversations you can have okay so another problem that you will run into with people is they're they're inappropriate or they try to hurt they say inappropriate things basically for example I was in one community where someone was asking about their content not being viewed and they were asking about if other people see the trend in with their content and then someone was like oh is your content so garbage that your your content is being viewed less and I felt that was kind of out of line this wasn't my community so thank God so the way you want to deal with that is by messaging that person who's being inappropriate in private and seeing like hey that wasn't cool okay now on to the don'ts of a community um one thing you don't want to do when you're creating the cumin a community is making it difficult to for people to join so don't make them jump through hoops don't make them sign up through email and add their Twitter account add their Facebook account um just make it very easy try to make it one click to join okay another thing you don't want to do is spam members with emails from the community it's kind of annoying people don't like it they they'll delete the emails eventually as soon as they see them and they might that might discourage them from contributing to the community okay another thing you don't want to do is make members feel bad so if someone's new to your community and they asked a very basic question don't make them feel bad for not knowing that question just point them in the right direction of how they can get the answer to their question point them to a previous thread that answers that question when people join a community and you make them feel bad that discouraged is them from participating and when someone else from the community sees a person getting put down that discourages them from contributing to the community okay the next thing you thing that you don't want to do is promote an empty community so don't start promoting your community as soon as you create it what you want to do is you want to wait a bit wait for people to ask questions respond to questions and then you want to promote it like have a big launch okay random tips that I have the first tip that I have is email is the most inclusive so email is very straightforward you use your email which everyone has then they can join the community don't make them when other communities you have to give to create an account and then you join like you have to create a social media account and then join this is bad not bad but it's not it's not good because it adds an extra layer to join the community and with email you avoid all that okay some people may want to promote their stuff so have a section where people can specifically promote their stuff one thing I don't like about some communities especially the ones that are hosted on chats like chat forums or whatever I don't like when they're like we're in the middle of an interesting conversation and someone new comes in and then they're promoting their con I find it very annoying and just have a place where people can promote their stuff and that avoids that problem okay the next tip is have a place where people can donate and this is because it's expensive to run a community so don't if you don't want people paying for the community I just have like a section and that way when people ask oh can I donate you point them over there and you have their money yeah it's not a bad thing for people to donate their money don't worry about it okay the next thing the next tip I have is um immediately put ads on your community and that way you can monetize it as well same thing with the donations the types of ads that you want to have in the community is from companies that will benefit from your community or like more people in your community so I run a podcasting community you know this already so the types of ads that I would put on the community or like in the community in the community okay the types of ads that I would put in the community are ads for companies that would benefit from the creation of more podcasters so a microphone company a podcasting host things like that okay have a place where people can commit or submit feature ideas and that way you know what the community wants front like from within the community like features and stuff like that okay my last random tip is create an FAQ and this is how you avoid having to type the same exact questions over and over again when someone asks you the basic questions you just point them in the directions of the Franco frequently asked questions and if a question gets asked repeatedly edits of the frequently asked questions and you don't have to deal with it too much okay finally how to grow a community new stuff okay so the first thing that you can do to grow community is niche down and what I mean by this is choose a specific section of your community you're the type of community that you have of people so I run a podcasting community and so right now I'm focusing on people that have a technology podcast and that way I can post in like technology places or like forms other forms to get people to join the community I'm not focusing on every podcaster every someone doing sports someone doing comedy it's very focused in that way it's easier to get them to join the community because I can speak their language language in quotes okay um make it easier for people to join that's another one yeah that's another one I talked about that before so I don't really need to go over that again how to grow your community third tip interviews and this can be either you going out and being interviewed and talking about the community or you interviewing people in the community and talk I have them talk about how being in the community has benefited them okay directories so there are directories for communities and you should go out and look for those directories for the community or like a community's directory in your niche and that way anyone who's looking at those community directories can easily find your community on that directories website okay the final new way to grow your community is email this means have a newsletter put the community like a link to the community in that newsletter put the community a link to the community in your email signature and yeah that's the final one final point about email what I talked about in the last episode social media create a social media account for your community and then you can post the different threads in your community on your social media accounts and then people will see that stuff and join your community yes okay the next thing you can do is write and you write about how things related to the topic of your community so I run a podcasting community I've said this like four times this episode sorry and I write about podcasting and that way I can relate my writing to my community and so recently I wrote an episode I wrote a article and article about interviewing and I could I talked about open podcast and that way people can click on the link to open podcasts in the article and then join the community okay interacting with in other communities so in other communities podcasting might be like a little section and what I do is I go to those communities and I answer questions about podcasting and then I put a link to open podcast in my profile so that way people can see like my answers through their podcasting questions and they if they have any more questions they can join the community okay creating interactions so you want to create interactions within the community so when other people want to join the community and they're looking at it they see that open podcast is very much active because when someone looks at a community they meet they may be discouraged to join the community if they see that the community isn't really active okay the final way to grow a community is provide value and how you can provide value is by helping your community members in any way so let's say someone in open podcast doesn't know how to submit their podcasts to the podcast players the major podcast players what do you what I can do as the person who created open podcast is create a video that will show them how to do how to submit the pot their podcast to all the major podcasting players and that way on providing value to that community member and any other community member who needs help with that same problem because I can link them to the video okay that's all I have for running a community thank you for listening if you want to host a podcast and you don't want to go through the trouble of adding your podcast to every platform things like that you can host a episode of the open podcast community podcast send me the audio and what you want in the show notes and I will add it to the open podcast community podcast so if you're interested in that join the telegram chat and let me know and we could work something out thank you for listening have a nice day bye