Day 47: Using Online Communities

Today, we're going to talk about how you can leverage existing communities to market and grow your podcast or build your own community.

Steps for Skill Mastery:

1. Find existing communities
2. Be a valuable contributor
3. Build your own community

Step 1: Find Existing Communities

Look for existing communities online that are around your topic or niche. People are already talking about the things you are discussing inside those communities and you could be adding value to them with your podcast.

Activity: Create a List

Search through places like Facebook groups, Reddit, Quora, Forums, Blogs, Popular Influencers and find communities of people discussing your topic. Create a list of these communities.

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Now that you know where people are. It's time to help them by providing value.

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Step 2: Be a Valuable Contributor

When you find a community, you don't want to just spam them with your episodes. You want to be a valuable member of that community.

How do you do that?

Here is an example of how Ryan Helms of the Hustle to Freedom podcast providing value and promoting his podcast at the same time on Reddit.

If you are unfamiliar with it, Reddit is a huge collection of forums where people post about various topics and comment on other people’s posts. Currently, Reddit is the 5th most visited in the United States and it has the highest time on page per visitor of any website.

So, how can you use this platform to promote your podcast?

The answer…

Very carefully.

You see, the Reddit community is very anti promotion and advertisement. They tend to look down on anything that comes off as not providing true value. When Ryan decided to start posting on Reddit about The Side Hustle Journal, it didn’t take long for him to realize that writing about his product without providing a ton of value would be shunned.

So, instead of just scoring tons of posts looking for one to comment on or making self-promoting posts about your podcast, you need to approach it a bit differently.

He uses a tool called Notifier for this.

Notifier allows you to track certain words or phrases used in Reddit posts. You can track the word or phrase in the title or in both the title and body of a post. You can choose whether you want it to look for an exact match to a phrase or if a partial match should also produce a notification. However you decide to configure it, you will get an email or SMS notification when it finds a result that matches your parameters.

To make this clear, I’ll give you an example of how to use it.

Ryan has a notification built around the phrase “side hustle”. When someone makes a post with this in the title of the post, he gets an immediate email notification with a link to the post. When he gets this email he tries to quickly go into the post and read it to see if there is any way that he can provide value. Ideally, he would be able to provide value and reference the podcast, but that isn’t always possible. But, when he can add value and reference the podcast, he definitely will try to do it.

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Activity: Provide Value

Inside the communities you listed, start providing value by answering questions, being resourceful, and help people in the community with their projects.

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Good luck on your search. Sometimes you don't always find one that fits your podcast. In which case you may think about creating one yourself!

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Step 3: Build Your Own Community

Your listeners don’t want to just listen. They want to be part of something. If you can make them feel like they are part of a tribe or a movement, they’ll be much more likely to consume more of your content in the future, share it with friends, and even spend money with your business.

If you can't find a community that aligns with your topic, then maybe you want to start building your own.

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For in depth crash course on building communities I recommend going through Jay Clouse's "How to build an online community (and why I’m all in on Circle)" and Tom Ross' "Ultimate Guide to Building a Community"

Activity: Start Building Your Community

Choose a platform to start building a community on and invite your listeners to join and engage with you there.

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Whether you are contributing to an existing community or building your own, it will be crucial for you in order to interact with your audience.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.