Communities are the new best thing in marketing, for a number of reasons, which I get into below. But I'm surprised at how fun it too.

Why are communities a natural progression in the evolution the digital landscape of creators and product or service offerings?

With the rise of Skool, especially since Alex Hormozi invested in it, this is an evolution that seems to be staying.

It marks a clear change in the way products or services are sold, because in the age of the internet creator, the old way of doing marketing is on its dead bed.

Creators that manage to build a personal brand around a product or service are winning in this game, while legacy corporations still have no idea how to adapt.

To me, automation coupled with AI is one of the most interesting evolutions (and business opportunities) in a long time, that also why I decided to go all in on it.

I knew one of the best ways to create attention, build a personal brand and community all in one, was to start recording the things I was building and share them publicly on a YouTube channel.

The problem was: I had to overcome my anxiety to talk and present in a camera.

Check out my other story about the start of my YouTube channel.

A YouTube channel that shows people how to build complex automations themselves, was the most natural way to get start building an audience.

I decided to take another piece of advice from Mr. Hormozi, and give away everything for free: no gatekeeping.

If you want to build great lead magnets, give an awesome (and complete) solution to an existing problem. It:

• creates trust,

• shows expertise

• and allows you to build an email list.

But as I was thinking to build a community, I decided to get started right away and not waste precious YouTube 'views', before actually doing it.

A bonus was also that a community makes it quicker to share digital tools or products, no need to create upload links, or automatic email replies to specific YouTube video's.

Other benefits of a community for your personal brand or business

1. Given it has enough members, it becomes more then 'your' community, people naturally like to hang out and talk about common interests

2. It creates many natural touch points when you, as a creator, have an update.

3. It creates trust and a connection, as you share knowledge that members are interested in

4. It creates a natural place to offer upsells, courses or other monetization.

5. Given that my community is about quite a technical topic, members tend to help out each other, which reduces the questions I need to answer myself.

6. Over time communities can be a source of income as access can be monetized.

So in short communities become a natural flywheel between building an audience, generating paying clients.

So from a marketing perspective its a no-brainer, especially since the new software platforms make it so straight forward.

How to get members in your community?

The obvious answer is, offer people something inside the community that they want.

Think of it as the 2.0 version of a lead magnet.

In my case that means sharing blueprints for automations. These automations can cost a business easily €2-3K, and getting that for free in a community is a tremendous amount of value.

Most people who enter are automation builders themselves, but that's ok, as the community grows so will the leverage.

Yes, it is more work then creating a pdf white paper, but those things probably don't work that well in 2024 as they did in the past.

From a business perspective, a community is a clear marketing hack: direct access to communicating with potential customers that gladly let you know what they want.

So it's ok to put some more effort in upfront, once there's more members a community gradually becomes more self sustaining as people create content themselves.