Renegade life coach, Sally Hope joins me today to talk about all things community. A former musician, she soon realized that she loved having access to people but wanted to help them in a more focused way. At the suggestion of a band mate, she looked into life coaching and got certiifed.
Creator of the first B-School group 5 years ago, she has since gone on to launch her own community, Wildheart Revolution in which the focus is the entire person and not just the business aspects.
We talk about how to launch communities, why you should do it because you believe in community and connection and not just do it for the money because it is a lot of work!
Key Takeaways:
Get clear on your goals and WHY you are starting a community.
Do it because you believe in community & connection.
When you start a community, you are part of it and not just the ONLY voice of it.
Sally Hope is a former touring musician, RV traveler, and current renegade life coach and leader of the Wildheart Revolution, where she teaches you how to “carpe the hell out of your diem” and live the life you were put on this planet to live. She’s a pun addict, olive lover, obsessed with motorcycle boots and you’ll never see her without a french manicure. You can find out more about her at sallyhope.com
Are you trying to fit in WAY too much for your business before the end of the year? Or maybe you’re one of those people who throws your hands up in early November and takes a couple months off?
Focus: Pick 5 things that you wanted to launch this year but didn’t get to. Of those five narrow your list down to the two that have low hanging fruit- meaning no big expense and no huge time delay. From there pick the project that most lights you up because we know that November is a hard month to stay motivated with all that turkey those distractions!
Do the work: Sounds obvious, right? But it’s also about shipping. This is not about being perfect. Create your minimal viable product and run from there.
Accountability: Need help? Share your progress. Get feedback. It’s already happening in our #YESvember Google+ community. (psst..have you joined yet?)
Take the #YESvember challenge and this year, let’s do the whole holiday slowdown thing a little bit differently. Instead of saying “no” to new clients, “no” to launching that new product, and “no” to working on that big idea — how about we say YES instead?
In part 2, we looked at figuring out who has the problem you are trying to solve with your product (or service) by talking or surveying your ideal client.
Use the feedback to validate your assumptions and identify the core problem.
Prioritize features. You don’t need everything in your first product. We’re at iPhone 5 (5S, 5C?..I can’t keep up) aren’t we? And I’m pretty sure they cut out a lot of features in the first version!
Stick to solving the core problem and save the bells and whistles for later.
Creating and Packaging Your Product
Product Idea: Member-Only Content
You may decide that you want to offer a membership component to your product or service.
Some options are:
4. Password-Protected Page: You can create a password protected page on your website and only give access to paying members. This is what a Password Protected Page would look like on a WordPress site (password: test). Note: branding, pages, widgets are all still visible!
5. Create a Secret/Closed Facebook group where members only get added after they have paid for access. Pretty simple, eh? Cost: Free!
6. Ning is pretty much as out of the box as it gets. I’ve used this platform for several years problem-free and found it easy to get started. It’s easy to customize and has all the familiar social network features. They offer the mini- plan at $19.99/year for up to 150 members. At this level, domain mapping is not included so you would have a url with yourbizname.ning.com. I don’t see that as a negative though, considering you could link to your Ning network from within your site or share the link to members after they sign up and pay.
WordPress Specific
7. Optimize Press: Optimize Press provides a lot of value. You can easily setup your membership site using the templates and divide the content into sections, modules etc. and display a navigation menu and/or side bar that makes it easy to access the content and understand how it is organized. Bonus: You can but choose from many templates and create sales pages as well! You can also install OptimizePress on multiple sites that you own.
I haven’t personally used the next two but they come with rave reviews as well:
8. Buddy-Press: Everything you need to start your own self-hosted and WordPress-powered social network. (Opensource)
9. Wishlist: Easy enough to use that you really don’t need to be a techie to build a great membership site with it. The plugin allows you to build a high quality membership site that looks sleek and is easy to manage as an admin. (single site license: $97)
As you can see there are several to choose from depending on what is you need to do!
Product Idea: Video or Audio Recording
If you want to offer an interview-based product you can use Skype combined with a call recorder to record the audio or video.
12. Camtasia I’ve been a long time user of this software, first on PC and now on Mac. There are a lot of tutorial videos and you’ll be up and running in no time.
13. ScreenFlow (Mac) I hear great things about ScreenFlow and had I not already invested in Camtasia I would have used it.
14. Jing Is a great free alternative to both Camtasia and ScreenFlow by the folks at TechSmith (who make Camtasia) and you can record up to to 5 minutes.
15. iMovie (Mac) Got a Mac? Well this comes with and is easy to edit video.
16. Audacity: Edit your audio recordings- a wealth of tutorials available online if you get stuck.
18. Windows Movie Maker (PC) If you’re on PC you can download it for free, if you don’t have it already. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the higher end products like Camtasia, it gets the job done.
Upload Your Audio/Video
19. After you’ve created your video or audio content, you can upload it to your site directly or use a site Dropbox and then share/embed a link. I love Dropbox and the fact that I can seamlessly share and access files from anywhere.
20. For video you can upload your content and make it private on Vimeo and then embed on your site.
Product Idea: Email Course
21. Mailchimp: Want to create an email course (for example a 7 day challenge?) Sign up for Mailchimp and use the autoresponder series. I tell you that Mailchimp monkey has a special place in my heart..an email marketing that has a sense of humor and easy to use? Win in my books!
Outsourcing
Don’t have a creative or techy bone in your body? Or need help formatting and putting together your ebook (or anything for that matter?) Outsource, baby! You can use sites like
22. Elance Submit your project needs and sit back while the proposals flood your inbox.
Warning: You can potentially get a lot of bids and probably don’t need to look at them all before you make a selection. If it’s a one-off project be sure to look at past work, references, portfolio. If it’s for an ongoing project, I recommend starting with a small test project to get a feel for how you work together.
24. Fiverr As the name implies, five bucks will get you pretty much anything. It can be hit or miss but there are a lot of things you can get done at this price that can save you tons of time (and headache).
Graphics
Need graphics for your product? Stockphotos to the rescue!
29. PicMonkey: Seriously, LOVE this site. You can jazz up pretty much anything and have fun while doing it. I did a post that walks you through a few different sites that help you create image posts.
Selling Your Digital Goods And Services
30. Show me the money!
Fortunately, sites like Paypal,make it super-easy for you to start offering your services and get paid for them! Paypal is widely used and pretty straight-forward to setup. Once you’ve created your account, add your products/services and choose the type of buttons you want to create (e.g Buy Now or Add to Cart). Paypal will generate the code you need to embed on your webpage. You can also take recurring monthly payments using Paypal.
Now that you’ve created that ebook but need a way to deliver it? While Paypal is the go-to site for sending/receiving money, they don’t offer product delivery. So unless you want to manually email each person that buys your product, you’ll need to use a site like E-junkie to deliver your product. E-Junkie integrates with Paypal and provides the code necessary to add to your webpage.
Create An Interest List
Start building an interest list before your product is ready. Use out of the box landing page apps and drive people to sign up to your early-bird list. This should be done in parallel to your product creation. You don’t have to wait for it to be on sale to get the word out and start promoting it.
Recommend Tools:
32. SeedProd: Lets you collect email address and work in maintenance mode on your website. WordPress plugin. (one time fee).
33. LaunchRock: Set up landing pages in minutes, either on your own self-hosted website or directly on Launchrock.
In the series, “Creating A Cupcake: Instead of the Whole Cake”, I’m taking at look at how to create a smaller version of your digital product before going all out with the full version. This approach, known as a minimal viable product, allows you to focus on delivering a very specific feature without all the bells and whistles and build on it as you incorporate feedback and learn.
I see it as the K.I.S.S approach to product development (keep it short and simple) and can be applied to pretty much anything. For example- starting out with social media? Instead of trying to DO IT ALL- start small, join a few key platforms and then take it from there!
In this post, we will look at an example of a minimal viable product and the tools that were used to create it.
As a techy who loves to try every tool out there, I definitely have to reign myself in more often than not!
Creating A Minimal Viable Product
For instance, when launching Thrive Hive, an online community for women entrepreneurs, we could have chosen anyone of the following options:
($ no to low cost, $$ moderate, $$$ high)
Option 1: Set up a custom white-label network using Ning which starts at $25/month not to mention the setup time involved. $$
Option 2: Set up a new WordPress site with a membership plugin- costs: hosting, domain, membership plugin, development time $$$
Option 3: Use our existing websites + private Facebook or Google+ group $
Choosing The Tech
Cost was not the only deciding factor when we decided to go the direction we did (which was option 3) but rather what was it that we were trying to accomplish and who were we trying to serve.
We could have easily spent months developing a custom site and then promote it and share it with our communities. This would mean more time developing and less time learning what worked and what didn’t work. It also meant getting people in the habit of spending time on yet another site.
Removing Barriers To Increase Engagement
The same would apply to using Ning, while the development cost would be less we would still have to encourage people to spend time on another site.
However, our target market is already on Facebook (sorry, Google+) and spending tons of time there. Did we really want to add the barrier of having to go somewhere else to engage? Probably not.
Our goal is to connect women entrepreneurs in different stages in their business, share each other’s content and organize online events such as chats and hangouts.
After surveying our audience and getting clear on what was missing in the groups they were currently participating in, we were able to narrow in on our focus and priorities.
Now that’s not to say we would never consider the other options and we could re-evalulate if we outgrew the existing setup, but it was out of scope for our minimal viable product.
Payment: Paypal recurring payments for subscriptions
Community: Private Facebook group
Communication: Google group for social media posts + Aweber (for sign up + autoresponders)
Group activities: Twitter chats (#thrivechat) and Google Hangouts
Because we used our existing websites and free platforms we were able to keep the actual cost down and the only expense was our time.
Time to development: From idea to launch we were able to execute on this in only 4 weeks (between 2 businesses).
As you can see, when creating your minimal viable product, it helps to look at what solutions already exist but to choose based on what you are trying to accomplish. And as you learn and grow, you can make changes to the technology that you are using.
In the comments below, I’d like to hear what you are launching and if you are considering the “cupcake” approach!
In the final post in this series, we’ll look at some tools you can use to easily create and launch your first digital product.
I like to practice what I preach..check out the new live online-workshop I am running in beta on August 30th.
Sign up below to get the entire series delivered in ebook format (for free*).
Sally Hope is a former touring musician, RV traveler, and current renegade life coach and leader of the Wildheart Revolution, where she teaches you how to “carpe the hell out of your diem” and live the life you were put on this planet to live. She’s a pun addict, olive lover, obsessed with motorcycle boots and you’ll never see her without a french manicure. You can find out more about her at sallyhope.com
And there you have it. The tools you need to take that idea to launch. Let’s do it!
