I often hear advice that online communities within your niche are a great place to distribute your content and meet prospects.
But if you do it wrong, you risk putting yourself in conflict with the community incentives and have you committing the cardinal sin of marketing instead: spam.
As with all things, it’s all about how you do them.
It may be easy (and tempting) to slide into the DMs of those juicy community-members-soon-to-be-clients (unbeknownst to them) or spam the group with links to your stuff under the guise of sharing something helpful, but it just doesn’t work in practice.
The best way to attract clients in communities without committing spam is twofold:
1. Be genuinely helpful to others in the group—without expectations
Reply to people’s requests for feedback, offer guidance when people ask for advice, start conversations to help spur discussion in the group. These activities place you in the good graces of the organizer and make you someone members can trust and potentially buy from down the line.
In other words, you’re aligned with the incentives of the community (members and organizers). No pitches, hard sells, or links to your site are required. If people like what you offer, they will look you up.
2. Once aligned with the organizer, you can offer to teach your expertise
As an aligned community member who adds value and seeks nothing in return, you will have fair justification to speak with the organizer privately and offer to do a webinar or training or even offer some pre-created benefit to the community.
This is part of my Golden Goose strategy and the key here is creating alignment between you and the community’s interests.
I can’t stress that part enough.
Nobody wants to be in a community where they’re being pitched, DM’d, or spammed with irrelevant stuff. No community organizer wants that, either.
But people do want to learn. People do want feedback. People do want interesting conversations happening in the community,
And guess what? The organizer wants that, too.
The better community member you are—measured by how much you contribute without taking—the more you can get out of the communities you belong to.
It’s a fine line between being helpful and doing thinly veiled selling (people can smell it), so the best mindset is to give with no expectations in return.
Not for a day or a week, but for a while.
Even if you don’t get clients from it right away, you’ve learned what your market cares about, you’ve built a positive reputation, you may get referrals, and you never know who may reach out to you to inquire about what you offer.
Communities look like delicious honey pots ready for the taking. But the more you try to take advantage without contributing, the less likely you are to succeed.
Be a great contributor (no personal links or salesy DMs required!) and great things will happen.
—k