Connecting With Communities

The Power of Community

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Lesson Objectives:

In this lesson, you will:

• Understand the benefits of adding a community to your product suite
• Discover how a community can set you apart from the competition

Choosing A Topic For Your Community

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Lesson Objectives

In this lesson, you will:

• Discover a community topic that serves your market segment
• Identify what problems or challenges your community supports

When it comes to building a business online or even a social media presence, you’ve most likely heard the term Niche.

What the term niche refers to is the specific segment of a market that you serve and provide a solution to. An example of a niche would be Nutrition for night shift nurses -> There are people (night shift nurses) who struggle with a similar thing (trying to navigate nutrition with a crazy sleep schedule to remain in optimal health for themselves while remaining present for their family).

Many online experts will tell you to niche down for your course, social media content, and messaging. While that does play a large role in the success of your business. When it comes to building out and creating a community, you can be a bit more flexible with your topics than you would other types of digital products.

Let’s meet Nora. Nora recognized her passion to help women navigate the balancing act of reaching optimal performance while working as a nurse through the night shift. That is how Nora discovered her niche. The best niches are not chosen they are discovered. There were people who knew they had a problem and Nora had just the thing to help them solve that problem and was passionate about doing so.

If you need some inspiration, turn to your existing audience. You can get information from your audience by creating polls on social media or putting together an online form to gather data that can help you create a community your audience is looking for.

Let’s dive into what to consider when it comes to choosing a community topic.

There are many factors to consider…
What is the overarching goal that those within your community can work towards? Is it a revenue goal? A mindset goal? A lifestyle goal?

Your community topic can be broad and can support multiple topic deep dives and support varying customer journeys through the different access groups you create.

• What is one general topic/ problem you can provide a safe space/ support for?
• What do you generally chat about on your social media platforms?
• What are your courses on?
• What questions do people always message you about?
• What topics get talked about over and over on your social media?
• What do you specialize in?
• Where do your customers need to be supported?

Let’s see how Nora is going about creating her community. Nora feels confident in who she helps and what problem she solves. Her community will focus on empowering change and sparking creativity within night shift nurses' daily lives and work schedules to help find a balance between sleep, life, and nutrition that works with their body’s natural cadence.

Nora is thinking about possible community names like The Balanced Night Shift or Finding Your Balance. This title not only provides a general overview of what will be included, but it also provides intrigue to want to participate. So when it comes to your community, the main goal is to encourage engagement in a safe space, sparking connection and allowing conversations to go further than they could in just a course or a membership.

Kajabi’s community product provides flexible access, which allows for an overall general topic while creating content within your community that can be gated by access groups. Let’s go through some examples of communities and content together to help spark some ideas for you and your own community.

Do you teach wellness?‍

How about an online wellness community, filled with meditation and mindfulness challenges? Another idea is to create a conversation circle around intuitive eating that everyone can access and

Do you host a weekly podcast and want to get to know your audience better?‍

You can create an online community for your loyal podcast listeners, a pod squad if you will. Then, create an “after-show” space to support those who tune in weekly to your podcast to talk further about episode topics, which is only accessible to those who pay. Picture this, you record the episode within the live room with an audience from there you can create challenges around different podcast discussions to take specific actions, and feel supported. This makes your podcast shine brighter than every other podcast out there to become an actionable resource for your listeners.

Do you coach coaches?‍

You can create a Mastermind group within your community where coaches can support one another, talk strategy, and discuss systems. How about creating challenges that help coaches find new clients and gain more exposure? This type of community can embody abundance and foster a sense of community to help coaches move further faster.

Do you work with Stay At Home Moms?

What would it look like to create a challenge that gives moms activities to complete weekly with their kiddos? Or maybe a conversation circle for moms with specific ages of children to discuss development or milestone activity?

Now, these are simply ideas, and now it’s your turn to look inward and see what you can bring to your community!

How can you foster community and help solve a problem? When you have decided on your community topic, head on to the next lesson!

Understanding Community Components

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Lesson Objective:

In this lesson, you will:

• Learn about the terminology and parts of a Kajabi Community
  

When it comes to building your online community, these use cases are meant to spark inspiration for what is possible within your community. But it is important to remember that they are just inspirations, you know your customer best and how to support them in their journey. Trust your knowledge. Trust your experience and Listen to the community.

Before continuing, don’t forget to download the community components resource!

Additional Resources:

Creating Your Community On-Demand webinar

Gain actionable tips to drive engagement and interaction within your community, leading to stronger relationships with your audience and increased revenue. We will guide you through the ins and outs of community building and give you the tools you need to succeed.

Migrating to Kajabi Communities

Downloads

Kajabi Communities Guide

Build Your Community

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Lesson Objective:

In this lesson, you will:

• Learn how to organize content within your community

You know your topic and the different components of a community. Now it’s time to make your community come to life. This lesson will focus on organizing content within your community.

Content Organization starts with your community topic.

From your topic, think of a few sub-topics that your members would want to talk about.  Within each of these different sections, you can start thinking of content to kickstart participation. Another way to say this is “what questions can you ask in your circles to drive customer conversations and engagement?

When you create a subject-specific circle, you’ll need to give it a title, add an image and add a short description. Decide who can participate by assigning access groups. Only people who are part of the access group will be able to enter the circle. you’ll also decide between a feed style or a chat style. The type of circle you choose to create will determine how it is structured and the kinds of content you and your community will be able to share.

Once you’ve created a circle, you can start to “pad” your community with content before people join. When people initially join your community they need to see the value and vision of the community.

So when you add value and content before you open the doors to your community it gives your community an immediate competitive edge.

Padding your community can feel like a lot of work upfront, but it WILL be worth it. When new community members join, they will be able to jump into active conversations and learn from existing posts and community members.

Additional Resources

Community Access Groups

Build Kajabi Communities

Creating Your Community On-Demand webinar

Gain actionable tips to drive engagement and interaction within your community, leading to stronger relationships with your audience and increased revenue. We will guide you through the ins and outs of community building and give you the tools you need to succeed.

Downloads

Kajabi Communities Guide

Community Roles

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Lesson Objectives:

In this lesson, you will:

• Break down on how to assign roles in your community

When you create a community it is important to select a few key members who can act as an Admin or Moderator within your community.

Appointing these key members is so important and will largely contribute to the longevity of your community, creating a space people want to be in. These people will represent you within your community and will act as additional eyes to uphold and keep your community standards in place.

There are different member roles that you can assign to key community members. You, the creator of the community, will hold the founder role. Founders are identified by a blue check mark, representing a “verified” user. Admins will have a person icon next to their name, moderators have a star. If you have already added admins in your main Kajabi account user settings, those admin permissions will carry over. These account admins will automatically be granted admin permissions within your new Kajabi community.

Let’s look at Jeff, Jeff is a personal stylist in Miami, and he runs and operates a successful online and in-person styling business. Jeff decided that adding a community to his product suite would allow for so many opportunities for everyday individuals interested in learning style tips and tricks. Jeff is busy with the in person styling so he doesn’t have time to do all of the back-end Kajabi work, so his virtual assistant helps him with that. Let’s jump into Jeff’s dashboard. Within his settings under “Account Users,” you will see that he has his virtual assistant listed as well as his online trainers, in total he has 5 account users. Now, let’s take a look at Jeff’s newly created community and we will see that all five account users are listed as Admins within the new community.

You can always add additional admins to your community. Admins are appointed by community leaders to have access to most of the community's advanced tools, such as deleting a message, creating meetups, circles, and challenges, and moderating the community. The admins you appoint within your community will not count toward your total kajabi admin allotment. You can appoint as many admins as you need within your community without worrying about running out of Admin seats.

Being selected to be a community admin can be exciting and comes with a lot of responsibility. Some tasks of an admin within the community are tasks such as:

• Welcoming new members
• Leading circles by initiating discussions, posing questions, creating polls, and supporting others within the community.

Additionally, admins can organize and lead meetups about topics they feel confident speaking on and hosting.

Maybe you’re not sure you want an admin, maybe a moderator is more what you are looking for. A moderator is an ambassador who has been appointed by the community leader to represent or speak for the leader and/or the community. Moderators are identified by a star next to their name and are granted the ability to delete messages in the circles.

Now you may be wondering, what are the best ways to select admins and ambassadors?

Here are a few ways our most successful communities nominate ambassadors: If you already have an existing community, you can transfer existing leaders. These should be your first choice.

Now if you don’t have an existing community, A great way to determine who could be an admin or moderator is by identifying the most active members in your new communities’ leaderboard. This allows you to quickly identify who your top members are. The members on top of the leaderboard are already engaged and active in the community and will make great candidates for your admins and moderator roles.

You can let your community know this is how you make your selections and reach out personally to those who meet your qualifications. If you want to leave the roles open for your current community members to opt-in to this role, create an announcement and link to a form with a few screening questions. When you do it this way, you will be notified each time the form is submitted and have records of those who have shown interest. most likely you will not be able to select everyone who applies, so this record will be helpful to refer to if you ever need to go back and select additional admins or moderators.

When you are going through the applicants you want to make sure they align with and connect to your mission. A general rule is to select 3- 15 moderators for your community. A great question to ask in the form for your applicants is what time zone they are in. Picking applicants from a mix of locations is a good idea to make sure you have a moderator available and active around the clock.

There are some proven tips for success when managing moderators and admins. They are simple, but they require you to have trust and clear communication with those who have been selected for the roles.

The first step to success is to delegate. I know, I know it can be hard to hand over parts of your business when in many ways it feels like your baby. I recommend nominating lead admins and moderators who will oversee the others on your behalf.

The next step to success is to communicate clearly with your admins and moderators. A great way to have open and ongoing communication is to create a private circle where you and your team can communicate effectively.

The last tip for success to consider is to plan regular get-together sessions. Hold admins and moderators' virtual meetups around once a month. It's a great chance for you to get feedback on your initiatives and stay up to date on the overall temperature of your community and recurring trends that are being noticed.

Creating a community that is built for longevity is understanding that you can’t do it alone. A community can be one of your largest business assets if created properly and set up with a solid foundation.‍‍

‍Additional Resources:

Creating Your Community On-Demand webinar

Gain actionable tips to drive engagement and interaction within your community, leading to stronger relationships with your audience and increased revenue. We will guide you through the ins and outs of community building and give you the tools you need to succeed.

Migrating to Kajabi Communities

Challenges

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Lesson Objectives:

In this lesson, you will:

• Learn unique ways to use Challenges to stimulate engagement

Another great option when it comes to padding your community is creating challenges. Since challenges happen within a specific time domain, it encourages your community to take action together! This is a fun way to get your community to connect with each other over particular prompts/ activities.

What are some examples of a challenge?

You can introduce different types of challenges like:

• An Introduction challenge
• A movement challenge
• A reading challenge
• A photo challenge.
• A challenge that compliments your course content, to keep your customers engaged
• Accountability challenges to keep your customers on pace

A photo challenge is one of the most utilized challenges within the community. People connect with other people. So when your community members share photos of themselves, people can connect more quickly and be inspired to share themselves! It’s a quick and simple way to encourage community engagement. It also allows those within your community to connect on topics they may never have with just a feed-style posts.

We have covered different ways for your members to engage, so it’s only right to talk on how to manage the engagement within your community. Now, I know it is completely unrealistic for you to be in and active in your community every day, and I do not expect you to! The best community you can have is aY customer lead community. This is where you choose a few key members and have them inspire conversations, add to comments and make sure that your community standards are being maintained.

Additional Resources:

Creating Your Community On-Demand webinar

Gain actionable tips to drive engagement and interaction within your community, leading to stronger relationships with your audience and increased revenue. We will guide you through the ins and outs of community building and give you the tools you need to succeed.

Migrating to Kajabi Communities

Meetups

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Lesson Objectives:

In this lesson, you will:

• Discover ways to use Meetups in your community‍

‍Meetups within your community are a great way to bring people together both online and offline creating an easy way for community members to RSVP and receive emails and push notification reminders.

A large component of a successful community is connection and these meetups allow you to provide a safe space for free-flowing conversations, topic-specific gatherings, and the ability to break into small groups to foster an even deeper connection.

Within your community, you have access to a live room. This is where you can go live, separate into breakout groups, and spotlight other members of the community who want to share with everyone.
There are so many uses for the live room:

• Complete the current challenge together
• Q&A sessions
• Masterminds
• Guest speaker spotlights and events
• Feedback sessions on particular topics
• Game night
• Live podcast recordings

Meetups are a robust option that allows you to dive deeper with your audience and your audience to dive deeper with each other.

Additional Resources:

Creating Your Community On-Demand webinar

Gain actionable tips to drive engagement and interaction within your community, leading to stronger relationships with your audience and increased revenue. We will guide you through the ins and outs of community building and give you the tools you need to succeed.

Migrating to Kajabi Communities

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