So I’ve heard a lot of people start here and say, “Community is really important. This is something we need to get off the ground for our business.” And I’m not entirely sure that it’s always, in some cases it’s the right way to go, but it’s always the right direction to go.
I would much rather start here and invest some time, testing to learn and understand the community and building your own is actually the right way to go for your brand, your business brand, whatever you’re trying to achieve.
So, to get started, you need to find a relevant community. I have a publish on LinkedIn with a step-by-step process to do that and go into more detail in my Athens is about SEOboth linked in the notes. Become a member, engage and learn. So this is an extremely important part when you enter a community. You’re here to help So don’t sell. If that’s one thing you learn from this, it’s don’t go into a community that isn’t yours with the intention of selling.
In fact I would even say that if you build your community, don’t do it with the intention of selling. You’re here to help You’re here to get things out of it, obviously. But you’re here mostly, especially in the beginning, to put things in there. So engage, learn, help, answer questions, provide resources, provide opportunities, amplify others.
These are things you can do to be a helpful member of any community.
So let’s say you go through this process and say, “This works. I’m getting what I need.” Then you could maybe decide that you want to collaborate with that community. You will have a slightly larger time investment, and at that point, you will also have a monetary investment.
So as you go, you increase your level of commitment, you increase your time, you increase your actual monetary investment, but you should also increase your impact on what this community can do for your brand. You’re putting in more, so you should get more out.
So let’s say you do. Make sure that when you collaborate, you also maintain your membership. You too continue to be helpful. All of these build on each other.
And then you decide it’s great, it works and you have two paths. You can expand within the current community of your choice. You can expand into other communities. Or you can say, “I’m ready to build my own.”
There are a lot of wonderful resources out there, including the founder’s SEO Women in Tech book, published a few months ago, “Creating communities for marketers“which can help you do this.
So a couple of benefits that we offer to the community actually help your SEO.
