Community Building & Management Best Practices For 2025
Master community building & management in 2025 with our best practices guide. Boost engagement, loyalty, and growth. Click to learn more.
This insightful video explores the essential best practices for community building and management in 2025. As the digital landscape evolves, understanding how to foster engagement, inclusivity, and connection within your community is paramount. We’ll share innovative strategies, tools, and real-world examples to help you create a thriving environment. Don’t miss out on these valuable insights—watch the video now to elevate your community management skills.
The Hosts of The Show, Jonathan Denwood & Nicole Ouellette
#1 – Introduce guidelines and expectations
#2 – Hyper-Personalization: Creating Tailored Member Journeys
#3 – In-Person Events for Deeper Connections
#4 – Humanizing Your Brand
#5 – Balancing Automation and Personal Touch
#6 – Empower Your Hosts
#7 – Facilitate Networking Opportunities
#8 – Best Practices Checklist
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:01:46.970] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 108. In this episode, Nicole and I are going to be talking about community community building and management, the best practices for 205. Everybody seems to be talking about community and membership. It was a big subject in 2024, and it’s just continued in 2025. There are new platforms, but nobody can really pin down what is a community and how you should manage it properly. It’s a bit mind-filled, but Nicole and I have some good insights to share with you, our beloved tribe, our beloved community. It should be a great show. So Nicole, do you want to introduce yourself to the tribe quickly?
[00:02:40.980] – Nicole Ouellette
Oh, yeah, sure. It’s great to be back on another Friday here, or not? On whatever day we’re recording, whatever day you’re hearing this. For us, it happens to be Friday. My name is Nicole Willet. I own a marketing company, and I’ve owned it for the last 17 years. But I’ve clearly been doing social media marketing and blogging for about 20 years now. I’ve seen things come and go, and I’m always excited about what’s coming next, so it’s a pleasure to talk about these things. Thanks for having me, Jonathan.
[00:03:09.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, Nicole runs a great YouTube channel where she takes it in cheek, a little aim at all the online drifters. So, what’s the name of the channel?
[00:03:20.060] – Nicole Ouellette
Oh, yeah. So, yeah, it’s Breaking Even Communications, which is the YouTube channel. And that particular playlist is Nicole Ouellette, and I’ve reacted to over 100 online marketing gurus. So, if you enjoy that content, it’s pretty bingeable.
[00:03:33.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, been Johnny. It’s very entertaining, folks. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a major message from one of our beloved sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we’ve got a fantastic curated list of the best WordPress technology, plugins, themes, and services. That will save you a ton of time if you’re looking at building your membership community website on WordPress, and I think you should for all the flexibility, design, UX, and ownership benefits of building on an open-source system. You can find all these goodies by going over to Wphyphtonic. Com/deals, Wphyphtonic. Com/deals, plus some special offers from the sponsors. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe?
[00:04:44.620] – Nicole Ouellette
I can’t think of anything else I could possibly want.
[00:04:47.370] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ll be honest. Yeah, there we go. She filled my mind there. Nicole just spurns me so easily. But on the other hand, it’s quite easy because I’m a man. It’s very basic stuff.
[00:05:01.430] – Nicole Ouellette
So… Jonathan, you contain multitudes. Who are you kidding?
[00:05:05.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, I’ve fractionated. Is there a word? It should be. It is now. Yeah, it is now. There we go. Before we go into some of the show notes, some of the points that I listed to guide us through this episode, Nico, where do you Would you agree that it’s a very, in some ways, overused term when it comes to membership community? It’s been a consistent feature of building a membership website for the last couple of years. Would you agree what I’m outlining here?
[00:05:53.310] – Nicole Ouellette
I would say that I think there’s two ways people use the word community, and I think one is, I’m a content creator or I’m a business and I’m putting out material and my community, the people that follow me, are commenting on it or asking me questions and things like that. So I feel like people use the word community for that. And I guess when I think about this topic, though, if I’m saying an online community, that’s not what I think of. I don’t think of one person or one company bringing up all the topics of discussion and leading it in that way. I think of something that’s a little bit more egalitarian. I think of something, whether it’s a group on a social media platform, or whether it’s maybe using an asynchronous messaging system like Slack or Discord, or maybe it’s using the third party or the WordPress software where you’re hosting your course content and letting people talk to each other. I think to me, that is more of a community. Yes, you are bringing up some topics and things like that, but also there is very much this back and forth, which I don’t often see, I guess, when people, content creators refer to their community.
[00:07:09.650] – Nicole Ouellette
But I don’t know if that is something that I’m misreading, but that is just my impression of it.
[00:07:16.670] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think there’s different levels. I think there’s consumers, there’s followers of particular YouTube channels or particular Twitter or whatever social media platform that you follow. There’s particular people that I follow, and when they publish a new video, a new piece of content, I will stop and have a quick glance, and if it’s of some interest, I will consume it because they’ve got a track record. They’ve built some level of trust in me, that it’s worth be stopping and just giving it a quick glance and see if it’s worthwhile. Then there’s a load of other influencers or people on social media that I don’t know. The title or the thumbnail really has to stop me, where the other person, I will stop anyway because I’ve consumed their previous content and it’s been good. I even know if the thumbnail isn’t fantastic, I will still look at it because they’ve built trust with me. There’s that level, and then there’s a more educational level in my mind, where you actually bought a course and you’ve got some value from it. Then you look at buying the next level course, which normally is more expensive, and They built trust in you.
[00:09:01.600] – Jonathan Denwood
And then part of that next level is more of introduction to our online community that’s around the rapper of mentorship and training. That’s how I see the flow.
[00:09:17.320] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, yeah. No. And that’s what I mean is people use the word community in both of those senses, whether it’s… I mean, obviously, I guess I don’t consider my YouTube channel a community. I mean, I do. People, I guess, are leaving comments. I’m commenting back. They’re commenting with each other. But I feel like, I guess if I was going to call it an online community, I feel like in the sense that I mean it, I would have to be doing more to I feel like nurture it or creating opportunities for them to talk to each other a little bit more in a structured way. I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel quite like a community to me. But the way that you put it, maybe it is. Maybe I’m just overthinking it, that it needs to be something bigger than it is. Maybe a community can be more basic than I’m thinking it is.
[00:10:08.140] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it’s very difficult. I love podcasting because as a child, I think one of the things that educated me was listening to UK radio and Radio 4. And I’ve always been in love with radio. And And I think podcasting is the modern, the 21st century form of radio. But one of the problems of podcasting is it’s extremely It’s not always difficult to get any response from the audience. The only time that you normally do is through social media. I have quite a big following on X. But it hasn’t grown lately. I get a few people, but I don’t normally engage in feeding the cesspool, as I call it. So maybe that’s why I don’t get the level of engagement on that particular platform. The YouTube channel has grown very strongly recently, and I’m getting a lot of people sign up, and I do get comments there. But I’m not used to other people. But on our end, it’s very difficult for me to judge if that’s the platform because other people seem more successful in getting response and a two-way conversation going. Before we go into the points, what’s your thoughts about that? Is it generally hard, or are we making excuses, or is it a mixture of the two?
[00:12:08.200] – Nicole Ouellette
I think it’s probably a mixture of the two. When I think about, even if we think about YouTube creators who I feel like have a strong community, it’s because they’re doing live events or meet and greets with people. They’re active on across multiple social media platforms. They’re posting, obviously, content regularly to YouTube. They have typically some Patreon or similar membership level, which gives those people additional access or benefits. So I feel like the people who are most successful are doing a bunch of different things, which obviously, if you’re a single operator or a very small business would be hard for you to do. And I think the reason they get interaction is because they’re doing all these things, and those different channels are feeding each other. So for example, they’re getting ideas for a upcoming videos by asking their Patreons, or they’re using a comment on social media to improve or schedule an additional live event in a certain location or something like that. So I feel like the marketing engine, you could always be doing more. And I think that’s what’s really hard about it. But until you try the different things, you don’t really know it’s going to work for you.
[00:13:24.130] – Nicole Ouellette
So it’s this… It’s like that first takes when you start a college semester, and you’re just trying to do all the readings and go to all the classes, and it takes you while to figure out, Okay, well, this professor is going to lecture on everything that I read, so I probably don’t have to do all the readings, or this professor is never going to ask you any questions about the supplemental reading, so I can stop doing that. But at first, you have to do everything for those first couple of weeks, and that’s exhausting. But I don’t know if that’s an accurate assessment. When I think of people who I perceive as successful in having the two-way conversations, it’s the people who are doing a lot of different stuff.
[00:14:03.730] – Jonathan Denwood
I also notice that a couple of YouTube channels that I do follow because the subjects that they have a consistent record of producing interesting content in areas that I’m interested in, which is online marketing, AI, WordPress, blah, blah, blah. Yes, folks, I’m a very boring individual. But I noticed a couple of them. One guy, he’s Russian, but he managed… He left Russia just for a while. When the Ukraine-Russian war started, and now he’s living in Argentina with his family. He produces a lot of… He’s very Russian. I knew quite a lot of them in London. He’s very Russian. I put a little comment, I made a little joke about he’s got a French Bulldog, and I said, Well, you should really get a British one. He did really get the humor, really. Bless his little heart. He’s based in Argentina at the present moment, but I think he’s looking to try and move him and his family. He produces a ton of quite good AI content and then reviews all the platforms and everything, delves in it great. He’s been struggling with making money online, basically. One of the things that he’s recently done is he’s produced a community courses, but he’s on school.
[00:15:48.940] – Jonathan Denwood
He’s decided to use school. I’ve noticed a couple of these leading YouTube influencers are moving on to school. It seems to be the Infine at the present moment, a bit like circle used, and it was promoted by Pat, a well-known podcast, but then he put money into it.
[00:16:23.500] – Nicole Ouellette
Is this Pat Flynn?
[00:16:24.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, Pat Flynn. He invested a ton of money in circle, didn’t he? But it all seem to be looking at school at the present moment. Why do you think that is? Is it the deals that he’s getting? Because for the price, and they also take a percentage, but I suppose it’s the combination. A lot of these platforms, I also notice in the newsletter space, you’ve got a thing like Beavehive, that they’re mixing the actual functionality of sending out a newsletter with a marketplace. Beehive do that. Plus this school is doing it, isn’t it? Because they’re building… It’s a competitor to something like teachable, or if you’re looking at WordPress, Learnable, or Lifter LMS. But they’re combining a marketplace as well, aren’t they? They’re combining a marketplace with a platform, aren’t they?
[00:17:29.260] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, I mean, I think I just looked up really quick in my other screen, and the Affiliate Commission on school is 40 %. And if you know how much school is, you’re like, that wouldn’t be a bad… If you have millions of subscribers and you send them to this platform, 40 % of their signup is nice.
[00:17:50.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, they’re trying to combine. They’re trying to take unami, aren’t they? Basically, aren’t they?
[00:17:55.870] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, and also, I understand the tension, right? Because the marketplace, you’re like, okay, I like that there’s a marketplace, there’s an existing group of people who want to buy something. But then my stuff is right next to my competitors. I understand, like I said, the appeal of the marketplace, but I also understand the hesitation with, I guess, jumping into that, because suddenly, even if you don’t have any competition that you perceive, you’re associated with all these other people. And the question is, do you want to be? If you’re in the same marketplace as them, right? And there’s some people on there that you don’t really want to associate with.
[00:18:42.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. The reason I’m point is a one point in this, because I thought is that it’s being pushed in the same way that I saw how circle was being pushed and how I saw Kajabi through YouTube- Oh, Kajabi, that’s the other one I was thinking of. I was trying to think of that other one. It was promoted through So basically, YouTube influencers pushed it a lot because they were getting really fantastic affiliate deals, especially some of the bigger YouTube influencers. They were getting some enormous kickbacks from Kajabi. And I saw this with Circle. Circle, I don’t think, has been a tremendous success. I I think they thought that… I’ve never used it. I’ve done a review on it, and there were parts of it that… It tried to do the intermediate thing where you added it to it, existing website rather than what Kajabi and let’s say, Mighty Networks, this total Swiss army life solution. But I saw the same trend about building a community on circle on these platforms. I wouldn’t say I think school would do anything wrong, but in the way I think when you’re charging a fair whack, I think their cheapest plan starts at $99, then you’re taking 40% as well.
[00:20:26.230] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’re taking the Mickey a little bit, especially on Especially on the platform that is not spending a lot of money on online marketing, is relying on affiliate and kickbacks from YouTube influencers. What do you think?
[00:20:46.440] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, I think both you and I are the people who… I mean, we’re both WordPress users. I think the LMS I have used in the past is LearnDash, and I think you’ve used that too. I like building something that is on a platform that I control, and I like building the features the way I want them. And it’s funny, because if you read some of my YouTube comments some of them aren’t super nice. And basically people are saying, oh, the reason you talk about these people is because you’re jealous that they’re successful. And it’s not that I’m jealous, although don’t get me wrong, if I woke up and had a few million in the bank tomorrow for absolutely no reason, I wouldn’t be mad about it. I I think it’s just that when I feel like somebody is overcharging for what they’re delivering, it just makes me feel a certain way. And that’s how I feel about it. I feel about school the way you do, to be honest with you. I think it’s way overpriced for what it is. And I think the reason it’s overpriced is because they have to pay all these people back, all these affiliates, and maybe investors too, of course.
[00:21:51.100] – Nicole Ouellette
But yeah, I’m with you on that. I think a lot of these tools are overhyped. And a lot of times when you’re just starting off building a community, you don’t need all those features. You don’t need a Swiss Army knife. You just want to get really good at maybe a little knife that has the little tiny scissors, the little knife, and maybe a nail file. You want to start with that and work your way up to a tool that has more with it.
[00:22:19.270] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, the thing is, before we go to break, because I’ve gone off track a little bit, but we will go through the main points in the second half. But it just occurred to me that there was a bigger subject that we really needed to talk about, which in this first half, because I’ve seen it in the newsletter space with Substack and with Beehive, where a lot of traditional media have gone and become new media. Basically, they’re trying to build a YouTube channel, and they’ve got their Substack newsletter. And then Beevehive have tried to mount muscle into that as well. And they take a big cut. And I I think, maybe use it at all, but really you want them, and I’m sure that they share the list because you’d be mad if they don’t. That’s one of the things. I don’t know with school, I would imagine they must share the list of people that sign up, because that’s one of the main drawbacks of UniMe, isn’t it? Is that they don’t share the list of subscribers with you that actually buy the course. That’s probably another reason why people that would look at UniMe are looking at school, aren’t they?
[00:23:53.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Because that’s painful that they don’t share the list, the UniMe.
[00:23:57.720] – Nicole Ouellette
I mean, Meetup is the exact same way. I have a paid meetup account. I have a list of like 100 people. I can’t contact any of them. I can only post to the meetup platform. And so the fact I’m paying $30 a month to pay to people that I can’t directly contact in any other way feels gross to me. Actually, I meant to cancel it and then I forgot to, and then it auto-renewed at the end of the month, and I was like, oh, crap. But yeah, that feels a little seedy, too. I understand that I shouldn’t have maybe their credit card numbers or something like that. The platform should keep that safe, but I should be able to contact them if they’ve purchased something for me as a business, if only for quality assurance purposes.
[00:24:43.770] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, to your Awful enough, but I just wanted to do a landscape and the things you got to consider. We’re going to go for our break, and when we come back, we’re actually going to delve in to the key parts of building a community, some of the key things that you’ve got to understand that will help you build a community, whatever platform you’re considering. We will be back in a few minutes, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a bit of a dive in what the landscape when it comes to building a community is like with new players, existing players. But before we go into the second half of the show, I want to point out that Nico has got a great social media service. That sounds fab. So Nico, do you want to tell us more about your social media service that you started a few months ago? Sure. I’m getting some real traction, I think it sounds fat.
[00:25:48.300] – Nicole Ouellette
It’s starting to, yeah. So if you have been on social media, you probably have noticed that vertical short videos are the thing that all the platforms want. But as As a business owner, he might say, I don’t want to learn a new dance right now. I don’t want to do that stupid thing. I wish there was a way for me to find a trend that I could do and record once and post across multiple platforms as it was trending. Well, don’t worry. I’ve got something for you. It’s called Trend to Send. And if you go to trend2send. Com, you can sign up and you will get a text message from me twice a week with a trend that you can film. And I film my own. It’s a very short little And then I link to all the audio on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. I’m looking at… If you’re on Red Note, they’re going to start offering trending audio. I’m keeping an eye on that, so I’ll add them once that exists. And basically, you record your video, and then you attach the trending audio as you post it to the platforms and your videos will get a lot more views.
[00:26:50.310] – Nicole Ouellette
And just as an experiment, I did this on my own YouTube channel where I regularly post content. I posted trending videos and I posted my regular content. And guess what? Those silly little trending videos that I I spent 15 minutes on from start to finish got twice as many views as videos I spent hours recording. So if you are ready to start playing social media’s little game, but ready to not spend your whole life doing it, check out trenddescend. Com.
[00:27:14.870] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, sounds fab. So let’s delve in to… So you’re looking to build a community and whatever platform, it’s going to have a… It’s going to have something similar to Facebook groups as part of the platform. It’s going to have elements of a forum. You want the community to start talking to one another on the platform that you’ve chosen You want people of the community to engage, which sounds fantastic, but anybody that was brought up, that utilized, that was in web development design of the ’90s know that some of the most poisonous areas of the internet were forums. So you need guidelines and you need to control expectations What’s your thoughts around this, Nicca?
[00:28:18.100] – Nicole Ouellette
Well, groups that I’ve been a part of or managed, obviously, there’s group rules posted and part of what you do when you sign up is you agree to them. But the second thing that I found helpful is that usually, and different groups do this differently. Sometimes it’s once a week, sometimes it’s once a day, they will announce new members and tag them as, Welcome, welcome, welcome, Nicole, welcome, Jonathan, welcome. And then they will post the group rules as well. So there’s absolutely no excuse that you haven’t seen them because you check the box that you agree to them, but also your name, and they are right under that initial post that is associated with your name. And that also gives those new community members a chance to to say hi without starting a whole thread themselves because they’re being welcomed in this new way. So yeah, I think showing the group rules multiple times in addition to enforcing them is a good way to start out. What do you think about that?
[00:29:14.850] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, yeah, I think you’re spot on, but I’ve noticed I might be one of them. I don’t think so. Can be, but who knows? It’s these people that join. There’s a I have a few things that I… A few regular Zooms and other webinars that I’m a member of a couple memberships myself, and I join regularly every week. There’s just a few people that seem to dominate the conversations every week. They got endless lists of questions. They go on forever. They’re wafflers. Worse than me, Nico. How many insights about how you deal with these types? Because I think every online community has them, don’t they?
[00:30:10.270] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, I think every online community has them. So when I, believe it or not, before this whole Internet thing, I trained to be a high school teacher. I thought I was going to teach high school science. And I’ve done student teaching, and I’ve actually taught at a school for a couple of years. But one of the techniques that they teach you is if there’s a student that’s talking that you physically walk closer and closer to them, and you stand near them. So thinking of a way to do that virtually is interesting, right? I think part of it could be encouraging other people, maybe when you post a particular thing and you know, for example, let’s say in your online community about courses, let’s say you have a couple of people that you know have had courses a really long time, but they haven’t ever really commented on things. When you post the update, tagging them in a comment saying, at Stephanie, at Mark, I’d really love to hear your thoughts about this as experienced creators bringing them in. I don’t really know how else to do it. I mean, you can’t really tell the people.
[00:31:22.880] – Nicole Ouellette
Because also you don’t want to look like… I mean, you want people to contribute to your community And so I did have somebody once. I was managing a Facebook business page, and she was just really dominating the comments. And I decided, I thought, I said, okay, I can ask her to stop, right? Because it’s… Or I could funnel her energy into something else. So I messaged her privately and I said, hey, I really appreciate how active you are here. This business is actually trying to be getting more reviews on Google. Is that something you think you could I could help with. And it gave her… She was trying to be helpful to the business by leaving all these comments. But I was like, Could you maybe leave a review and maybe help us encourage other people, too? Oh, that would be great. So it gave her something to do to help, to channel her energy into something else. So that could… Something like that could work well, maybe for an online community.
[00:32:21.700] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s a great insight. The other thing I want to point out is anything you say really Anything, email, anything you comment online will come across a lot more severe than you think. It’s just a part of platforms. Really tone it down because you really got to tone your voice on emails as well. Because any digital communication, apart from a Zoom, a video call, which isn’t exactly the same as meeting somebody person to person in real life. But it’s as close as you’re going to get online. But apart from that, Everything, all well-written communication, you really need to look at it and tone it down because it comes across double, three times in tone niche than you think it will. So that’s my comment on it. But there’s no easy way, but be aware that you do need guidelines and you do need a document that will manage expectations of what they’re going to get, especially if they’re joining a course that has a large element of community and they’re paid a fair bit of money to join it. On to the next one. Hyper personalization, creating Taylor membership journeys. Well, this is a core element of building out a community around membership.
[00:34:09.850] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s one of the core elements of the value proposition of having a tier structure. Normally, not always, it’s more less than pre-recording, then you join a next level that has community, and then you have a next level that has a power group, and then the final level has a power group, and you have one-to-one interaction with the owner founder. That’s how it normally works. So What’s your thoughts about this?
[00:34:47.300] – Nicole Ouellette
Well, I will say one of the gurus that I reviewed in the last few months, she mentioned, of course, she was in a multi-level marketing thing. But what she did was she put all her new people in into a challenge group for, I think it was four or six weeks. So they had a very small group. And then basically, once they graduated from that group, she put them into her larger community where she did live streams and stuff like that. And I thought, well, that seems backwards to me, right? Because wouldn’t you put someone in the bigger community, and then if they paid more, you would put them in a smaller, more intimate community. But what I realized is that was a shortcut to give them a four or six week intensive. She probably we’re in the same group over and over again. She scheduled the same content in the same order and all that. But it set the tone before these people joined the larger group, which I thought was an interesting idea. But I think I mean, I think there’s a variety of ways to do that. And I think a personalized experience that I can think of in one of the groups I’m in is that there’s a monthly, I think they call it coffee hour And there’s one volunteer that organizes it.
[00:36:02.920] – Nicole Ouellette
And she’ll post and she’ll say, okay, who wants to be in? And she’d be planning for March toward the end of February. So the last week of February, she’d say, okay, put your name, comment here if you want to be part of the March coffee group by this particular date. And so you comment like me, me, me. And then what she does is she matches people up and she tags them. So she’ll be like, at Nicole, Jonathan, you guys are matched up for the March coffee And then we’re in charge, you and I, of arranging what that looks like. So I might private message you or email you or something like that to set up a time over Zoom or a phone call or something like that. But that is a personalized experience because you’re in this group, but you don’t have to participate unless you want to. And they’ve created this structure where it happens on a monthly basis. You know what to expect. It’s always the same person organizing it. So you can do personalizedise journeys either on that base level, like the Pyramid Scream lady, or you can do it within the group itself.
[00:37:08.590] – Nicole Ouellette
Not everybody has to participate in everything, but if you create these opportunities, the people who want to can Yeah, I think the example, as you say, the pyramid lady, I love it, I love it.
[00:37:22.930] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s back to front. It’s effective because of what she’s involved with. I think most more… How to word this?
[00:37:37.370] – Nicole Ouellette
More your non-p pyramid structures?
[00:37:40.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, that’s the way to word it. Thank you, Nicole. You’re much more… I’m struggling there. But it’s a more traditional where you join at a lower level and then you consume some of the less expensive course, you build relationship, you build trust, they move on to an intermediate course. Then so many of those people will join a higher group where it’s a group meeting normally with the founder, and then they can also have access to a discount price where they can purchase one-to-one consultation. The pricing is all laid out and the discount you’re getting. I’m a member of a group run by a well-known Facebook influencer that’s got many years and is reasonably incredible, and that’s a gentleman called John Numa, and that’s how he structures his packages, and other people that are not in pyramid schemes, that’s how they seem to organize their online communities. On to next thing. In-person events, deeper connection. Well, live events, that seems what YouTube has been pushing a lot these platforms. I make these. Sometimes we get people join us, sometimes we don’t. But I’ve noticed with some of the regular Zooms or StreamYard that I remember. It’s okay if they got a particular topic and they’re going to discuss that with an element of free discussion.
[00:39:41.350] – Jonathan Denwood
But if it’s just free discussion, they just go on a big bend, or worse than me, Nicole. So what’s your insights about in-person events?
[00:39:53.080] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, no, I think that they can work really well, obviously, for most online communities, especially if you’re in in a specialized niche. You might not have anybody physically nearby you that does the same thing. So I think these hybrid events are nice. I appreciate it when they’re well-structured, like you said, where there’s an agenda, and that if there is discussion, maybe you’re being put in a breakout room that’s relatively small, so that it gives everyone a chance to talk. In particular, the good ones I’ve been in have been like, okay, we’re going to put you in breakout rooms for eight minutes, You should each spend about two minutes talking about this particular thing, and we’re going to put you and go. So then there’s that expectation, and there’s a little countdown Timer. I don’t know if it’s optional or if it’s automatically on, so that you can see as you’re talking like, okay, my two minutes are coming to a close. It’s on to the next person. But I appreciate when they’re a little bit more structured, too. And also going in with a bit of an agenda. I’m on this one email list and they’re like, let’s get together They’re a network.
[00:41:00.820] – Nicole Ouellette
And I think I went once, but I can’t bring myself to make the two hour time to go, because I don’t know. It feels too amorphous for me to want to really commit to it and think about how I could contribute to that virtual event. But also, I just want to throw this out there, that part of your virtual event, it can be tempting to plan it, I guess, all out, ahead of time in terms of, I’m going to say these exact things, But just giving people space to either ask questions or work, sometimes can be really valuable, too. So if Jonathan was going to say, hey, I’m going to host a virtual hour, and all of us are going to work on our WordPress membership websites, and I’m just going to be here. I’m going to put you guys all in your own breakout room to work, and then I’m going to be here and you can call me into your breakout room and I can maybe help you with a WordPress setup issue that you might be having. So sometimes just even getting together for a work session can be nice. What are your thoughts on that, Jonathan?
[00:42:06.460] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’re spot on there. I haven’t got much to add to that. I’m going to drop, I had done before humanizing your brand. I’m going to drop that because that’s such an enormous subject we could talk about the whole show. So I’m going to move on to number five, balancing… This is insightful because this is tricky as well. Because everybody, and I’ve had loads of people I’ve advised that wanted elaborate optimizations in place, and they haven’t even got their first student. And I just look at them and I think, you’ve got… And I’ve given up trying to persuade people not to go down this path, because that’s the other thing. You’ve got to make it as fast. There are a lot of people… It’s taken me almost 60 years to work this one out. I am a very slow learner in some aspects, Nicole. I’m not you. I didn’t twig when I was a younger person. A lot of people that ask for your advice, they really don’t want your advice.
[00:43:18.240] – Nicole Ouellette
They just want you to- Yeah, they want you to agree with them.
[00:43:20.350] – Jonathan Denwood
They just want you to agree with them. They have no interest in your opinion or thoughts about anything. I’ve had these people, and they need to really concentrate on building their minimum viable course, as I call it, from the world of bootstrap startups, build your minimum viable product and get your first back group of students and really find out what they liked about blah, blah, blah. But these people, they want to build these elaborate optimizations, and they haven’t even got 20 students in their course. But on the other end, when you start getting in the hundreds, 500, 1,000 students, that’s when you got to start building your optimization, because you’re just going to get flooded, aren’t you? So what do you think?
[00:44:23.960] – Nicole Ouellette
I mean, what I always tell people, and this gives them pot, I say, when they come to me, I say, When you have that problem, you’ll have the money to solve that problem. And that usually… Because I’m like, okay, do you really want to spend hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars on this, depending on what it is right now? Or I was like, what if you… I was like, when you have that problem of too many people, we’ll have the money to solve that. And then usually they’re like, okay, got it. Because they know that I’m just trying to save them money, right? And heartache. But I think that there’s We were talking before we started recording about the American dream, right, is being able to make money with absolutely no effort, right? But I think the thing is- That term that Americans always use in…
[00:45:13.370] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s not secondary income What’s this?
[00:45:15.950] – Nicole Ouellette
Passive income.
[00:45:16.680] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s the term. That’s the term of the American life, is it? Passive income, right? But I’ve never found anything that was passive.
[00:45:24.270] – Nicole Ouellette
I mean, the only thing I can think of as passive is, I guess, my retirement account or something as I put money into it, and it’s automatically invested in these stocks or whatever. But I can’t think of anything I’ve ever done that is passive, even stuff that seemed like it wouldn’t be a lot of work was some work. So I think more of what you need to do at the beginning is some checklist thing of like, okay, when you get a new member, what happens? What needs to happen? Okay, you need to add them to your LMS. If there’s a separate group, you need to add them to the group. Okay, you need to tag them in a new member post. I’m not- Yeah, I think you make a process. And then once you work with your process for a little bit, onboarding your first students, you might say, oh, somebody was confused because they got the course email before I added them to the group to tell them that they were going to get the course email. So maybe I want to switch the order of that.
[00:46:15.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, that’s why you need to work closely with these things.
[00:46:19.810] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, exactly. So that when you do automated, it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:46:21.870] – Jonathan Denwood
You work in that process, isn’t it?
[00:46:23.120] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, you want to get through your process in the automated, but it’ll take some trial and error. You’re not going to get everything right, right away. I mean, I think most of us know that about anything that we’ve tried to do in our lives. So I would say, work on that. And if you wanted to automate, let’s say that on your WordPress site, you have a Gravity form that automatically makes them their own WordPress account when they fill it out to pay for the course, and that gives them access to the course.
[00:46:53.970] – Jonathan Denwood
You said the wrong thing, Nico. That’s fine.
[00:46:55.710] – Nicole Ouellette
What did I say? What was wrong? Oh, you don’t like Gravity forms?
[00:46:59.280] – Jonathan Denwood
No, I love it. But I think for it, I just think this much easier. I think for the right situation, Gravity is still a great solution. But I think for a lot of people, I think Fluent Forms is just easier, better values. It’s got a free version, and it’s got the pro, and it works with Fluent CRM, really. So it’s a double winner. I’ll forgive you, Nicole.
[00:47:28.320] – Nicole Ouellette
Thank you so much. I did want to have a forum smackdown in the middle of this episode. But point being is if you were like, Okay, it’s a pain that they filled out this form, and now I’m going to go fill out a form on my website to make them an account. I wish it… That automation, I guess I have less of a problem with. That makes sense to me that you. Yeah, it’s the balance.
[00:47:47.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Thanks for pointing that. You’re totally right, as normal. But I meant more of these elaborate optimizations.
[00:47:59.560] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, I I know.
[00:48:00.810] – Jonathan Denwood
You haven’t even got your first student through this, and you need to really concentrate on getting your first students through this. Absolutely. I agree with Claire. You’re just wasting time building elaborate optimizations for the thousand students. What’s the sad thing is, is that I’ve had some people that are hosting with WP, Tony, and got computations with me. And they’re cool. They’ve got the knowledge, and they’re built out a professional course, and it’s great, and they need to start marketing it. But they’ve just got sucked into the world of WordPress and marketing optimization and click funnels or whatever the bloody platform. They just got sucked into this nonsense.
[00:48:54.270] – Nicole Ouellette
I know. I think automation is so sexy, right?
[00:48:57.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Getting their first students, right?
[00:49:00.170] – Nicole Ouellette
I know. And I think just automation is such a marketing word, and it’s so sexy. This idea that something’s going to automatically happen without you having to do anything. I get that we all like the idea of that. And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have that at a certain point, but I’m saying that it’s like, I don’t know, let’s say you had a factory and there was a problem in the process and then you’re like, oh, how can I make this work faster? Well, all it’s going to do, the thing is going to keep breaking. It’s just going to break at a faster rate because you’re moving faster. So just figure out your process first and then you can automate after, and you can talk to someone like Jonathan who can look at your process and be like, oh, this is what you can automate. There’s tons… People can help you out when you’re at that point. But again, When you have the money, when you have the problem, you have the money to solve that problem. So just wait for that, I would say.
[00:49:50.410] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a nice problem to have, isn’t it?
[00:49:52.040] – Nicole Ouellette
It is a great problem to have. I have too many students. Oh, poor you.
[00:49:58.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Empowering your host Well, these are the… These people that help you run communities, they normally get some benefits by being a host or a lead, whatever terminology you’re going to do. But any community, you normally have these individuals that become that are leads. People get worried that they’re going to… If you go down this path, you are going to get people that will volunteer to be leads, and they’re really important, but it’s important to empower them. And so what’s your own thoughts about… You We’ve probably been a couple of leads. Yeah.
[00:50:47.900] – Nicole Ouellette
I end up being because sometimes I have an idea of like, oh, it would be really cool if we… And this group I’m in, this one guy, he was like, oh, he wanted to start a Marketing Monday a thread, because the group is no self-promotion. But he’s like, can we have… So he went to the Mods and said, hey, can we have one thread a week, Marketing Monday, where we would start the thread and then underneath it in the comments, people could promote a product or service that they wanted to talk about. And the mod said yes. And so every Monday, he was like, All right, Marketing Monday. Who’s got some new stuff to talk about? And it’s nice because people might have ideas to make your group better, and they They probably understand that maybe you don’t have time to implement it or whatever. If you trust them to do that and you structure it in such a way where it is understood that this happens on Monday, that there’s brackets that say Marketing Monday at the top of the post, and that’s the one you know is it, and you know that that’s where you’re allowed to self-promote.
[00:51:51.360] – Nicole Ouellette
That group is just really well-run because the moderators are constantly enforcing the rules in an egalitarian way. Also, so that when people have an idea like that, they go to the moderators, figure out how it’s going to work, and then bring it into the community, which I think makes a lot of sense.
[00:52:09.990] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to drop number seven because I’m going to go to eight, and then we can have a quick ending chat and wrap this show up. Best practices. Are there anything that, based on your experience, that you think that we haven’t covered that people need to know?
[00:52:29.890] – Nicole Ouellette
I mean, I think, like I said, a big part of community management is it does take does take time and enforcing the rules, like I said, consistently, not letting certain people get away with stuff because they’ve been around longer or something like that. If you’ve decided that there’s suddenly no self-promotion in the group, but the guy that started with you is still self-promoting, you need to enforce that. Because there’s nothing that will degrade a group’s feeling if you start treating people differently. So I would say I would just underline that, I guess.
[00:53:04.810] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, the thing I want to point out is that I think if you’ve got an existing Facebook group, if you’ve got an existing as I call it, your tribe, the Purple Cow, the tribe. What’s the name of that guy that wrote those books?
[00:53:23.490] – Nicole Ouellette
Seth Godin.
[00:53:24.590] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, Sethy. Such a slick guy as me. But He’s a pretty smart guy. I’ll give him that. He’s intelligent, isn’t he? But he’s so slick, isn’t he? But there we go. If you got these online communities and you got them to a certain stage, it’s a great idea to get on your own community platform. You’re putting a lot of work into it and you’re building on somebody’s own platform. And like I say, I think the best platform, if you’re going to put all this work in, folks, is the platform that you have the most control over, and that’s WordPress. And there’s two Basically, two platforms. There used to only be one, and that used to be Buddy Boss. It’s a fabulous platform, but it is a bit of a beast. For your first outings in this, there’s another great solution called Fluent Community, and that looks really promising. You got a couple great community building platforms on WordPress now. You got two options. I just think it’s best to build it on WordPress because the other thing is if you haven’t got this community, but you have got the knowledge and you’ve listened to to all the other advice that we’re giving in this show, I would start with a membership and then build it up and then look at community.
[00:55:10.270] – Jonathan Denwood
Because I just think people underestimate the amount of work involved in building a community, managing it, running it, and it’s just too much too quick. It’s not that it’s a bad idea, but you’re trying to run before you can walk. What do you reckon, Nicole?
[00:55:30.030] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, I’ve had a few… Actually, I pitched for a regional business organization because people were like, oh, they’re not really on Facebook, and email feels clunky. I was like, well, we could set up some online community that would let people post stuff, and they really like that idea. But when I told them how much it would cost for me to manage it, they were like, oh, that’s really expensive. And I said, well, I have to get in there every day and interact with people and enforce the rules and start different discussion threads. This is a brand-new community. And I’m not saying that longer-standing communities aren’t more artwork because they are. But at first, you really have to set that tone. So it does take a lot of time. And a lot of people are like, oh, the few people I’ve pitched this community management to, they’re like, yeah, I don’t want to pay you to do this. And I’m like, okay.
[00:56:19.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, there’s nothing worse. You build out this community, whatever platform, like a network, circle, school, or WordPress, but you spend all this time and money, and it’s crickets because the early days of a membership website don’t show. Actually, you don’t want because you’re going to get overwhelmed. You do need this minimum viable course in this initial round of students and be really tight with them to learn, to work out the bugs of your process, and also get the feedback so you can make the course better and build a secondary course based on that feedback. So you don’t worry about the students. And that’s intuitive with what a lot of influencers push out their folks. But with a community, it shows that you haven’t got a lot of engagement. So that’s why you want to build your community with these first steps and then morph it into a community. You won’t get to this cricket stage, as I call it. So, Nicole, I think we’ve covered a ton of stuff, and I think it’s been a pretty good discussion. I didn’t quite know where this was going to go, actually. But I think we’ve covered a lot of useful things. Yeah, I think so too.
[00:57:47.830] – Jonathan Denwood
Honest insights here. What’s the best way for people to find out more about you and your fabulous ideas and knowledge? Sure.
[00:57:56.300] – Nicole Ouellette
If you want to learn about that trending video idea, you can go to trenddescend.com, or we’ll be on various social platforms. But you can also follow Breaking Even communications. And I’m on most social platforms under that handle.
[00:58:09.960] – Jonathan Denwood
We will be back next week with another subject to help you build a great membership business in 2025, with either a technical subject or a more general subject, but we are trying to give you some knowledge so you can avoid some of the pitfalls and really get where you want to go. We will be back next week; bye. Where’s my… Why is my mouse playing?
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