Community vs. Audience, becoming the BEST solution, Bitcoin for beginners.
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👋 Hi! This little email found its way into your inbox because you were kind enough—and awesome enough—to subscribe here: knowledgeup.substack.com
(You probably connected with me on Twitter: @growthcurrency)
DON’T GROW AN AUDIENCE. BUILD A COMMUNITY.
You’re probably here for one reason: you want to grow.
More specifically—grow your online presence.
You’re a creator and you have something awesome to share with the world, right? And you’ve been trying to grow a massive audience to share it with?
Well… stop.
STOP TRYING TO GROW A MASSIVE AUDIENCE.
A natural human desire is to be part of a community—not an invisible number in the audience.
An audience is faceless.
Performers have audiences.
Big brands have audiences.
They have their target demographics and customer avatars. They have their market research and R&D.
They’re in the market for awareness + attention—not communication.
They talk to you—not the other way around.
And I'm here to tell you that you don't need any of that. Nor should you want it (at least not yet).
What you want is a community.
One thing the rise of Clubhouse and beta launch of Twitter Spaces has taught us is that people long for connection. They want to be a part of the conversation—not necessarily spoken to.
In Build an Audience vs. Building a Community, Noele Flowers describes a key distinction in audience vs. community:
A simple way that some think of the distinction between audience and community is that you talk to your audience, you talk with your community.
There's intimacy in community. Community implies relationship.
There is support, reciprocity, feedback, willingness to lend a hand.
Community is different than an audience because you are helping, not performing.
When you grow a genuine community vs. a sterile audience, you are going to impact more people, more positively, and they will support you in turn.
You get what you give.
So growth for the sake of growth reaps little in reward. Your audience simply becomes a faceless statistic. A vanity metric.
The goal of amassing thousands of followers on social media is not the goal.
What you should focus on instead is building a community. Here’s how to start 👇
10 Rules for Building an Online Community in 2020 (via Noele Flowers)
(Highly recommend checking out Noele’s work and reading the full article, here are the main points)
Start with a purpose, not just a topic.
Go beyond a forum to build a comprehensive online community program.
Quality community interaction beats engagement volume, every time.
Measure the important stuff, and ease back on engagement metrics.
Ditch big social platforms like Facebook.
Use your community as a source of high quality content.
Do things that don’t scale. (← I LOVE this one.)
Don’t say “community” when you really mean “audience.”
Rely on best practices from experts, not instincts.
Great communities come from strategy, not magic.
Which of these rules your attention the most? Leave a comment or DM me on Twitter.
TWEET OF THE WEEK
(Safe to say I’m drinking the Ship 30 For 30 Kool-Aid. More like guzzling it by the boatload 🚢.)
THIS WEEK’S GROWTH CURRENCY 🧠💡
✏ WRITE
Writing is Thinking: Learn to Write With Confidence by Steph Smith
This masterpiece of writing by Steph Smith highlights how she thinks about the practice. While the article is amazing, one (OF MANY) takeaways for me was how many of her articles take between 25-50 days to write—and some over 150. Thank you for normalizing my eternal struggle to hit ‘Publish’, Steph 🙏
STEPH’S WRITING PROCESS…
Ideation [Passive]
Tracking [Active]
Outline [Active]
Idea Arbitrage [Passive]
Research - Active
Writing - Active
If you want an interesting framework for writing better, this is a must-read.
|| MORE: Check out Steph’s eBook Standing Out in 2021: Doing Content Right
📈 MARKETING
NO-BULLSH*T MARKETING RESOURCES by Louis Grenier
Louis is fighting “marketing bullshit with radical differentiation” according to his Twitter bio—and I’m here for it. In fighting the good fight, he’s created a basic page (using webflow) where you can filter through 600+ resources by type:
→ Blogs & Newsletters
→ Books
→ Courses
→ Events
→ Podcasts & Videos
→ Tools
Try it out here.
|| MORE: Everyone Hates Marketers podcast by Louis Grenier
💰 SIDE HUSTLE
"Become the best solution to a real problem.” - John Lee Dumas
John Lee Dumas made another appearance on the Side Hustle Show, as he is launching his new book The Common Path to Uncommon Success. In the episode, he answers the questions…
→ How Do You Get Started With a Big Idea?
→ Is There Such a Thing as Being Too Niche?
→ Starting Today, What Channel Would You Use?
→ How Long Do You Wait To See Traction?
→ The 4 Best Questions to Ask To Find Out What Your Audience Wants
John’s credibility? He has made millions of dollars creating focused content for aspiring and successful entrepreneurs alike. He knows how to create a product (his BEST solution) and sell it to the RIGHT people with REAL problems.
👀 PRODUCTIVITY
Taylor Pearson’s FREE Template Library
Work templates and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are not sexy productivity “hacks”. But they are extremely helpful—and often necessary for growth & scale. Check out Taylor Pearson’s free library to improve you and your team’s productivity.
💳 PERSONAL FINANCE
Bitcoin for Beginners [Interview w/ a Bitcoin Investor] by Millennial Money Woman
Bitcoin has been surging in the past several months, crushing its previous highs of 2017. But what is it, exactly? This article covers Bitcoin for crypto-dummies like me (click the links below to go straight to those sections in the article):
→ What is Bitcoin?
→ How does Bitcoin work?
→ How do you invest in Bitcoin?
→ Why is Bitcoin going up?
If you’re reading this—you made it to the end and for that I’m grateful.
Thank you, sincerely.
This was the 10th edition of Knowledge UP↑ — I have no intentions of stopping until I’ve hit 100. So your feedback would mean the world to me!
Can I ask you a few quick questions?
→ What did you find most helpful or useful?
→ Do you like the editorial sections at the beginning of the post? Or should I scrap them?
→ What would make this newsletter a MUST-OPEN in your inbox every week?
Shoot me a tweet or DM on Twitter @growthcurrency and let’s hash it out.
Or in the spirit of reciprocity, I’ll give you some constructive feedback on something you’re working on as well.
Keep growing 🚀
I really enjoyed the audience vs community breakdown (and visual). High signal this week!