It's so important to be seen as a leader in your niche. This helps your sales because people want to buy from leaders. They want to buy from those they know are influential and experienced. It's also helpful for your branding. If people know you’re a leader, they're going to look up to you. They're going to come to you first for new ideas.
So, the question is, how do you become seen as a leader? There are many different avenues you can take to make this happen. I am not one to toot my own horn, so let's take a look at how Dennis Becker has done it.
He started by publishing a simple eBook: 5 Bucks a Day. This book was all about his method of focusing on a project that would earn him five bucks a day at a time and stacking that project with subsequent “five buck a day” projects, essentially achieving a full time income in bite-sized pieces.
People flocked to this product and bought it like crazy. There’s something special about it and its contents and methods have resonated with people from all over the world and from all walks of life. He started to get a lot of questions about it, so he saw the need for a community for the customers of that product. He created one.
That community was successful, so he was inspired to take it to the next level by creating the Earn 1K A Day community. The goal with this community was to help Internet marketers achieve their first $1000 day in marketing. This community is still going very strong today—it’s one of the most successful IM communities on the web. I don’t know for sure, but I’d venture to guess that we also have the highest number of success stories of any community our size.
Dennis never set out to become a guru of the Internet marketing community, but by being the leader of the Earn 1K A Day community, and by being very successful as an Internet marketer, many people see him as a leader. It's just the natural flow of things. And this reputation has done amazing things for his business and his branding.
Several years after he created the Earn 1K A Day community, Dennis created a Facebook community called The IM Inside Track. Unlike Earn 1K A Day, the IM Inside Track is free to join.
Each of these communities serves a different purpose. The paid community is higher-end and includes many incredible resources, valued at several times the monthly fee. Anyone could join Earn 1K A Day and build a sustainable business and find a powerful community that will help them achieve their goals.
Being the leader of a community is excellent for sales and branding. People perceive you as an expert. They go on to find me elsewhere on the web.
If you want to become a powerhouse in your niche, one of the absolute best ways to do that is by building a community. People in any niche crave that community feeling because it's so rare to find online.
The fact is that, no matter what the niche, we all want a safe place to be and share. You can create a community that's like that for the people you market to. You can create somewhere where people can gather, find value, get that human connection, and more.
You will be seen as the leader and expert. This will help your sales and branding, no matter what you sell online. People will seek you out, join your list, buy your products, and join your online memberships.
To be clear, no matter whether you have a paid or free community, it's not somewhere you just market all the time. It’s not about you—it’s about your members. The community is mostly for sharing, growing, and learning. It's all about providing value and really helping people with that personal connection. It’s more about that one-on-one or group connection than people can get from standard products or by reading a blog post and watching videos.
If you want to create a community, it can be a free Facebook group, like the example I've given you. Or, it can be something paid like Earn 1K A Day. What you choose depends on your goals and your niche. Each type of community attracts a certain audience, with some overlap, of course. You can choose to create both, like I have. I highly recommend that you start off with just one so you can grow it effectively before you move on to another.
So, where and how are you going to start your group? If you're just starting out in online marketing, I highly recommend you start out with a free Facebook group first. This can help you establish yourself in the niche, show people that you deliver a lot of value, help you grow your list, help you make connections, and more.
If you’ve decided to start a free community, it's important to understand how to get an audience. It can be really helpful to go ahead and join an already-created group in your niche that’s similar to what you might create, for now. This can help you network and get a feel for a unique angle you might take with your group. You want to network with heavy hitters in your niche as well as future members and buyers.
To get an audience, you'll market your free community by driving traffic just as you would anything else. You can advertise it with paid advertising, on your blog, mention it in other groups (only if group owners allow it), use article marketing, search engine optimization, and more. Choose a group name that people might naturally search for – it can help.
If you’ve decided on a paid membership site, you can drive traffic to its sales page in much in the same way. However, it can be much harder to get people to join a paid membership site since there is that greater barrier to entry. You can get affiliates on board, give people a free trial entry, and so on. You'll need a great, enticing sales page to get people to try it out, of course.
No matter what, focus on that community feeling if you really want people to join. That's what’s going to set what you are doing apart from everything else on the web.
You'll naturally start to be seen as an expert when you build a community. It's just something that happens as you give of your time and share your expertise. People have questions and you can answer their questions. People have problems and you can help them find the solutions – that means a lot to people.
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