Kyle's Blog

Daily Articles From Kyle Wood

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The difference between community building and audience building

Daily ·

Audience building is about how many people are aware of your brand, service or product. It’s about giving people an easy, shallow way to connect and spread your message.

Email newsletters, blogs, videos, Instagram and Facebook groups are a great way to do this. They provide a regular chance for people to connect without having to engage with too much risk.

Community building is about creating a place where members of your audience can go deeper. It’s about giving them a platform, space and leadership to connect with each other and your work in a way that they’ll get much more out of it.

Retreats (and other live events), masterminds (or other accountability groups), private community areas (not held on social media) and social learning (courses which promote students engaging with each other) are all fantastic ways to build community.

Hat tip to Noele Flowers to pointing out the distinction between the two.

Where we end up

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When I was studying engineering I did a year of work placement. I was really looking forward to it, engineering was going to be my career for life! I was not what I expect and I really struggled. So I decided to study something that was interesting me at the time, fitness.

On Monday’s and Wednesday’s after working at my engineering job all day, I studied how to become a Personal Trainer.

I imagined myself as a trainer, working at a gym, helping people pack some serious muscle on their frame. Group fitness didn’t interest me in the slightest.

But then we did a module in the PT course on group fitness. We had to plan and run a short session for the other students. While running me session for everyone else, something sparked in me. This was a lot of fun! And I knew that I wanted to run outdoor group fitness classes once I’d finished my qualification.

Around this time, looking for another outlet from my engineering job, I started tinkering with websites. I quickly got bored creating small websites to sell ads or Amazon products. I wanted to work on something bigger and more long term.

I decided to create one on outdoor group fitness classes. It was called Bootcamp Ideas. 10 years later it’s still one of the biggest resource websites and blogs for group fitness trainers.

12 years ago I couldn’t have even imagined doing what I do these days.

The point is that we rarely end up where we imagine that we’ll end up. Instead, as we keep pulling on threads and following our curiosity our course changes in amazing ways we never imagined.

And that’s a good thing.

The tools I use to create BootCraft

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Thanks to the number of amazing SaaS products out there online, creating a really great website isn’t the crazy tech nightmare that it was even just 10 years ago.

It seems that better and better products are coming out all of the time. Which is closing that gap between website creation only being for full time web designers and something that anyone who can click a mouse can do.

5 years ago I created the website BootCraft by myself using some of these tools. I still maintain and create anything new on there today. In this post I thought I’d share what exactly is under the hood of the membership area.

I run on WordPress hosted by SiteGround and with a theme from StudioPress. I heavily customised the site with help from Toolset and custom CSS.

Memberful powers my sign up process, takes payments and handles the membership security.

Circle is a new addition which powers the community area so we can move off of Facebook Groups. I was using Intercom for chat but it wasn’t getting used much so we’re trying out the new community area.

ConvertKit handles the bi-monthly newsletter. Also thanks to Memberful syncs up who on my mailing list is a member and who is not.

Some useful WordPress plugins I use for this site are PrintFriendly for PDFs, Thrive Architect for extra customisations and WordPress Popular Posts for trending items.

BootCraft uses more tools and plugins than other sites I have, but that’s because it needs to do more and it needs to do something unusual (search a database of group fitness workouts). You don’t need all of these tools to make your own website. In fact many new platforms will handle your email, website and membership site so you don’t have to worry about all this stuff.

The point of this article is twofold. 1) So that I can look back in the future and see what I was using if anything ever changes and 2) to hopefully show you that if I can do it, anyone can, you just need some determination and tools.

3 habits to help you build trust

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1. Consistency

When people know we can be relied upon to turn up in the same place at the same time, that builds trust. Think of the 1990s news anchor who was on your TV every single night, watched and trusted by millions.

Start with small things and then over time work your way up to being consistent with bigger and bigger stakes.

2. Transparency

Be honest with your intentions and be upfront when you make a mistake. Then, seek to learn and remedy the mistake you made.

It can also be helpful to share your losses and failures and what you learned from them as much as you share your wins and successes. Take people with you on your journey. The point is not to be right, the point is to try and then course correct when needed.

3. Authority

This one gets a lot of people confused. Authority isn’t about having the right certificate or waiting for the right person to tell you that you’re now an expert. These are just gatekeepers that are holding you back from contributing.

Authority happens when you decide to speak up. But just as important is listening. It’s a conversation of you are sharing what you’ve learned so far and then being open to feedback. After all, who better to teach you then the people you seek to serve.

If you want to build trust with your community, audience or customers, find a way to do these 3 things. Especially if they scare you.

What they want

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Different people want different experiences when they buy from you or join your community.

Some want it fast, some want it cheap, some want the red carpet rolled out, some want to lurk, some want to feel seen, some want to take their time, some want to be included and some don’t want it at all.

None of these is right and none are wrong. That’s the point, it’s depends on the person. Your job is to work out what they want and how they want it.

Upwards and downwards spirals

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Positive habits often create momentum and flow into more positive habits. In the same way negative habits often lead into more negative habits.

It kind of works like an upwards or downwards spiral.

Let’s take the example of wanting to create a new routine of exercising first thing in the morning:

  • The night before you take 5 minutes to get organised. You set out your exercise clothes and set your alarm.
  • You work out what time you need to go to bed and start getting ready for bed 15 minutes beforehand.
  • The next morning you’ve got everything ready to go and it’s easy to get dressed and get started with exercising.
  • The rest of that day you’re feeling pretty good about yourself and that momentum leads into more action that day.
  • After the early morning and activity you find it easier to get to bed earlier that night to repeat it all again the next day.

This is an upwards spiral. The positive actions lead into more positive actions and make it easier and easier to keep your new routine going.

A downwards spiral might look like this:

  • You want to start a new exercise habit but this time you get sucked into watching just one more episode of the show you’re into.
  • And then just one more.
  • And then just one more. Finally you drag yourself away and head to bed a couple hours later than you intended.
  • The next morning your alarm goes off. You hit snooze a few times before finally getting up.
  • Now you’re late and you can’t find your exercise clothes.
  • When you finally find them it’s too late so you skip exercising today.
  • You feel tired though from the alarm and all of that snoozing so you have more coffee that day.
  • That night you decide to try again and to go to bed earlier. But wired from your coffee you stay up and watch just one more episode.
  • And then one more…

What does value mean?

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Choosing how much to charge for something is difficult.

If you’re used to be paid by or charging by the hour, the temptation is to caclulate how many hours your thing took to make and multiply that by your hourly rate. But that doesn’t accurately create the value of an item or service.

Value isn’t what it’s worth to you, value is what something is worth to the buyer.

Netflix includes films and shows that took thousands of hours to make, yet we get access for less than $20 per month. We’re used to having things to watch on our TV for free, so we don’t highly value something that gives us that.

When someone buys a piece of art, it may cost them thousands of dollars. But it’s something she’ll get to keep for life. It’s also a statement that she’s the kind of person who buys expensive art. And it may make her feel good to know that she’s supporting an artist she admires.

Expensive or cheap, price your thing based on the value it gives.

Wait 5 minutes

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In the rush to not be bored, sometimes we fill in the quiet moments of the day too quickly.

If only we’d wait 5 minutes before checking that email or beginning a session of endless scrolling, we might see that there is something better we can do to fill our bucket.

At the very least we’ll get 5 minutes of our day back.

Sundays are for recharging

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That could mean spending the day doing nothing.

Or cleaning your house to make your space enjoyable to live in.

Or decluttering for the same reason.

Or giving your day to others by volunteering.

Or cooking for hours and hours to share a meal with friends and family.

Or putting some hours on the bike or taking a big hike.

Or playing video games with a few friends online.

Or just slowing down enough to notice the little things in your day.

We all recharge in different ways. Sundays are for recharging.