"Community", a guide to making a profit from a project that earns millions a year!

My definition of a community is an organization composed of a group of people with common values ​​and interests, connected by a core node. It is a lightweight online industry association. Compared with traditional groups such as WeChat groups and QQ groups, the interest positioning of Internet communities is more vertical and in-depth, and members have stronger loyalty than traditional group organizations.

"Community", a project that earns millions a year

From the beginning of 2018 to now, I have been running the community for two years, with more than 1,500 accumulated community members and charging 598 yuan. The accumulated amount of community payment alone exceeds 900,000.

Of course, I still have a long way to go before I can build a top community with tens of thousands of people and earn a million dollars a year, but I have to say that my community business is superior in terms of vitality, and I cannot help but share with you some of my experiences in running the community over the past two years.

To be honest, building a community is a slow-paced and operations-intensive project.

The reason why the community is slow is that it is a project that requires long-term cultivation; the reason why the community is important is that it is a project that processes information 24 hours a day.

Quick money and huge profits are inherently out of place in the community business.

But the superiority of this business is unmatched by many other projects. This advantage is the sustainability of the life cycle. No matter how the Internet develops, communities will still exist in various forms. Communities are the important core connecting people, and this business will rise and fall with the Internet.

If you are looking for a lifelong career, then the community will be the best choice for you.

After learning today’s content, no matter what industry you are in or what job you do, you will be able to start a community of your own and generate at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in income per year.

"Disassembly and real sharing" is my experience of making money through community building. In my opinion, there are only two most important points for a community.

The first is the founder of the community, who is the central node of the community. In the early stages of a community, 90% of the content is produced by the founder, and the founder’s ability and influence also determine the foundation of the community.

If you want to form a community, you must become an expert in a certain industry and must have your own unique experience and advantages. No matter which industry or technology, as long as you are professional enough and experienced enough, you can start a community.

Therefore, not everyone can build a community. There are still some barriers to entry, but the threshold lies in whether you have a special skill.

The second is the positioning of the community, which is the interest basis of the community. What kind of goal will your community have to attract like-minded people? Generally, this goal only focuses on two or three points.

For example, the Black Hat Planet community that I initiated is focused on projects, traffic, and technology. Only when your positioning is accurate enough can you grasp the key points and get started quickly.

I have seen too many Internet communities that died in less than a month.

I once joined a community in my circle of friends where one could join by forwarding a poster. After adding the founder of the community on WeChat, I received a message from a robot that automatically replied that it would take 30 minutes to forward the poster + copy. I forwarded it to the group using a small account, only to find that the screen was filled with advertisements. In less than an hour, I had gained followers from multiple WeChat businesses. Three days later, I found that I had been removed from the group chat. It turned out that the group was disbanded because there was no one in charge.

This is not a real community. Traffic dealers are just using the name of the community to attract fans.

A high-quality community can stand the test of time. At least in the Internet industry, a community that can survive for more than a year must have its vitality.

In addition to being accurate, the community's positioning must also be small. A truly high-quality community is a small and beautiful one, not a large and comprehensive one. What I mean by big and small here is the fields, interests, and services that the community covers. Only when these are small enough can the community be of high quality.

I have seen many small and beautiful communities, such as Yiren’s “Skills to Make Money” and Wang Liuliu’s “Fission Laboratory”. They only focus on a few points, and only in this way can they be more professional.

To build a community, build IP first, then do marketing. To build a community, build IP first. Only by understanding the importance of IP can we truly understand the business model of the community.

How to build personal IP? This topic has been talked about for a long time.

To put it in one sentence, if you want to become an influential person in a certain industry, then you just need to persist in outputting value for a long time. This is the simplest methodology to build personal IP.

I don’t want to say much about creating IP. But let me just say one thing, before becoming a public IP, you must first become an expert in a certain industry.

Whether it is the Internet industry, traditional industry, or other industries. Your level of expertise determines how far you can go in the community.

The process of creating an IP is actually a process of input and output. In addition to sharing practical information, you also need to absorb new experiences and knowledge. Many people mistakenly believe that creating an IP is about sharing their own experiences.

But the reality is, once your experience is brought to the public, it will need to be subject to public scrutiny, and the timeliness, authenticity, feasibility, values, and interests of the content will be tested. At this time, you cannot only examine the content you share from a self-perspective. What you need is to share from a neutral perspective as much as possible.

The positioning of the community also determines the portrait of your potential fan group and the way you promote and market.

If you are targeting the community in the catering industry. Then, your user groups will mainly consist of restaurant owners who are currently opening restaurants and entrepreneurs who want to open restaurants.

Similarly, if you want to acquire this type of users, you need to use different methods to market, attract traffic and promote. Regarding this issue, I will continue to share my experience below.

Passive traffic cycle & art This is the "Tao" of the community. Here Tao refers to the essence of the project, and the corresponding "art" refers to the method.

Next, let’s talk about the “art” of community operation process.

It is easy to understand the community model, but it is difficult to build a truly practical community.

The methods of community operation can be mainly divided into two parts. One is "traffic" and the other is "marketing".

Traffic is probably the first hurdle for many people to overcome when doing any project. The reason why you need to build an IP before building a community is because a successful IP brings its own traffic. A successful IP will empower your community. The process of building an IP itself is a process of attracting traffic and promotion.

80% of the traffic on the Internet is long-tail traffic, which is traffic composed of a large number of fragmented channels. The best way to obtain this part of traffic is to obtain it through high-quality content, whether it is a short video or an article. As long as you can lay a large amount of content, you don’t have to worry about the problem of traffic diversion and promotion.

Every day, 40 to 100 people follow me through search alone, which solves the traffic problem without any active promotion.

Content traffic has an advantage and a weakness. Let me talk about the advantages first. Good content can allow you to obtain a steady stream of traffic for a long enough period of time in the future, and the fans you attract will be sticky and accurate enough.

The disadvantage is speed, which is slower than other methods. If you want to gain traffic by creating explosive content, the difficulty is x10 times greater.

The same content, the same video, can be distributed to multiple different channels to gain fans.

In less than three months, you can establish a complete traffic operation system of multimedia platform > official account > personal account > official account.

To put it bluntly, no matter what type of community you create or how you make money, attracting traffic through content is the most common way.

In addition to content, you also need a little bait. Content is only what can make potential fans recognize you. If you want to attract as many of them as possible, you can guide them to follow you by giving away xxx items/courses/programs for free.

Such as the catering community I mentioned above. What do restaurant owners care about most? Promotional activities, store performance, store location, and operational SOP plans. You can use any of these as bait and put them in your content to attract them.

The core of the art of social marketing and pricing is to gain trust (sharing useful information) > attract attention (free bait).

In my opinion, there are only two points about social marketing. One is what you can offer, and the other is what they need.

Combine what you can provide with what they need and write a recruitment copy. In the copy, you should focus on the positioning of your community. A community recruitment copy should be within 2,000 words and should not exceed 3,000 words at most.

There is only one core of social marketing. That is "uniqueness", which means to explore your strengths and others' weaknesses as much as possible, and use your strengths and avoid their weaknesses to do marketing.

The pricing of the community is the area that many people struggle with the most. The pricing of a community is actually very simple. You just need to analyze the pricing of similar communities in the market and the paying ability and willingness of your target group of users. Taking an intermediate value is your best pricing.

Of course, the price should not be too high or too low. Price has always been an effective means of filtering people. If the price is too low, it will lead to a mixed quality of community members and reduce the quality of the community; if the community is priced too high, some loyal fans will be discouraged.

A moderate price increase is also a more powerful measure for community operations. A high-quality community will have different life stages. The number of people in each stage determines the number of content production nodes in the community. The initial community is initiated by an influential IP. As the number of community members grows, more content node IPs will be born in the community. Moderate price increases are also a reflection of the value of the community.

Scarcity gives things value, and moderate price increases can promote scarcity.

Finally, to conclude this article "General Strategies for Making Money in Communities", I would summarize the process of building a successful community in one sentence, which is "first do the positioning, then output the hard stuff to build the IP, then throw out bait to attract potential fans, and finally launch your own community."

The above is my real experience in running a community for two years. I hope it can be helpful to you.