For 5 years now, I’ve been making a living online.
But I realized that I won’t reach the power I want until I build a community, because the only way to be visible on the internet is to share content. And it doesn’t make sense to do it alone.
So a community is 1,000 - 10,000 - 100,000 people shouting what you want to say together! (you will see the tactics I use for this step by step)
I used to be registered in a few communities that weren’t my own. Every morning and evening I would share a few things and sell what I had. My livelihood depended on it.
So I had to constantly sharpen my community building and copywriting skills.
And not only that, I made an effort to learn web design. Then I jumped into CRO (conversion rate optimization), which means retaining an incoming user and guiding them to the action you’ve set. It requires a lot of UI and UX knowledge (the best book I’ve read on this is Hacking Growth)
2 months ago I pulled the trigger and started a community forum on Xenforo!
I announced it to my followers on Twitter and it was going great at first. I was targeting the next generation of digital entrepreneurs, but for them this infrastructure seemed too “traditional”. My goal was to be a community like Indie Hacker. New and unique…
I decided to change the infrastructure of my site.
This is how I discovered Discourse. I was going to make a sponsorship deal with a big tech company in our country. They were going to sponsor my community because I was planning to build a community that spoke to their target audience.
They told me that it would be better to use “discourse”.
With this suggestion, I discovered Discourse. I said okay, this is what I was looking for! 1 month ago I switched to this infrastructure. I was announcing my community on Twitter, so I changed it to a twitter-like design (user habits. we use what we are used to more easily)
But it was insufficient.
I tried to solve all the places where users had friction. For example, I put a sticky “Comment” button in phosphor green for commenting on the topic, because it was not very visible before. The rate of members commenting was low.
Even this small change was very useful.
I also used the “Guest Gate Theme Component” for member acquisition. I thought it was necessary to inform the user to register after visiting a maximum of 10 posts. It really worked.
These may seem like small things.
But you are preparing a huge system as a result of every 1% small change. Now, for example, I want to do the following.
- Members should be able to give each other +/- trade points after trading among themselves
- A link network view for links within the topic (like obsidian)
These are things that my target audience would like. For example, my Twitter followers are very interested in the Second Brain method and note-taking. If I can display a network of links for a “linked notes” development like Obsidian, for example, that will be very innovative and my members will look forward to using it.
All in all, I love that Discourse allows for all this.
I wanted to share a few of my tactics for now, and I wanted to give something back to this Meta community in return for learning from you.
Know that you are loved, friends! 