Community is NOT a Passive Income Source

Are you as ready for the end of the year as I am? 😅 

September has me (and many of my clients) rushing to wrap up any chaos that sprung up during this year. So that we can “Stabilise” the ship in time for a restful end-of-year break. And a (hopefully) ready to kick off next year with a bang!

Today’s essay is a bit of a warning to stick to building your strategy, rather than jumping into flighty fancies which can easily distract you from your long-term goals.

Community is NOT a Passive Income Source

So you’ve put blood, sweat and tears into building a following and proving you’ve got a credible brand. Firstly, well done! 👏 

If you’ve engaged over 1000 people - that is NO small feat. If you’ve amassed an audience of over 100k, then I’d go as far as to say you probably know what you’re doing when it comes to content creation and social media.

It’s usually at this point that you’ll start to think about how to make money from this hard work. Especially all that content you’ve spent hours toiling over — that is just gathering “dust” in some old folder in the cloud.

It is at this point in most potential client’s journey’s that they reach out to me.

Because the social media guru’s and 4-day-work-week peeps all say that you have to create a recurring, passive income stream to actually make money off of the audience you’ve worked SO hard to build.

And yes, a community is a brilliant way to receive recurring monthly and annual income from your audience.

But if you think this is a passive endeavor, boy are you in for a world of burnout! 😅

What is a community actually?

There are a few lenses you can adopt here: products, sales, marketing, social welfare even. But at it’s core:

So yes, a community can be a product - but when you’re selling a community, you are not selling a platform of features and downloadables.

You’re actually inviting people into a space where they can engage with other people who are on similar journey’s or looking for a particular transformation or experience. And you have to design, build and iterate on that experience on a recurring basis — and won’t just be able to stick a paywall on it and retire overnight.

There are various common types of community you can build:

• A community of practice (professional or non)

• A community of place (related to common geographies)

• A community of interest

• Identity-based communities

• Communities of need

• Communities of convenience

You can see some examples of these communities here.

Social media followings are NOT communities

This is a really hard pill to swallow but to put it plainly:

Social media is a lead generation channel, which means it aims to get your brand more reach and helps you grow a very “cold” audience of individuals who are potentially interested in you, your brand or your business.

These individuals never pay you a cent for your content - and these platforms actually make it really difficult for users to navigate off of the platform. Instagram won’t let you have more than one link, because it doesn’t want you to drive people away. They want more and more people to use their platform, and will actually punish your reach if you try to push your products on their platform.

This means you do not “own” your audience. In fact, you don’t even own your platform or the content you put on it. You’re just feeding the social media machine and driving more and more users toward it if you don’t have a better way to engage them.

You’re smart to want to “own” the audience you’ve built

But you have to note that you’ve mostly learned “lead generation” tactics up until this point and may have a SOLID awareness channel 1000s of followers - but now you need to turn those leads into customers.

And that means setting up an engagement channel that allows you to:

1. Capture their details (so you can contact them again).

2. Tell your audience about your products - and invite them to buy,

3. Build long-term credibility that creates advocates and super fans.

But it also might mean setting up a nurturing channel which allows those people to reach back out to you - if your brand needs it.

Check out my newsletter about choosing the right channel to learn the difference and how I choose my marketing stack.

Overall, a community is more than just a WhatsApp/Discord group that you can stick a price on and people will join. I believe it is a brand product that needs just as much effort, strategy and consideration as any other product you hope to launch to your audience.

(And we haven’t even started talking about how much time community management actually takes - if you want to do it authentically that is 😉)