If you’re asking, ‘how do I create a niche online community,’ you’re not alone.
More and more people are figuring out that building an online tribe is a great way to become your own boss, build stable business revenue (and hopefully profit), and reduce the number of hours you have to work each week in order to live a great life. In a word: freedom.
The question is how to get started. What steps do you have to take to build a niche community online?
That’s exactly what I want to lay out for you here. I’ve been starting and running niche online communities since 2010… and there’s a blueprint that I follow to launch them. Let’s dig into it now.
How Do I Create a Niche Online Community?
The steps to take when you create a niche online community are pretty straightforward:
- Decide on your target niche
- Build a unique offering
- Test your specific offer
- Ramp up traffic to your site
- Profit
Of course, the details of each is where you can get bogged down or confused. These steps are like walking up a flight of stairs – while each step is pretty obvious and seems simple, there are a million small tasks and adjustments that your body has to make to balance, coordination, muscle tension, vision, etc, in order for you to accomplish your goal. I’ll lay out some of the details behind these steps for you here.
IMPORTANT: Remember that these steps are the same no matter if you’re building a Costco competitor, or just want to build a community behind your YouTube vlog (ok, the website may be more or less relevant, but aside from that…). The basics do not change, but the specifics that are relevant to your particular niche will.
And, if you want to know the technical solutions we use for these steps, visit our best digital marketing tools page.
1. Decide on your target niche
It all starts with your target niche. You need a group or submarket to go after. Even better if it’s a sub-submarket… the smaller and more defined the better.
Your best bet is to focus on a market for a skill that you know well… so you can write or communicate about it exhaustively. Remember that your community is there to follow you and your solution, so the more knowledge that you have about it the better you can help others, market to them, and build your tribe.
But you should also remember to focus your energies on niches that promise some hope of profit. You want to make sure that the area you’re going to build a community in is a niche where people spend money on services like those you may offer. If not, you could build a large following of people who will never give you money, and you can kiss your freedom (and the funds you used to start your venture) goodbye.
Here, I look for competition. You actually want successful competitors in your chosen niche because it shows that some people are making money in your area of focus, so you could too if you get your offer right. Also, look for places where businesses are spending on ads. This will tell you that businesses are making enough money in the niche to fund advertising. This is very promising.
2. Build a unique offering
Once you nail down a niche to focus on, you want to craft your offer. Your aim here is to build an offer (what you will provide in exchange for some amount of money) that people take you up on, known as an offer that converts.
To craft a unique but appealing offer, you need to understand your target market, understand the people in it – their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, pains, frustrations, hopes, opinions, etc. Basic market research will help here. Read forums, discussion groups, listen to podcasts, read marketing surveys, go to meetups, etc, in order to either ask questions or read comments in order to build up your knowledge.
Once done, come up with a number of “pain points,” emotionally potent frustrations that are niche relevant and represent problems that you could potentially solve for people in your niche. I would personally focus on what seems like the biggest or most pressing pain point and then brainstorm solutions for it that you could conceivably provide.
Finally, look at your competition to see what solutions are already in the market. Remember that as an entrepreneur you are a problem solver. That’s what business is. So, find out what problem there is that you can solve, one that nobody else is offering.
Don’t just blindly copy what someone else is doing. That’s a sure way to defeat, as the incumbent can outspend you, out market you, and likely has the better solution since s/he’s refined it for a long time.
It does not matter if there is already a solution for the pain point that you uncover. What matters is if you can offer a differentiated approach to solving it because some percentage of prospects in the market will prefer your differentiated solution over the existing solution.
3. Test your specific offer
Once you have your solution nailed down, it’s time to craft and test a specific offer. Here, you want to be very specific about your solution, what exactly you’ll provide, and how much you’ll charge for your solution.
Specify exactly what you will offer the prospect… whether a community forum, individual 1-on-1 help from a guru (you), a data package, etc. You want to make this as specific as possible.
Now, look at your competitors to find out what they may be charging for similar products or services. Your competition’s pricing will tell you what the market is willing to pay, and for what. Set your price in line with what others are charging. Any more and you won’t be competitive (you’re a new business without a brand, or reputation, remember). Any less and you’ll be seen as lower value (unless you’re offering some volume based solution for a type of solution that people are already price sensitive to).
If you plan to offer your own community website, set up a basic site using internet standard software, utilize attractive existing templates, put up a signup page that sells people on your product or solution, and implement some way to record the number of signups. Google Analytics is probably good for this since it can track page hits, but any software that tells you how many people landed on your “success page” is good enough.
You do not need a merchant account yet. Don’t worry about taking payments. This is the test phase, and your objective is to get your offer in front of as many people as possible in order to test whether prospects in your niche will give you money for your solution or not.
Your aim here is to try to get people to fill out a dummy checkout page (without storing the data) and then redirect them to a success page after they click submit. You don’t actually charge them, and your success page can state that there was an error in processing the payment and to check back later or email support. You simply count the number of submissions to see how many people would have bought your offer.
Get traffic via social media, ads you run on websites via private placement (contact them and ask how much for various places on the site), Google ads, YouTube ads, etc. You need to reach out to your prospects where they are.
Remember, get the offer in front of people rapidly, make sure those people are relevant prospects in your niche, and record the number of people who try to sign up relative to the number that visit your sales page.
If you get some conversion rate over – say – 5%, you’re probably good to go if hundreds of people visited your sales page. The actual number of attempted sign ups that is considered good is necessarily arbitrary. Asking how many is good is like asking how warm water has to be before we can say that it’s hot. The better your conversion rate… uh… the better. But, you will need a higher conversion rate if fewer prospects visited your sales page.
When launching a recent site, I got our offer in front of 183 people and said that if we got just 20 of them to sign up, a conversion rate of 11%, I would consider that a pass. I had a personal target of 25 – just because I “felt” that was a good number – working out to a conversion rate of 13-14%. If we got 30 (16%) then I would consider that quite good. As it so happened, we got 48… for a conversion rate of 26%. Outstanding.
After you test, you’ll end up with one of two outcomes: people either tried to buy, or they didn’t. If they did, and you feel that the conversion rate was pretty good, it’s time to push forward with your project.
If you don’t feel that enough of them tried to buy, then you may have to retool your offer – lowering your price, adding some features, more clearly communicating what you want to provide, how they will benefit from your solution, etc – then test again.
4. Ramp up traffic to your site
Once you have your offer that converts, you actually build out your solution so people can access it, implement your payment system, and put in place your membership management system, it’s time to get your offer in front of a lot of people.
(Remember, if you want to know the solutions we use for these, visit our best digital marketing tools page.)
Getting your offer in front of more people usually means ramping up traffic to your website, but could just mean getting more people to view your YouTube videos, follow you on Twitter (X), etc.
In general, writing articles on well selected keywords (relevant and low competition) is a good way to build a recurring stream of prospects to your website. This is a long term endeavor, though, and takes considerable effort.
Social media posts are another great way to drive traffic to your website / podcast / YouTube channel because you can immediately reach a large number of prospects when you post on social media groups. The burst of traffic, though, is short lived and some groups are iffy about posting your own content on. Be careful.
Advertising is great if you know that you have an offer that converts well, and you can afford to spend money to test advertising messages. This approach is a great way to maximize what you have (but it also maximizes losses if you just got lucky with your initial conversion rate). Make sure you already have a viable business before going this route.
5. Profit
With a website in place, an offer that converts, a good system in place for getting eyeballs on your offer, and sales coming in, you can rest a bit easier.
Continued success depends a lot on how sustainable your source of prospects is, what your prospects think of your solution and the care and attention that you provide your prospects.
Don’t be like many other businesses and offer terrible customer service. This will open you up to attack, and eventually ruin your business. Treat your clients like the gold that they are.
Reaching profitability means bringing in more revenue than you’re spending to run the site. It’s wise to invest that profit in areas that you think could bring you more sales – online courses, memberships, staff, etc – and maybe build a competitive advantage.
Don’t just waste it on luxury bags, or nightclub tables. Remember that long term profit depends on your ability to keep bringing in prospects, and ensuring that those who take you up on your offer are satisfied and stick around.
As you can see, there are a million details behind all of these steps. Knowing how to proceed from one to another comes from experience and guidance from people who have walked the path before you. We can’t help you with the experience part, but I will do my best to share the insights I’ve gained from launching and running membership communities since 2010. Subscribe to keep up to date with what I share.
