Category: CommunityCategory: Community

Part of breaking up with Google becomes abstract. Sure, you can say you’re not going to use Google Search anymore, but what about SEO?! How will people find your site if you don’t optimize your website for the random search traffic that the biggest search engine might send your way?

I’m not trying to get everyone on my Escape Pod Zoom calls. I’m trying to keep the people who keep showing up – those are my people! So I try to recognize where conversations are going, or themes that keep coming up. Those become future blog posts, or sometimes future Escape Pod Zoom calls.

Think less about reaching everyone, and think about reaching one specific person. Literally.

For your next post, don’t write for everyone. Instead, write to one specific person who might need it, and then send it to them directly a few days later.

This from “I almost killed my podcast,” by Becky Isjwara. Becky does a podcast called Small Creator Big World with Bhav Sharma.

Every community is shaped by the people running it. The alternative was to shut ours down entirely because I felt so icked out by what it had become. That would have meant running away from the problem rather than deciding what we actually wanted this space to be.

I’m sorry to the entrepreneurs we disappointed by not becoming the community of your dreams. There are many brilliant communities out there built for you.

There’s a weird space for everyone. We’re committed to keeping ours our kind of weird.

I post this on Social Media Escape Club (also a weird space – see our upcoming gatherings here) because getting away from social media requires a destination. Simply deleting a social media app is one thing, but figuring out what to do next can be difficult.

Becky’s Small Creator Big World started out as one thing, then through some well intentioned advice, became something else which didn’t sit well with Becky.

But this is a journey so many of us need to go on, even for Becky who isn’t “escaping social media!” The challenge in “what should I do?” is protecting your vibes from the (as mentioned before) well intentioned advice.

Grow. Streamline. Niche. Double down. Most of the time that sort of advice comes from a good place – the people we trust and admire just want us to do well! But deep down we have to honor ourselves, and the vibes we seek, the peace we want in our bones when doing the work we wanna do.

Having something for sale online is the easy part. The hard part is making the sale.

I talked about this a bit on a recent Substack Live with an author who had their work on Gumroad and Amazon but had no sales.

I got talking about this in my conversation with Deanna Seymour, about sales pages. Well, long sales pages. You’ve seen them; two miles longs, 9000 words, and they don’t say anything.

Like Deanna says during this conversation, by the time she’s on a sales page, she already knows she wants the thing, to which I replied:

“I think it’s a trust thing. The trust that (is) built. Like, there are people that we both know, they could send a Google Doc with a PayPal button on it. Yes, I’m signing up because we built that trust. We trust them now. I don’t know that an 18-page sales page builds trust. I think the trust comes way before someone clicks on your sales page.”

We buy from people we trust, or we buy things that we trust will get us what we want. We trust that buying a coffee at our favorite shop will bring us a bit of calm, peace, productivity, whatever.

But buying something from a complete stranger on the internet? There is risk in that, a roll of the dice. A foundation of trust has to come first, before growth and reach and views. As Sari Azout of Sublime said:

“Attention is cheap and volatile. Trust is slow, expensive and durable, and I think if something reaches a lot of people but creates no relationship, that’s not distribution. That’s just noise.”

When I started hosting Zoom calls with my readers in 2023 I made sure to invite friends personally, one at a time, just in case no one else showed up. By doing so, I got to learn how to host a Zoom call, and make my mistakes in safety, with people who appreciated and loved me!

Seek out ways to build trust first. Build that foundation, become oh-so-very sure and confident in who you are and what you’re offering that people are drawn to what you’re doing. Seek out the one or two or five people who appreciate what you do and figure it out together.

On today’s Break Up 💔 With Social Media call (upcoming schedule here), we got on the topic of energy. A guest mentioned that they felt inspired from the call, and they were going to spend 30 minutes afterwards working on their creative project.

Getting on a good Zoom call can give you energy.
Then working on your thing can give you energy.
Now you’ve got two jolts of energy to get you into the afternoon.

It’d be a lot easier to scroll, click, consume, of course. But choosing to spend energy, to take a chance on a Zoom call, or to make the choice to work on a thing for “just” 30 minutes, it’s all a chance. A risk.

As Seth Godin says, “this might not work.” While true, I think we know what we’re gonna get if we spend that time on social media.

Got this question recently, about community building. I’m a big believer that audio and visuals help build trust, which helps build community, as it’s you on display, in real life, unlike words on a page which can look very similar to other words on a screen.

What if my writing is the regular gathering? Maybe I don’t want to do a ton of video content—that’s okay. What if I treat my writing and sharing my work, and inviting others to comment/reply/engage, as the gathering I’m hosting every week? It’s been an interesting shift of perspective!

When I started a music blog back in 2001, we wrote it real by-the-books at first, just the facts, and nobody said a word — no comments, nothing. It wasn’t until we opened up and showed our actual personality that people started sticking around.

I still talk to people from that site 25 years later.

I’m not saying you need to publish six times a day like we did. I’m not saying post daily. I’m not saying start a podcast. But building community is about showing up in front of people, regularly, and inviting them to comment, reply, engage. If you want those things, you need to model that. You can’t just hope it happens.

So lean into email, because the inbox is intimate in a way social media ain’t. Bring people into your newsletter — “hey, I was talking to so-and-so about this.”

If you want to use names, ask for permission. Otherwise, it’s okay to generalize (like this post).

So much of building community is proving there’s community, beyond a like or a comment. Bring other people’s conversations into the forefront. My rectangle on a Zoom call doesn’t have all the answers, but all our rectangles together, we get closer, and you can say that in writing just as much as on a Zoom call.

Now, is all of this slower going without video? Sure. Video gives people the cues, the body language, the vibe, all that trust-building happens faster when they can witness you. But you can still do it with words, you just gotta be more intentional about it since it won’t come up easily. Be vulnerable, bring other people forward, make it a safe space, and know it’s not gonna happen overnight.

I’ve been doing my calls since 2023, writing online since 2001, none of this is quick. Challenge accepted though. Give it a shot.