Community, Community, Community. This is what all the gurus are preaching at the moment. Build your community. Have your evangelists around you. Gain confidence and then Sell Sell Sell.
I really didn’t understand this concept at first because I’m a data and SEO person, but the community strategy — it’s gold.
I’ve watched many crafty people use this strategy. I have watched them over the years make their videos, build a community, and begin to sell courses and workshops. They are killing it. The key here is the community. They have built trust by providing free information which is useful and when their paid content is offered, their community jumps at it.
But I have also seen abuse of this community trust. Crafty people doing it backwards. One community in particular was able to take over $80,000 in 2 months this way — without a single product being delivered in over 7 months — all built on the trust they had built in the community. Mind blowing right? If I hadn’t seen it and experienced it myself, I would never have believed it.
So a creator of a bag has a very loyal and faithful community around them. The pattern is years old now and has had many copies hit the market but the creator keeps an ever growing number of fans around them and builds their faith on a single thing — a promise. That’s all. A promise that they will deliver workshops to teach the bag, that they have a new pattern coming out and it will have workshops as well. They promise. It’s coming.
Now the community literally threw money at the creator. I have never seen anything like it. It was a gold rush. The community couldn’t pay fast enough. They are STILL paying. Did I mention the funnel — I will get to that. And they are still waiting — 7 months down the track — for a single completed workshop or anything that even resembles a new pattern.
The funnel is brilliant. They have their pattern on Craftsy.com the leading online platform for independent creators to sell their patterns and workshops. Millions of people hit this every month. And to have a top selling pattern in a category is pure gold. People buy it month after month, realise how ridiculously hard it is to make and follow, and search for help. Voila. Help is at hand my friends with a facebook group, a website, and workshops to complete the complicated structure. This funnel brings in a couple of hundred new people every month. Ready to have their money taken from them for a product that isn’t even there. They sign up to the workshops. Come back to the group. Um where are the workshops? They’re coming. OK how long? Any day now. The new people start a new waiting clock, totally oblivious to the thousands of others who have already waited 7 months before them.
The creator has made all sorts of excuses, particularly those related to a conspiracy theory surrounding all her haters all over the world of the internet who don’t want her to succeed. They blame the internet. They blame poor staff. They blame corrupt staff. They blame their camera equipment. The excuses have grown more and more outrageous as the time has gone on. Anyone who asks for a refund is banished — BANISHED from the group never to return and publicly humiliated.
So if you want to make money on the internet without ever, ever, ever providing a product — build a strong steadfast community that you can brainwash like a cult, around you. And take their money. Over and over and over. And then, DISAPPEAR to start again a year later.
Carry on.
