Want to stop reading now? The answer is content.
Oh good, you’re still with me. The truth is if you want to start something where people do more than just buy from you and move the hell on, you need love. You need passion. You need fanatics.
Content is the only want to get those kinds of reactions.
And… all of the fluffiness around content aside. You need content if you care about growth. It’s free keeping your costs low. It spreads autonomously keeping your staff needs low. It retains customers. It gets picked up by major news outlets. You can monetize it. I mean… do I really need to say more?
Here’s how I did it for the GenJuice Tour in 2010.
1. Start with a story
2. Build the online foundation
3. Create a simple action for people to take
4. Start with the people that love you
5. Move to influencers
6. Create community through content
7. Be consistent
8. Monetize it
1. Starting with a story
Before starting anything, I like to sit down and come up with the story. The “WHY” for what I’m doing.
My GenJuice Tour story was I was a college senior who had to write a college thesis to graduate. My thesis was to test whether Gen Y was more entrepreneurial because we had to brand ourselves online.
A friend who was a DJ told me that if I was the true “rockstar” I said I was, I would go on tour to meet the entrepreneurial Gen Y leaders of America. Thus, the GenJuice Tour was born and that was our mission. 3-4 kids were going to hop into a car and tour the country.
2. Build your online foundation
So, I’m a broke college student with an idea to tour the country holding events meeting the top Gen Y leaders in the world. It’s now partly for my thesis, partly for an incredible once-in-a-lifetime experience.
What do I do first?
Ha! Start a blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel and just get the base for the project set up. Now I have somewhere to point people for the content I’m about to share.
3. Create a simple action for people to take
After you’ve created the places for people to go, you need to create a simple easy way for them to fall in love and take action. You need to tell the story clearly and give them one single way to get involved.
I did this in a few ways for the GenJuice Tour. My favorite was we created a photo album on Facebook with images of the different cities we were going to. We asked all of our friends to tag the young people that inspired them in the photos and we’d reach out to them to interview them on our GenJuice Tour blog.
There are probably 234298342342 single actions you can ask people that fall in love with your story to do. Hint: the first action should’nt involve money, if you want their hearts.
4. Start with the people that love you
You have family and friends for a reason. They will always support you, give you feedback, etc. If you’re like me and you always have something you’re working on, they are used to it.
The first thing I did with the GenJuice Tour was send out an email telling the story:
“I have no money. I have no car. But I’m going to tour the country with 3-4 people interviewing and connecting the nation’s youngest leaders and learning from them. Will you help me?”
Then I asked for a single action depending on how I thought they could help.
5. Move to influencers
If you have a damn good story, if you have some early traction from friends and family, don’t waste your time waiting for people to show up. Make a list of the people who will take your initiatives through the roof and start getting those introductions.
Brenton Geiser created a long list of Gen Y bloggers he was either connected to and/or could get connected to (the beautiful thing about influencers in a vertical is they typically know each other anyway!). He made those intros for us and soon we were getting written up by blogger after blogger after blogger. The blogs fueled the people who initially supported us and keep them excited (read: retained). Our little movement was going.
6. Create community through content
You have some momentum, you have people’s attention, you have a damn good story to tell. You should be creating content that continues to seed conversation and contribution.
If you have a good story, it’s likely you have a good problem that can be addressed consistently. With the GenJuice Tour, our community wanted to start businesses. They were eager to find out how to raise money, how to hire the right people, how to get their first clients. Of course, we could answer these questions directly – but that wouldn’t be too helpful. Instead we asked others with that knowledge to join the community and create content for us. We asked them to host Facebook office hours on our page.
On top of that, we knew our community wanted to be heard. They had stories to tell, too! So we became that platform for them. We asked them to contribute and we had over 100 contributors after the tour ready to tell the world about how they planned to change it.
The best companies create platforms where their customers/clients/etc can express themselves. Why do you think Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest and all of the social media properties that allow you to “present” yourself do so well?
7. Be consistent
People change. Ideas change. But the key – that we missed with GenJuice – is your story or the reason you’re doing what you do should never change. Our story was around 3 kids hopping in the rental car touring the country connecting Gen Y leaders. That story moved around and our community didn’t understand it anymore.
This step is simple. Always remember your story.
8. Monetize it
You want to do what you love and get paid to do it? There are TONS of ways to monetize your content, dude. Lifestyle design bloggers come up with cool ways daily. Just look at how Appsumo took the course business and created a flash site/daily deal site model to it. Learn from the people who are making incredible amounts of money from content. Pinterest is using affiliate links with Skimlinks. There are tons of ways, just go out there and learn.
Point is, digital media makes it easy to start movements if you believe passionately in your story.
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