Building your online community should be one of your key objectives if you are trying to build your business or your personal brand. Even if you are not building an online business, your online community is still an important business metric.

I am working on building the online side of my business. While consultancy, training and speaking projects are well established, this year I wanted to concentrate on building passive online revenue streams.

You cannot monetize an online business without an engaged and supportive community – JSB

Building an online business doesn’t happen overnight, despite the “build a six-figure business in 90 days” Facebook ads that clutter our newsfeeds. In fact building any business comes with hard work, dedication, experience and learning from previous mistakes. Another important aspect to building an online business is developing a loyal and engaged community.  I have been blogging for eight years, active on social media for nine years and working in some form of media or communications role for 15 years. So in essence I’m rolling all that experience into developing a suite of products for my online business.

Can you productize your knowledge? What intellectual property or expertise do you possess that a prospective online customer would buy?

My Product Offering

I am currently developing a suite of online products (paid for and free) including:

• Webinars
• Online courses
• Educational resources
• One-to-one mentoring
• Professional development programmes
• Podcasts
• Private Facebook Groups
• Membership site

If you would like to join my community simply click here or send me an email directly to [email protected].

My Online Community In Numbers

So this week I decided to calculate my online community and establish where I am and where I want to be. Remember relationships are not just about numbers, it’s about the quality of the relationship, so let’s not forget that.

In developing My Online Community infographic I assessed how many people are part of my online community. I have lots of work to do, but at least now I have clear line of site of where I am and where I want to be. Because I learned so much from doing this task I thought I would share it with you. Maybe you could do the same for your business? If you do, please let me know what your community numbers are. I’m also intending to update this infographic at least every three months, so I can monitor my progress.

I reviewed the following metrics:

• Social Media Fans

• Monthly Website Users

• Blog Posts Published

• Klout Score (social influence)

• Webinar Subscribers

• Email Subscribers