Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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How To Grow Your Community! Without Paying For Ads | Episode 411

 

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Think ads are the only way to grow your community? Think again. Rob reveals how he grew his community to 140+ members with $0 in ad spend—using three powerful, game-inspired strategies you can start today.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob Alvarez (00:00)
Most people think ads are the only way to grow a community. But mine has 140 members already, and I’ve never spent a single dollar on ads.

And here’s the thing, the ads are not the secret. There are three strategies that anyone can use to start growing their community today, and I’ll walk you through them.

Rob Alvarez (00:17)
Now, if you’ve ever tried growing a community, you know how frustrating it can be. You start to wonder, what if this never takes off?

That single belief keeps a lot of people from even starting a community, a profitable one, in the first place.

I get it. I’ve been there. But here’s what I’ve learned. The growth does not need to come from ads. As you know, I already have over 140 members, zero ads. I literally don’t even know how to do ads at this point. And honestly, that makes it even stronger. So if you’re stuck or you’re on the fence about starting because you don’t know, you’re not sure how people will find you, just stick with this video. I’m going to share .

three strategies that helped me grow my community, again, without a single dollar spent on ads, and how you can start doing that right away.

Rob Alvarez (01:04)
So I didn’t mention before, I’m Rob. The way I arrive at this is that I see all the business and even a significant part of my personal life through the lens of how games would solve this problem. they’ve, games and video games of all sorts have been doing all these things very successfully for many, many years. Video games for decades, games in general for millennia. So I see things through those lens so that we can be successful at what we do. So don’t be surprised if I insert here or there some game.

References as well. So let’s start with the first strategy. Most people don’t realize that they already have some free tools that they can use to achieve Those objectives of growing their communities. They are already in their hands right now today They can use them right away and it’s like if you were creating a Game, you’re an indie developer because chances are, you

just like in your community, you’re creating your community, you’re more like an indie developer than a triple A game studio which already has all those resources and followers and all that. So if you are creating your game, you already are hanging out somewhere with the people, the very people that you are creating that game for, same thing happens with your community. It’s certainly around some sort of passion, some sort of problem you’ve already solved, so you’re already interacting with the people that you.

are targeting to become your members. instead of using those tools, we typically, and this happened to me, we chase complicated tactics or even worse, we start thinking, how much money do I need to spend on ads? And don’t get me wrong, ads can be great and maybe you’re a marketer listening to this and you know how this whole thing works. But I used to waste a lot of time thinking about these strategies. And again, I’ve never done ads. not a marketer. I haven’t been into that, so I don’t have the expertise anyway.

thinking about, do I do these tactics? I do these things. How much money do I need to spend? Who’s gonna help me with this? Who do I pay? Who’s a great, like, I did have no idea with how to get to that point. And honestly, maybe at some point it does make sense to spend on ads once things are going. It’s like, I’ve heard this before. It’s like once things are working, it’s like adding more fuel to that fire so that it just grows exponentially. And the more fuel you add, the bigger the fire becomes, but you need to have that initial fire.

How do you get that initial fire? Honestly, this one sounds, you know, it’s gonna sound in your face a bit too obvious. The problem is, when we hear it, it’s like, then, yeah, how do I put ads on this and how do I do all these strategies? But it is a lot simpler, and that is why people ignore it, because of its simplicity. The truth is, your social media is already your most powerful free tool. Social media by social media, mean Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, like any of those places where people hang out.

Already they are in your audience and you know they exist because you’ve hung out with them before But you have to pair that with a simple CTA or call to action and it can be anything that goes from literally inviting to your community all the way to something like a freebie That’s how you turn attention from social media, which you are going to be getting by doing decent content You’re gonna get some attention. You want to turn that attention into members

So you create content, you have a good CTA to turn people into members. And, one of the easiest way, as I said, I said this was to offer a freebie, something small, something useful. For example, I created a YouTube titles spreadsheet that helps people create YouTube titles that make viewers click. And I give it away for free. Right. It’s simple. It helps people right away and it gives them a reason to take that next step into my community.

In you can find that call to action in the description. You can do the same with whatever fits your audience and your methods, the stuff that you are doing.

So the second strategy, here’s something that most community builders don’t even think about from the start. And let’s again take this to video games or even to apps that you have, whether on your phone or your computer. Let’s say you build a game or an app like it used to be done, let’s say, 30 years ago. Around that time, the only ones who really had access to that success

were people who already had a big name, were a publisher and could spend big bucks in marketing. Actually, same thing happens with books. Now, this has changed and you’ll see why and how this all relates. Like, you used to, like, to be able to publish a book, you had to convince the publisher and you had all these, gates that you had to pass in that sense. Nowadays, that is not necessary. Although you can still do it. Like, you can still go down that route. If you are independent or an indie developer or an indie writer, or in your case, like an indie,

community creator, you’re not a big corporate that can do that and just bring in all the people that you already have anyways, you have to think about this feature because otherwise you are wasting part of your efforts. Because most community platforms, or a lot of community platforms are actually islands. You have your community, your community is there, and that’s it. If you’re not bringing people, they’re not helping you bring people in,

then no one will ever find you that way. That means that you, if you’re not the one bringing people in with strategies like the one we just mentioned on social media, you’re putting in all the effort on your back. And yes, if you’re a big corporate, you got big money, that is kind of okay. But I’m guessing that you’re watching this video because that is not you. You look a lot more like that indie developer, that new author who wants to publish. You’re looking like that. And unless you do what…

those authors do nowadays, what those indie developers tend to do, at least the successful ones, if you don’t do that, the problem is you’ll have a much harder time reaching more people. So what if the platform where you build this, be it your indie game, be it your book, or be it, in your case, your community, is actually introducing you to new people for free? That’s why this discovery feature

on some community platforms really does matter. And that can look, there’s many that are capable of doing this. Some are better, some are worse for many different reasons. I personally recommend the platform Skool for Community Building. It has a lot of benefits, but in this case, the discovery feature itself, and don’t quote me on the numbers, is something like 25 % on average, of course, 25 % of new members come from the discovery feature on Skool. That’s amazing, that’s a huge number.

They actually surface your community through that. you do a good job of explaining what your community is about, they are going to be introducing people to your group for free. And if you want to create your own Skool community and you haven’t, I also share a link in the description so you can do that at absolutely no additional cost and also support us to creating more of this free content. If you consider this discovery feature, you do not have to do all of the heavy lifting yourself.

So let’s go on to strategy number three. And I talked about things being more, not lifting the whole weight yourself. But then we go to the other extreme. People wanna feel like things are just effortless. yeah, it turned viral. This overnight success and this whole idea of, and I was actually watching a video recently, it was in Spanish, about how, and again, there’s lots of stuff to discuss here, but how different it is, ⁓ Japanese,

anime, right? So Japanese cartoons like Dragon Ball, which is one of the ones I followed most, and how Goku does all this effort and has mentors and like goes through all of this to be able to defeat those, massive terrible monsters he’s able to defeat and save the world. Whereas in Western culture, we tend to be more like, oh, yeah, this ring fell on your hands on Lord of the Rings. And don’t get me wrong, I there’s sort of

some more behind it, but it tends to be more of, I am the chosen one and just stuff came from the sky and I am the chosen one. That culture of effortlessness is something that permeates into business as well. taking that example from there, it feels like we don’t have to put in that effort, like viral posts, funnels, ads that bring people, thousands of people just overnight, the overnight success Here’s the catch. Your first members,

rarely show up that way. Even if you’re using ads and even if you’re expecting to become viral, there’s something that you need to do to actually reach that point. Same thing as with indie games. Even if you’re on the right platform and you are promoting through social media, you need to start small and personal. Communities don’t start being big because you don’t go from zero to a million instantly.

You need to run through that path. Even when you see the hockey stick growth, you see that at start of the hockey stick, there is a small amount of people.

fastest way to avoid

growth stall is to actually do the thing that feels very manual. That is too unscalable. You wanna do the things that don’t scale. The most effective way to grow at the start is personal outreach. You wanna reach out to people one on one and this is actually also great because it also allows you to pinpoint, pick those people you wanna start for your community, culture, and growth. Invite them one.

on one and don’t go and invite five people, invite 10 people today, 10 people tomorrow, or like Alex Hormozzi suggests, 100 people per day for 100 days. That makes you reach 10,000 people, right? That’s huge. That’s humongous. Those early connections actually create the foundation for what you are creating. So remember, social media is already a free tool. The right platform, choosing the right platform can help people discover you and feel a little bit less weight on your back or actually that weight.

be able to give you better results. And those early one-on-one invites are what create the foundation. So if you want to create your platform through Skool, which I recommend, you have a link below. And if you want a quick win for your own social media posting, you go ahead and grab my free YouTube title spreadsheet to help you get more clicks on your videos. It’s linked below. It’s a simple way to start applying what we talked about today right now. And probably, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s…

Game over.

 

End of transcription