Hey there - we're back with another Deep-Dive Monday 👋

In today's edition, I will show you how to kickstart your community and attract your first members through content.

I'm happy to finally write about this topic because content has been our main growth strategy at Coinvise. From 0 to 2K members on our Discord and 11K+ followers on Twitter, we saw how great content can change the direction of a community.

Unfortunately, too many community builders overlook content as a growth strategy.

Content is one of the best ways to go from 0 to 100+ targeted members in weeks.

And while you might think attracting your community's first members through content requires a tremendous amount of effort, in reality, it requires only 4 steps:

1. Discover your ideal members' profound needs

2. Create content that solves their core problems

3. Share it in relevant/similar communities

4. Engage with readers & onboard them manually

At the end of this Deep-Dive, you'll walk away with concrete actions to get initial traction, create targeted content without an existing audience, and get your first engaged members.

Without further ado, let's dive in.

Step 1: Discover your ideal members' profound needs

Building a community is, before anything else, about solving the problems of a specific niche. People come together to solve problems they can't solve as an individual. 

So the very first thing you have to do to attract your first members is to understand their problems in depth.

When I started creating content for Coinvise, I asked myself 5 questions:

1. What do our members want to achieve?

2. What are their fears?

3. What do they struggle with daily?

4. How do they try to solve those problems today?

5. What are they standing for/against?

But I didn't try to find the answers myself. I actually spent hours online to find concrete data. Your future members are already sharing their problems every day, you just need to know where they talk about them.

So here are 3 tips that really helped me at the beginning:

• Search in the #help channel or #ask channel in similar/relevant Discord servers what people are struggling with or the questions they're asking. 

• Make a list on Twitter of your "ideal members" and analyze what they tweet about. Everyone on Twitter is tweeting about what they struggle with, what they want to achieve, or what they're upset about. Use those data. One of their recent tweets got a lot of engagement? This means their audience (and therefore, yours) is interested in this specific subject.

• Comment under the posts of the experts in your niche, and ask them to clarify their thoughts or expand on one of their ideas. This will result in more data for you to analyze and better understand your target.

You should actually spend at least a week browsing everything you can about your ideal members. Because the more you'll start to understand their problems in depth, the easier it will be for you to come up with new content ideas that speak to them.

Step 2: Start writing articles to solve their needs.

Now that you've defined your members' needs and that you have multiple topics in mind that would interest your members, it's time to start writing.

To come up with content ideas, organize all the problems you identified from the 1st step and try to come up with 10 broad categories.

For example, when I started searching for Coinvise's members' needs (Web3 community builders), I identified 10 broad categories they were interested in:

1. Getting initial traction / Raising attention

2. Turning Passive Members Into Active Contributors

3. Making Money / Monetizing

4. Targeting New Members

5. Creating a narrative around their community

6. Disincentivizing speculation

7. Understanding the Legal Aspects

8. Engaging a Twitter audience

9. Nailing the Onboarding Process

10. Figuring out Tokenomics / Governance models

Each new piece of content you're writing should fall into one of those categories, solve one of your community's profound problems and give them actionable / easy-to-implement tips.

If we're taking the "Engaging a Twitter Audience" category, for example, some article ideas could be:

1. Building A Strong Community Starts On Twitter. Here are 5 Writing Techniques That Will Help You Get More Engagement On Your Tweets.

2. This Community Grew Its Community On Twitter From 0 to 200K in 4 Months Using a Simple Framework. Here's How You Can Do It Too.

3. This Simple Framework Will Help You Grow Your Audience On Twitter And 10x Your Community's Engagement (Even If You Tried Everything).

You'll soon get more content ideas than time to write about them.

Step 3 - Share it in relevant/similar communities.

Once you have great content that you feel should be worth sharing with a broader audience - do it.

If you're building a community in a specific niche, chances are you already know a few communities and places to share your content with people that'd be interested.

But if you don't, here are 3 tips to discover similar communities:

1. Check who your "ideal members" are following on Twitter and try to spot the communities they are part of.

2. If your ideal member's Twitter name is their ENS name, look up on Etherscan which tokens they hold (and, therefore, which community they are part of.)

3. Go explore the many communities on Coinvise and find the ones who are building in your niche.

Once you have identified 3-5 relevant communities, it's time to share your content in their Discord in a thoughtful way.

You don't want to be this person simply dropping your content in the wrong channel and saying, "check it out."

Introduce yourself first, start genuine conversations, and maybe even contribute if you can. And only then, if this is relevant in a conversation or can answer someone's question, plug your content.

Sure, it takes more time than simply dropping your content, but you'll learn more about your potential future members by hanging out with them, and your impact will be 10x compared to the first option.

Step 4 - Engage with readers & onboard them manually.

Finally, people liking your content will generally engage with you. They'll send you a DM, react to your message on Discord, comment below your tweet, or ask further questions in the comments section of your newsletter.

Optimize your chances to let them interact with you. We suggest you to:

• Allow people to send you friend requests on Discord (and accept them) 

• Open your DMs on Twitter

• Let them know at the end of your article that you'd love to get feedback

By following these 4 simple steps and by providing real value, you'll soon create true friendships with people interested in the problem you're trying to solve.

Onboard them manually in your Discord, and see if there are ways they can contribute to helping you achieve your goal.

And that's a wrap! 

An efficient content strategy requires only 4 steps and will help you attract your first community members. As shown above, you need to: 

1. Discover your ideal members' profound needs

2. Create content that solves their core problems

3. Share it in relevant/similar communities

4. Engage with readers & onboard them manually

If you're being consistent in this approach and creating systems to organize your content, you should very soon get quality content that you can share with potential future members.

And before you notice, you'll get dozens of members in your community.

Found this helpful?

Leave a comment and share your first piece of content you’re planning to publish 😉

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