FREE TO EVERYONE! BUILDING YOUR COMMUNITY WEBINAR TODAY⬇️

Most of the women I talk to who are burning out on their community — Substack, Skool, Kajabi, whatever they're running — aren't actually burning out on community. They're burning out on feeling like they have to create new content every day. But those two things are not the same job - even though they feel like the same job - which is exactly the problem.

If you have a community, it might feel like sitting down on Monday morning with your coffee and the real intention to show up for your people. Somewhere before lunch that turns into "I need to produce something" — a post, a newsletter, a lesson, maybe a reel (if you're feeling self-destructive.) You make the thing, you send the thing, you watch how the thing did, you feel a little flat about how the thing did, and then it's Thursday and you have to do it again.

That's not community building.

What you've actually built is a content treadmill with the word community written on the side. (Am I the only one? 🙋🏼)

There are three different jobs hiding in there, and each one needs its own time and its own focus..

Content is the thing you create — the newsletter, the post, the video, the workshop replay. Someone can consume it alone, asynchronously, having never met you and never planning to. It's there to attract people and show your thinking and build trust from a distance, and you are not in the room when they read it, which is completely fine because that's what it's for. (This will be about 80% of your community - whether that is a Skool community, a Substack community or even your LinkedIn followers.)

Conversation is what happens between people — a comment thread that actually goes somewhere, a live call where someone asks a real question, a DM that turns into something useful. It needs at least two people and some amount of real time, and you can set up the conditions where it's likely to happen, but you can't manufacture it or schedule it the way you schedule a newsletter. You can send the DM - you can't guarantee people will answer - or even see it (especially if you have not shown them the options.)

Community is what forms when conversation happens consistently enough, between enough people, around something they all care about, that they start to feel like they belong somewhere. It's the byproduct, not the product. You can't post your way to it. You build it by creating the conditions — the right people, the right structure, the right prompts, the right space — and then letting people find each other and decide they want to stay. Gamification helps. Encouragement helps. Bragging rights help. Highlighting members help.

And then there's the part we forget about..... space for yourself.

You are also a person, and your community is not your only job. If you've built a membership where your members expect you on, producing, answering, going live, every single week with no off-season and no breathing room, you haven't built a community so much as a second job with nicer branding.

The membership businesses that actually thrive and last run on a rhythm instead of a content calendar, and a rhythm has an off-beat built into it — a content calendar is just on, on, on, until the day you quit.

Also - set freaking expectations!!!! You don't owe your members unlimited access to you. You owe them what you promised, well-designed and well-delivered, with enough room in between that you actually have something worth saying when you show up.

So, take whichever of these is yours and run with it:

☑️ Pull up the last month of what you made and sort each piece into content, conversation, or community. Just notice the ratio. Most of us find it's almost all content and we've been calling the whole thing community. (Yup - that's me - I literally JUST turned on gamification and DM engagment. More on that in my next post...)

☑️ Pick one thread or comment section this week and reply with an actual paragraph instead of a heart-react. That one paragraph is where conversation starts.

☑️ Decide your on-beat and your off-beat (not beat-off - I just had a giggle on that one) for the next quarter — when you're fully on and when you're deliberately quieter — and tell your people the quiet stretch is on purpose, not an apology. Ladies - we work and play and live in cycles - and that is not only OK - it's ENCOURAGED!!!!

☑️ If you're still building the room, write down ten people by name who'd be genuinely lit up to be there, and go talk to them before you worry about the next hundred.

Tell me in the comments which of the three you've been over-indexing on. I'll bet money it's content.

And if you want to go deeper on this, I'm hosting a live conversation with

@Kelly Howard

TOMORROW — Tuesday, June 30 at 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET — on building community on Skool specifically. She grew a membership from 25 to more than 1,000 with virtually no ad spend, so she's not theorizing.

Come hang out: https://www.skool.com/live/JwlSZkfhZQy

(LINK ALSO ABOVE IN THE PLATFORM - JUST CLICK OT JOIN)

FREE TO EVERYONE! NOT JUST PREMIUM MEMBERS :)

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FREE TO EVERYONE! BUILDING YOUR COMMUNITY WEBINAR TODAY⬇️