Let’s take your temperature!

I hope you are willing to come with me on a journey into building your community and what that can mean for your life and business.

Before we hit the road, let’s gather some starting information. And if you’d rather listen for now, click here for the podcast episode.

I promise you, I wanna make this as simple and painless as possible. 

See, in order to know if we’re making progress, it’s going to be helpful to know where we are right now.

Data! Yes. I said it. It’s time to gather some data.

I really like to refer to this as taking your temperature, and I would invite you to do this without self judgment, self loathing, or slow self flagellation.

Once we know where we’re starting, we can measure our success  and then make adjustments along the way.

Now it’s time for you to get to work!

I’d like you to grab a piece of paper and a pen. I happen to like Sharpies. Maybe you do too.

I want you to look at your social profiles and take down some information.

– How many followers do you have?
– How many connections?
– How many people are subscribed to your newsletter?

I would love for you to track all this information, or at least a starting point, for every platform you use on a regular basis. (If you don’t use Twitter, don’t count Twitter).

So this is about taking your current temperature so that you can track your effectiveness moving forward.

Because if you know where you’re effective, then you can do what my friend, Nicky Roush says, and you can pour gasoline on what’s working!

Stick with me for just another moment or two because I would also love for you to look at your Google analytics. 

And I know some of you might have just gotten ticked a little bit when you heard me say that. 

But knowing these numbers can help you know if your marketing, your messaging and your community building are effective.

Without this information, it’s really hard to make decisions to move forward. 

So what are the keywords that you’re currently using for SEO, search engine optimization? What are your current hashtags that you’re using? And are they working? (We’ll talk more about hashtags at another time.) 

Here’s the deal. This is a starting point. 

This is why I invited you to not judge yourself. Because I will say for myself, it took me FOREVER to start an email newsletter. And so my newsletter list was really small for a really long time. In fact, it’s still small, but that’s intentional. (Again, another topic for another day.)

Let’s do this. First, let me remind you, this is your starting point. 

We’re gonna make tweaks that are going to allow these numbers to grow. And you’ll be able to look back and go, oh gosh, remember when? 

But really, this is about you going on a journey to find your best practices so that we can move forward. 

Let’s do this your way instead of like everyone else. So as we go on this journey together through this blog, we’re gonna talk about all sorts of different ways to grow these numbers as we grow our communities. 

If you have struggled with trying to be like everyone else, or feeling like you might sound like that, stay tuned. 

There is hope. I promise you it’s coming. 

Look, there is only one you. You don’t have to be a megaphone for others and their message. 

Let’s talk about being a megaphone for your own voice. 

Cheers to creating a community that follows you wherever you go. 

Until next time!