Kate Toon is a Speaker, Author, Entrepreneur, Expert in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Copywriter and Hula Hooper.
Sharp and witty with an unstoppable career, Kate is leading others to build their personal brands.
Heidi Wright, Director of Wright Social, speaks with Kate Toon about creating a colourful and authentic brand for your ag business and cultivating a loyal community.
Heidi Wright: Welcome to the social media ag engine, Kate.
Kate Toon: Thank you for having me. Good to be here.
Heidi Wright: Awesome. So today we are going to walk through the steps on how to build a community around your personal brand, but first of all Kate, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Kate Toon: So, I guess I’m an entrepreneur. I call myself the misfit entrepreneur, because I don’t feel like I’m a proper entrepreneur. I’ve got three core businesses now all centred around digital education. So, I no longer have any clients; I am more a teacher than a doer and those businesses are Clever Copywriting School, which teaches copywriters how to be better copywriters, the recipe for SEO success, which is all around grappling Google and learning SEO; and then the Digital Master Chefs, where I teach people how to use digital marketing to build a successful and enjoyable business. And there’s directories, job boards, podcasts, conferences, shops, memberships, there’s a whole lot of stuff, you name it, I’ve done it.
Heidi Wright: Well, and I noted that when I met you at the digital marketers conference back in February. Oh, gosh!
Kate Toon: Feels like another lifetime, doesn’t it?
Heidi Wright: It does! When you were up on stage talking about personal branding and building community and little did I know you had all this other education to offer in the world of SEO and copywriting, which, of course, are interests of ours in this group. We are all about ag businesses and growing our audiences, our sales pipelines through lead generation, using smart social media strategy and tactics. So certainly, those topics are also relevant.
Kate Toon: I love that, good on you.
Heidi Wright: So today we’re going to focus on one topic only, and that is building a community around your personal brand. So Kate, tell us, when it comes to considering that community, what are some of the first factors we need to be thinking about before we even start to invest any time around building our community? What are some first points we need to consider?
Kate Toon: Well, I think the temptation is to go straight into tactics, to be quite literal about it and be “Oh community means Facebook community”, but we kind of need to be a bit more upper level, top level to begin with, and we need to think about what kind of vibe are we wanting to create in this world. It’s not necessarily having a Simon Sinek why, some mighty lofty plan, but it’s like, “I’m going to be doing this for a long time. It’s going to take me a while to build this personal brand, a while to build this community. Who do I want to be for that time? How do I want to represent myself?”
So, one of the first things to do is to sit down and think about your values for your business, which are generally your values as a human being as well, like, if you’re generous as a human, you’re probably going to be generous in your business. You know, if you’re brutally honest as an individual, then probably that’s going to come from your business.
So, you have to think about your values, what do you stand for? And what really helps, as well is to think about what you won’t stand for. What in your industry drives you mad, really irks you? And could you therefore take that as a bit of a standpoint, a tiny little bit of a soapbox, a contrarian view, to say, “look, everyone else is saying this, but I’m saying this”. So that gives you a real point of differentiation. But it can’t be fake, it can’t be what your audience wants to hear, it has to be something that you genuinely feel good about, that connects with your values.
So, it all starts with values, and that can be hard to do because we don’t like looking at ourselves and often we’re not the best judge of our own character. So, a great place to do that is to look through your testimonials, or to ask on Facebook, your friends and family, you know, how would you describe me? And you know, some of the things that they mention will be personality traits, we’re going to come to that, but some people will say, well, you’re always really generous, or you’re super approachable, or you’re kind, or you’re just so energetic. And these are kind of things that you go, “Wow, okay, that’s how I’m seen. So that’s how I’m projecting myself. Does that connect?” If it does brilliant, get it on your list. You only need four or so values. You don’t need 62. But that’s your starting point. Those are your foundations. So that’s step one.
Heidi Wright: I love that. And I think too, asking others how they perceive you gives you a bit of a brand reality check. And I use this example actually, for me, when we were crafting the Livestock Leaders Workshop around sort of themes on personal branding, where I posted to my Facebook feed, I said, “Look, how would you describe me in a few words?” And I was expecting words like ambitious, you know, creative, wants to get the job done. And I had words such as kind and, you know, approachable and all these sort of fluffy words that I would describe myself as a mother, but not necessarily a business owner.
It really is interesting, and it’s such a simple exercise that anyone can do. So, I love that we can keep it simple, but still out of that come up with our values, which can then shape how we attract I guess, our community. Which brings us to that next step. So, once we understand our, I guess our personal brand values and what our community wants to be about, how do we go about attracting the right kind of people to our community?
Kate Toon: Well, there’s a few steps before that I’m afraid. We can’t start with that yet. And you know, really important point that you made there about who you are, because people generally want to buy from people who they feel their values align with. You know, you don’t want to be buying from a company that’s burning down the rain forests. Equally, you don’t want to buy from an individual that maybe is a far-right extremist. Do you know what I mean? So, we need to embrace our values, so that we’re willing to put them out into the world. But we’re not quite ready for that yet.
The next thing we need to do is think about our brand personality. So, if our brand values are what we stand for, our brand personality is how we come across. So, you talked a little bit about that. Kind can be a bit of both, right? But, you know, is kind something that you want your business to be known for? Or are you just a kind person? Those are little distinctions.
So, personality wise, the most important thing is to find your odd, find your quirk. You know, we all want to come across as professional, knowledgeable. We all think we have a great fashion sense and a wonderful sense of humour. We don’t. But what is it about you that makes you, you?
For example, you said that people said that you’re kind and approachable. That is a unique quality, especially in the world of digital marketing coaching, because there’s a lot of grey holes out there who don’t come across like that, who do come across as efficient and blah, blah, blah. And honestly, they aren’t like people. I’d be more likely to go with you but I’m not going to know that unless you decide that that’s the personality you’re going to put through. Now again, it has to be you because you’re going to have to be you for a long time. So, it has to be your bad and you’re good.
So, for example, for me, I’ve got a lot of good qualities, great personality, of course, but I have some bad ones. You know, I can be a bit honest, a bit brutally honest. I can be a bit snarky. I can be a bit sarcastic, and people are going to find out sooner or later. So, I may as well embrace that and make that part of my brand, and then people aren’t going to be horrified when I make a sarcastic joke, because they are my people, and they appreciate my humour and my style.
It’s so hard to do this though because the terror is if I go out there as this person, some people aren’t going to like that. They’re not going to buy my stuff and that’s true. Some people aren’t going to like you, and that’s okay because we know as marketeers that good marketing is as much about repelling as it is about attracting. The worst thing you can be in this world, especially in personal branding is vanilla. If people are indifferent to you, if you cause no reaction to them if they’re like, “yeah, Heidi, Heidi Wright? Yeah, she’s nice.” That’s the worst.
Heidi Wright: I need some work then. Maybe I need to work with you, Kate.
Kate Toon: You need to be “Heidi Wright? Yes, she’s nice. She’s also super smart, and I love the way she does this, and did you see that post she did about that?” That’s what you want. You want to be memorable, and it’s very hard to be memorable if you don’t let your true personality come out. So that’s step two.
Heidi Wright: Love it.
Yeah. And then also, you can then work that into content pillars that you’re going to talk about. You know, you don’t want to say, “these are my values”. Your values will come through in everything you do, and your personality will come through in everything you do. Maybe what you’re going to do is dial up the personal content a little bit so it’s not just business business business. There’s less of why you do what you do, and what you do, but who you are, who you are, and how you are in this world. And then we get into the tactics, so now we can talk tactics.
Heidi Wright: Let’s talk tactics. That that was a great starting point, and I think all those points are often, you know, talked about, but not really considered seriously, so I’m glad we started with that.
Kate Toon: Yeah, it’s a foundation and it’s hard work to do, so most people kind of gloss over it and just get stuck into the doing, but these foundational things are going to form your approach to everything.
Obviously, the first thing you need to start doing is, you know, having a look at your website and saying “does this actually represent my values and my personality? I built it years ago, when I just wanted to seem like everybody else, and I’ve got a picture on the front cover of me with some hands on a keyboard that I bought off iStock, how can I make this site be more me, showing my values and personality?”, and then you kind of start taking that personality out for a test drive.
You start sharing posts on socials, gently at first, that are much more full of personality, that and much more personal. Your boundaries can be wherever you want to be, if you don’t want to share pictures of your kid, or you don’t want to share pictures of your dog, or whatever it may be, you don’t need to do that. But you do need to start saying not just “this thing is happening, but this is how I feel about it”. You know, having fears about things.
You know, in our world at the moment, Facebook is doing what Facebook is doing. How do you feel about that? What impact do you think it’s going to have on the world? What advice do you have for other people? Not just telling people what’s happening, but having a viewpoint is really, really important.
Heidi Wright: Yes. And that sort of filters into thought leadership too, which we’re not going to touch on today.
Kate Toon: It’s all part of it.
Heidi Wright: Yeah, absolutely.
Kate Toon: You’ll naturally become a thought leader because you’re sharing your thoughts, and that’s all that thought leadership really is, you know, just having an opinion on something and not being afraid of saying it and not being afraid of backlash and controversy. So, you start taking your brand for a test drive, you start sharing on socials, injecting your idioms and phrases and quirks into your social media, your email, your website stuff. And then also obviously, the best way to test drive it is through the medium of video or audio, so getting on podcast, doing Facebook Lives, and just being brave enough to turn up as you, and not behind your logo. So that’s the next step really.
Heidi Wright: Yeah, love it. So, taking your brand for that test drive. So how do you know when you’re driving that brand if it’s good, bad, indifferent? What feedback can we listen out for to give us a little bit of a nudge as to if we are in the right direction, or if we’re not?
One thing that comes to mind for me is if it feels true to you, and it’s it feels authentic to you, but often we can get confused. So, you know, if it’s the first time in front of a live video, for example, and you’re projecting the personal brand that you’ve come to carve out based on your values, and you feel camera shy or you don’t feel quite right, or you have that sort of butterflies in your tummy, you might go “oh, maybe this isn’t quite me. Maybe I am trying to be someone who I’m not.”
What are some little indications that you’ve found over the years or through your coaching or whatnot that can sort of help us read that feedback when we are actually out there populating content to networks?
Kate Toon: Yeah, well, the worst possible thing is to listen to your own thoughts, you know, because we’re idiots. Do you know what I mean? We’re sitting there thinking we’re doing a terrible job and everyone else is going “this is great”.
You know, so your own internal judge is really off. All of us think we’re, you know, unless we’re massively confident and narcissists, we think we sound weird, we look weird, that what we’re talking about has no value in this world. Why would anybody listen to us? Most of us start from that position, unless you’re like a complete sociopath and you think you’re brilliant, you know, so our internal compass is always a bit off.
I think what generally happens when you start to show up as you and share your thoughts and your values and your opinions is you move from getting likes to getting comments. That’s the thing that I see different. The engagement changes, because you’re turning up on the video going, “guess what? I’m really nervous. And I’m awkward about doing this, and I’m breathing a bit weird. Do you do that?”. Straightaway someone’s in the audience going to go, “oh my God, me to!” you know, because actually, everyone is looking for that “me too”, not in that context.
That’s the moment of identifying with you, the human. You know, yes, you can be utterly talented and fabulous, but unless I can relate to you on a human-to-human level, I don’t care. You know, I could learn about the things that you teach in your community from anybody, why do I want to learn it from you? It’s because I feel like I know you, and the only way I know you is if you share you. I like you, and the only way I like you is if I see a bit of your personality, and it gels with me, and I trust you. And the only way I’m going to trust you is if you’re a little bit vulnerable and a little bit transparent.
So, you know, it’s not about constantly banging on about what an expert you are and sharing tips and advice and tools, it’s actually sharing you so that I like you the person, and the best metric for that really is I think engagement, and that people start to connect with you and leave comments, and slide into your DMS and just engage with you much more, rather than just an indifferent like, they actually leave a comment.
Heidi Wright: Fantastic. So, let’s talk about engagement. What have you seen works really well to encourage engagement with an online community?
Kate Toon: So, you know, obviously, Facebook is where I have my communities. I’ve got six different communities, some paid some free. I think, to be honest engagement, there is a tipping point. So, you know, when you start this, there will be no engagement, and you will feel like you’re just talking to the screen and you’re sharing your content and no one’s liking it, and I feel like with a free group, it’s usually around the 500 mark where you start to get a bit of life. With a paid group, it’s more on the 50 mark because people are paying, so they’re engaged.
And so, you know, what works? You know, gosh, if we all knew the answer to what went viral and what really worked, we would be millionaires. I find that you need to have light and shade. So, every post cannot be a three-minute Facebook Live. I’d want to kill myself if I saw millions of them.
So, you know, it’s mixing up the content delivery between video, graphic and text. It’s mixing up the content styles between tip discussion, a good old poll, people love a poll. It’s mixing up between fun and business, because we’re still humans, we’re doing business, but we still want to enjoy our day, and it’s just mixing it up and having a healthy balance.
It’s like you as a person, you’re not business business business all day long. You know, so it’s a mix of content. The point is that no one piece of content is going to change someone’s life. It’s the continual flow. And it’s not about consistency either. So, I’m not a big fan of “Monday, Tuesday tip, Wednesday workday”. I can’t stick to that. That’s not real life to me. You know, sometimes Thursday is tip day, and I want to be okay with that. So, it’s not necessarily about consistency or regularity. It’s just about persistence, showing up on your good days and your bad days and sharing all of those.
Another great tactic if you have a community is, you know, you’ve set your values out, is that you really create a culture in that community, which means that you have to be a leader, which can be very hard for people. So, you have to have really serious hardcore rules in your group, and you have to be seen to be enforcing them, and even if it’s horrible and difficult.
So, if you have no promos, you need to go to someone who’s left a promo and say, “We don’t have promos. Delete”. You know, I have a rule in my group that you have to use a hashtag at the start of every post. People think it’s ridiculous. I don’t care. It’s my rule and I enforce that, and by enforcing that, it shows leadership in a really minor way. But it’s like “this is my rule group. This is how we roll. If you want to roll with us, come roll. If you don’t, bye”. You have to be brave enough to do that.
So, rules and authority and showing yourself to be a leader is really important because you can’t have a community that’s just peer to peer. You can’t, I think that’s what you’re encouraging, but someone needs to be the person handing out the sausage rolls, you know what I mean? It’s just you need a leader in the group and that has to be you.
Heidi Wright: Agreed. So much gold there, Kate. So many different angles we could dig into. I’m interested in hearing from you with the four or five groups you do run, some income generating, others not, what have been the payoffs for you within your own business from building a loyal online community around your brand?
Kate Toon: Yeah, all the groups make money either way. I’d guess some of them, the sale is slightly further away. So, the free group, you know, it’s a corral of people who may ultimately buy. The paid group people are actually paying to be in the group. So, they all make money one way or the other, it’s just the sale might be further away.
The benefits are that if you, you know, we didn’t talk about the other things like creating advocates in the group, peer to peer connections, they’re really, really important. So, helping people connect, lifting people up, recognising people in your community who are turning up a lot, and giving them responsibility and recognition, that really works, so it’s not all about you.
Once you’ve done that, what you essentially have is this kind of, I like to call it a Viking horde behind you, you know what I mean? Like, you want to go and invade Paris, they’re there with you to invade Paris. Do you know what I mean? Like, you want to start, you want to launch a webinar, those 100 people will sign up regardless, even if they don’t turn up. They’ll sign up just to be nice. You want some reviews on your Google My Business Page, those people will go and do that for you. They’ll come to your first clubhouse room. They’ll like your post on social media. It’s just like, it takes a village to run a business and you’re creating your own village.
The main thing I’ve seen though is Jeff Bezos. Let’s not judge Jeff Bezos, he’s not a great dude, but hey, he’s a clever dude, and he said, you know, “your brand is what people say about you, when you’re not in the room”. And I guess when I’ve seen that this is all working, because it’s quite intangible, you know, you’re looking for metrics and how can we see if this is improving our conversion? It’s hard.
But one of the things I see is that there was a group that I used to be in that I’m not anymore called “Like Minded Bitches Drinking Wine”, and someone would go in there and say, “does anyone know anybody who helps with SEO?” and I just see myself being tag tag, tag, tagged, and by the time I got to the post, maybe 40 people had said “Kate Toon, Kate Toon, Kate Toon”. And I don’t have affiliates in any way, shape, or form, so no one’s getting paid to recommend me. They are just my Viking horde, and they will turn up, recommend me, turn up, defend me, turn up, advocate for me, so that I can be in places that I can’t be. Does that make sense?
Heidi Wright: It does! That to me is a raving loyal community, Kate. So that’s incredible. For us, you know, I think it’s an honour for people like you and me and so many other people out there who are running their own businesses to be able to share our knowledge and have an avenue to talk with our group and engage and get feedback.
And you know, this Facebook group that we’re in and get customers for your ag business is for anyone wanting to grow their agribusiness using social media, and to be able to share our knowledge and have you in the group and offer that is just so wonderful.nAd I’ve had people approached me from in the group to say, “Hey, can you jump on a zoom call with me? And tell me, what do I need to do with my social media? Can you just run through what I need to know in an hour?”
And as much as I would absolutely love to do that, I’m finding myself time strapped. I’m working, you know, with clients on a day-to-day basis and to find and carve out that time, I would love to do that eventually, and it’s something that I would like to do, but it is tricky in terms of resourcing that community.
Kate Toon: Yeah, and it’s about boundaries. It’s really about boundaries. So, my free communities, it’s free. I will turn up whenever I feel like it, you know. If I don’t feel like it for a week, it’s free. You can’t complain when it’s free. I mean, you will, but you can’t. And so, it’s free, so I have no qualms about that.
And generally, my rule of thumb is in the free groups I will talk about the what and the why, and in the paid groups, I will talk about the how. So, I’m more than happy to explain to you what SEO is, why it’s important, but if you really want to learn how to do it, I can give you a teaser, but you’ve got to pay me for that. You know, I’m generous, but I’m not stupid.
I think, you know, that’s why you can evolve these groups into paid memberships. That’s how mine grew into paid memberships, because I’m like, “I’m giving away a lot of stuff here”. And I like the kind of one-to-many approach; that works well for me. And then you know, if someone wants to sit down for an hour for me, I really have to debate that, and it has to be a lot of money because what I could do in an hour in terms of the revenue generate with my one-to-many module model is huge. If I’m serving one person, I mean, yeah, they’re going to have an amazing experience, but does it serve me as a business owner?
And I think the thing is, people will always overstep your boundaries and ask you for things because why not? It’s worth a chance. Like I can say to you “Hey Heidi, can you just tell me this?” And there’s a chance that you might say yes, and I’m not asking you because I’m a dick and trying to take advantage of you. It’s like, well look, she’s so generous, maybe she will, but all you have to do is say, “I’d love to do that but I’m focusing on my paying clients right now”. And that just makes people realise, “Okay, fair enough. Can I be a paying client? How do I do that?”
You know, but I think too many people become slaves of their community, because they don’t set the boundaries and they try to be nice, and you can be generous, and you can help people, but you don’t have to be a people pleaser necessarily, they’re two different things. But that I think only comes with experience, and it’s taken me a while to learn how to have those boundaries and learn how to say no in a nice way.
Heidi Wright: Yes, so critical and such good information for people starting out in their own groups, and particularly, you know, for myself, who would love to do a one to, you know, five to six group session whereby those small groups really do give the best results because they’re interacting with each other. They’re bonding as a bit of a team and they’re learning from each other. So certainly, those points are good for me and absolutely gold for anyone else listening who’s looking to build a group.
In terms of what holds people back from going to an online community, and obviously we’ve talked about resourcing just then, is there anything that you see, holding people back from sort of, yes, they’ve got their personal brand, and yes, they maybe want to start a LinkedIn group or a Facebook group or an online community, but there’s something there that’s holding them back. What is that? And what are some tips maybe for overcoming those things that are holding them back?
Kate Toon: I think there’s two or three things. I think number one is that when you have a personal brand, you can have a pretty website, you can post stuff on Instagram, but that’s not really having a personal brand. Having a personal brand is showing up as you all the time, wherever you are, and that’s scary. When you have a logo or a business, you can hide behind that, but when someone doesn’t like your product or service you can detach it from yourself, and when someone doesn’t like your personal brand, they’re literally saying they don’t like you. You know, I hate your face. You know, I’ve had someone send me an email saying, “you’re too ugly to send me emails”, which is just, isn’t that brilliant? I love it. I screen grabbed it. I shared it.
And, you know, you can’t hide anymore. Like, people generally are going to say “that’s not funny, Kate. I don’t think you’re funny. I think you’re weird”. And you have to go, “okay, that’s fine. I can deal with that”. And that takes some while to build up that resilience. So, I think it’s the fear of not being liked. I think there’s effort in terms of turning up and community.
No one wants to look a fool, and we’re all worried that we’re going to like fools, whereas generally 99% of people online want you to do well, and we shouldn’t stop living our best life because there’s some troll called Kevin in his mum’s garage, but we do. We let that one person ruin it for us. So, it’s the fear of someone calling us out and saying, “you know what Heidi, you don’t know what you’re talking about”, and if we’re not confident enough that can really rock us.
So, I think it’s fear of not being liked. It’s fear of being shown up to be a fool or an imposter, and then the other thing is the time, because you know, the time to sell is longer. So, some people join my SEO community, they may be there for two years, taking in the free stuff, absorbing the goodness, before they make a purchase decision. So, it’s about having faith, because I don’t use ads at all, no Facebook ads, no Google ads. So. I’ve got my conversion figures, but still, every time I do a launch of the SEO course, I’m having faith that everything I’ve done for the last three months is going to pay off, and I still don’t know until the day whether it will or not. And that is nerve racking, much easier to pay your $5 a lead through Facebook and not have that nerve wracking feeling. It’s much more expensive. Your profit is going to be lower, you know, but it’s easier on the brain.
So, it’s harder, it’s a more of a process of osmosis and waring people down and building people up. And you know how do you make a friend? You can’t just make a friend by going “be my friend”. It can take months, it takes effort and emotion, and sometimes it doesn’t work out, and then you have to make a new friend.
It’d be much easier if you just pay Facebook $5 and have a friend, but it doesn’t quite work like that, and the people you get from Facebook ads, generally, they’re not going to be as loyal and as friendly and as long lasting as the people you get through content marketing. So yeah, the friend analogy is good. I like that. I’m going to write that one down.
Heidi Wright: Yeah, good work. And I think you know, that key term again, it’s community, isn’t it? There’s so much that underpins that word community, and I think we’ve covered on a lot of different touch points within that. I’m thrilled with how we’re we’re going here and the value that we are sharing.
In terms of who you’ve worked with, who you haven’t, with your experience within that, when it does come to handling sort of negative vibes within a community, because as you said there’s always a Kevin, what have you seen has worked well in terms of not only mitigating the Kevins but when they do arise, handling or managing the Kevins?
Kate Toon: Yeah, I think it’s an iterative process. So, often you have to have a Kevin to work out how to deal with Kevin and then you work out something that means you’ll never be Kevin’d again.
So, for example, you have a rule in your group that there’s no promos, silly little thing, no promos. So, then someone does a question that kind of is a promo, but it’s a question. And you’re like, “this really overstepped the mark. I don’t know how to handle it, but I can see that it’s vague”. So, then you go and update your Facebook rules and say, “no promo questions masquerading as promos or the other way around”, do you know what I mean? So, you address it, and, you know, having something to say, “Well, look, I did tell you”, is really powerful. “Well, look, here are the community rules. So, I know that you’re not happy about this, but it did say that, and you don’t have to be here”. Do you know what I mean? You don’t have to be here. So that’s really, really important.
I think what you do is if you create that culture, and your values are clear, the group will often deal with those situations for you. So last year, in one of my communities, we had a very difficult situation, when Black Lives Matter was happening, that some people in my community wanted to talk about that, and other people really didn’t want them to. They wanted one place where that wasn’t an issue. It’s a copywriting group. We shouldn’t be talking about that, and I was conflicted, because I’m like, this is not just like a political issue. This is human rights. This is a big thing in the world. How can we just say we’re going to close the door or not talk about that here, because we’re just going to talk about colons? But equally, I could see that a lot of the posts that people were sharing were quite triggering, and they were controversial, and people didn’t necessarily agree with the point of view. And you know, some people are quite anti-Black Lives Matter, because there’s an idea around them being a bit anti-Semitic, and there’s some Jewish people in the group.
And so, it started to kind of kick off a little bit, and at that point it hadn’t happened before in that way about something that was so sensitive, and so I kind of said, “hey, look, you know, you’re more than welcome to have these discussions out of the group. Let’s not have them here”, and I turned the comments off. Whoa, the backlash I got for turning the comments off. And so I turned them back on, and I said, “okay, have at it. You go for it. You know, you’re all adults. You decide what you want to do”. And in the end, they kind of resolved it between them because they’re all decent people. So, I made a mistake there by not letting the community deal with the situation.
Obviously, if someone’s coming in and being a troll, being offensive, posting racist stuff, or, you know, sexist stuff, or homophobic stuff, you just cut that down, just delete and block, but you have to sometimes let things play out a little bit, take a step back, watch what’s happening, be ready to step in, but generally just let things play out.
But if someone’s being an idiot, you just have to say, “buh-bye!”, and not be upset about that. I mean, the thing is, in business, as you will know, it’s impossible to have a business for more than two or three years without having some people dislike you for whatever reason. They could just dislike you because of your nose, or they could dislike you because you want to block them in a Facebook group when they try to promo something. As long as you feel that you’re sticking to your values, right back, you’re being yourself, you know, you’re being who you said you were going to be from day dot, then it shouldn’t bother you too much, because they’re just not your people, and that’s okay.
Heidi Wright: Love it, thank you so much, Kate. One final question before we wrap up. In terms of promoting your online community, have you got any tips for organic promotion, so non-advertised promotion? So, someone’s built a community, they’re really happy with it, they want to get it out there. What are some tips from you, from your experience in building these communities as to how you might promote that without using or spending a cent of advertising dollars?
Kate Toon: I think it needs to be your main thing. I think it needs to be the only thing you talk about, and for me, it is, it’s the start of my funnel. So, when you join my community, I take the Facebook, I take your email address, and I send you my lead magnet, but I don’t promote the lead magnet, I promote the community. So, the community is in the header of my websites, in the footer of every email, when I finish a podcast it’s what I mention. When I go into groups, I share the community, not my website address, not anything, because once I’ve got people in my community, I can market all those other things to them in a safe space where I control the conversation. So, it just needs to be the only thing you talk about.
And you know, one thing I do is I will make graphics that look like ads, but that’s just shared on content marketing for my group. So, it’ll be like “join this community, it’s amazing”, a little “join” button or “join now”. You know, it looks almost like an ad, but it’s an ad to join a community.
And just, it’s the only thing you talk about. It’s your first touch point, and I think that sounds like such a simple option, but so many of us are trying to promote 15 different things. Promote one thing and then when you’ve got someone in your community or on your list, then you can start telling them about the things in the order. The community should be the number one call to action for everything you do. That’s would be my recommendation.
Heidi Wright: Wonderful. Kate, thank you so much. Where can we learn more about you?
Kate Toon: Well, katetoon.com is my starting point. That’s where you can join the tooniverse and go off in all the different adventures and I’m @katetoon on everything. So, I’ve gone with the personal brand. If you’ve got a stupid second name, you may as well embrace it.
Heidi Wright: Love it. Well Kate, thanks so much for joining us here on the social media ag engine and we look forward to seeing you next time.
Kate Toon: Thanks for having me, Heidi.
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