How to Build a Real Fandom: 5 Steps to Brand Loyalty

hello my friends this is income schoool and my name is Ricky and today we are talking about fandom which essentially in business terms is brand recognition and Trust I'm going to help you learn exactly how you can build a real fandom and you can start doing it just today now first things first you might look at me and say Ricky what the heck do you know about fandom and I'll tell you what I know about fandom

over the years on this channel we have grown multiple times over and over and over again it's always kind of a different group of people as time passes but we have developed dedicated fan bases over the years and we've done it through numerous means and we're going to talk about some of the specific ways we've been able to do that and how you can incorporate those for yourself in your own way for your own audience fandom

equals branding but it also equals loyalty which is why there are people who will watch this video and stick with me as we pivot the channel and start talking about broader things cuz we've been doing a heck of a lot more than just blogging here at income school and they're sticking with us why because of these things that we're doing so let's dig in step one to building a real fan based is we have to give

people a strong reason to trust you now there's a lot of things that go into trust right it is a long difficult road to build trust with people but it's a really easy road to break that trust so if you really want to build trust in your brand you have to be very careful to not break that trust which means giving people authentically things that that are real now you might think on YouTube you know people

are often wishy-washy I see this all the time it actually drives me nuts because it works for some channels and it works for a long time where they may talk about one thing in a video one week and then the next week it's like they completely contradict themselves but it doesn't matter because both were clickbaity enough that they got a whole bunch of views that might work for the algorithm but it doesn't work for building a

loyal fan base and I think you're smart enough to see through that so how do we do it again we we need to tell the truth we need to be authentic that doesn't mean that your experience your opinions those things they can't change as you grow and develop that's all great but you need to be consistent so that's how to not lose that trust but how do we build it in the first place well you can

start by having real experience in whatever the topic is and then showcasing that experience showing more than telling is incredibly valuable which is why in this video I'm going to share lots of specific examples of how we have done the things I'm talking about over many years but let's say you don't have a ton of experience yet but you're you know you're you're sure you're pretty sure that the things you're saying are going to be helpful

to people great well before you have a lot of experience you can start with confidence when you look and you seem confident in what you're saying the trust that people have in you is substantially greater now how does what does confidence look like in a blog post yes I'm mentioning a blog post you know why because blog content still has a lot of value in digital marketing but blogging on its own is not a strategy that

I'm going to recommend we'll keep talking about that because I think that's really important in a blog post confidence looks a lot like it looks like in a video it's using language that sounds sure it's not being wishy-washy this is actually something that I struggle with this is me getting a just a little bit vulnerable here I struggle with showing a lot of confidence mostly because I'm somebody that likes to give people a well-rounded view of

any situation so my tendency is I will teach something I will share this is what I think you should do but there are always situations where you might want to do differently and then I'll start explaining those things I would do a lot better if I just projected more confidence by telling you most of you most of you should do this thing because that's the thing that I've seen work be confident not arrogant but confident in

what you're saying and what you're talking about in all of your marketing and that's going to do a lot to build that trust another thing you do as your building experience is to do testing if you can show that one thing works better than another because you actually tested it out that builds a lot of confidence so all of that really comes back to experience and showing confidence in the experience that you have now that people

have a reason to trust you now we have to give them a reason to like you we do this by matching the style of our presentation the style of our videos to the audience that we're trying to attract now most of you watching this this video are probably b2c businesses you may not realize it you're just like oh I'm just making content I'm a blogger yeah who is reading your blog post for most of you it's

consumers it's normal people who are asking questions who's watching your videos normal people who are trying to learn something or who want to be entertained by you depending on what type of Channel you have in those cases a very personable and non-corporate looking setting is going to be better than something that feels very corporate very scripted authenticity is key there now if you're targeting a B2B audience you're a business and you're trying to attract other businesses

well now depending on what type of businesses those are that you're trying to attract you're going to need to have the style of your content fit what their expectations are now let me tell you here we're trying to obviously we're trying to project that we have experience we know what we're talking about we use decent lighting and stuff because one of the things we teach is how to make videos so if I made videos that just

looked super cheap um it would be hard for people to trust that I know what I'm talking about so my channel and other channels like me we do this sort of a thing we we have decent lighting we have color behind us we have um stuff behind us that just is interesting now I like to Showcase some things that show my personality there's a lot here that you might not be able to tell what it is

but like this here this is cool this is a Tonka truck that was at my grandparents house my whole life as a kid this metal tunka truck was there and then when they moved out of their home when my grandpa passed away I took that on and and to me that's a nostalgic thing it's something about my childhood and it's showcasing that like I'm into original like lasting things toys today that last like a month and

then they break I I hate that I'm about authentic original like longlasting stuff that's me it's kind of a mix of somewhat professional things but also a lot of kind of personal things that's the feeling that I'm going for so that's what my Decor is but it's also the tone that I try to take in my videos with you make your style every aspect of your style as well as your choice of social media platforms match

the audience you're trying to attract again if you're in a business to business space you're trying to get businesses to notice you or maybe you're in a c2b space you're like a consumer that's trying to get hired on by a business I don't know whatever you are you should probably be using LinkedIn LinkedIn is a powerful platform form today you should be posting content directly there post your videos directly there literally write whole blog posts on

LinkedIn not just linking to your website put a post or at least a summary of your post right there on LinkedIn and then maybe link over to your website so that you can direct some of that traffic over there but use that to build your brand your credibility that's the right thing to do use the right platforms where your audience is most active now I mentioned a website if you have a website which I believe most

of you should have a website no matter what platforms you're choosing to use you should have a website it is a location that can be yours you own it it can be your Hub and it's where you can put the very best resources you create that website should have an appropriate feel for the audience that you're trying to most relate to if you're trying to come across as really friendly even if you're a business but you're

trying to come across as friendly a cold really corporate looking website probably not the right call now speaking of your website this video today is being brought to you by cloudways I don't use any other hosting provider for any of my websites or my client's websites but cloudways in fact I currently have over 40 websites that I'm hosting through cloudways the value I get there the really professional website hosting that I get there is incredible for

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whether it's again written content social media content video content you need to use a Persona that's going to relate well to the audience you're trying to attract what does that mean it means we're all fake no it means we need to present ourselves in a way that's going to resonate well with the audience we're trying to attract the easiest Persona to use is well you of course trying to emphasize the strengths that will best resonate with

that audience and sometimes even your personal weaknesses flaws and vulnerabilities that will also relate the best with your intended audience authenticity is key especially on YouTube so building your persona around who you really are that's going to make it really easy now we'll talk about that for a moment I personally I'm a total nerd stats and analytics that is my jam I have my background like I mentioned earlier is in chemical engineering in business school where

I did it an MBA there's me sharing my experience that's why you should trust me I know all about marketing okay in business school I thrived in the quantitative classes right stats um Finance Corporate Finance uh even real estate investing all that stuff that was what I was really good at so at income school from the very beginning I have been the kind of dorky analytics guy that's who I really am and I didn't try to

put that on as a persona but it actually fits so well with my founding partner Jim and his Persona he's a very very charismatic and confident person but we'll just say that like numbers aren't his personal strong suit I'm also a dad and I totally have a dad joke sense of humor if you haven't caught on to that yet in videos we would start them often with little skits that would kind of highlight different aspects of

a personality even though the skits were totally contrived I don't do those more because most of my videos I film by myself and skits by myself they make me feel kind of lonely anyway we did this to the extent that like if there was a stunt that was going to happen it was always me seriously from sliding in a pool of tha Curry to climbing on to the tiny peak of this Cliff overlooking a ghost town

to falling through Jim's deck to the ground floor below I've always kind of been like the fat guy that does the silly stuff but it was endearing it was comical and I think it just built some connection with a lot of the audience all of this led to an early and strongly dedicated fan base an audience of engaged fans that allowed us to launch project 24 to an audience of we only had between 12 and 13,000

subscribers on our YouTube channel and really no other social media to speak of and yet we did $100,000 in sales in the first month that allowed me to leave my day job and start doing this full-time that is what engagement can do for you all right number four this is going to be value packed number four take a position on things take a confident position controversy invites comments some people will agree with your stance on issues

and they'll maybe let you know in the comments other people will disagree about your stance and uh they will definitely let you know in the comments now what I'm not saying to do is to purposely create or contrive controversy just for the sake of controversy I I don't think that's great but if you take a genuine stance on a particular topic that's great that's authentic but also it invites that engagement right a few guidelines for dealing

with this kind of content number one don't be afraid of disagreement now a couple of little tips to help you deal with the engagement and the Fallout that you're going to get from taking a stance on things the first one do not be intimidated by that disagreement now next tip you should definitely moderate your comments if someone is being hateful and is steering your community and really like no matter what social media platform you're on the

comment section that is a community of people that's your community you should moderate that and if somebody is hijacking that Community for their own purposes and harming you or others in your community even verbally you should moderate that that's totally fine you can disagree and that's great but don't be a jerk about it you can treat your own Community the same way you set the tone for that Community set it to be whatever you want but

again invite disagreement when people disagree with you it will invite discussion from other people somebody will comment saying I disagree cool then somebody else will say yeah but you missed this point and they'll go back and forth and back and fourth that's all engagement and engagement feeds all of the social media algorithms now the third tip here is to make sure that that engagement is driving toward the goal you want not all engagement is good engagement

people will say hey all PR is good PR even if it's bad right because it gets you known it strengthens your brand or whatever no it increases brand awareness but that's not necessarily strengthening your brand you can have huge amounts of Engagement but if your goal is to sell somebody a product or a service or even just get them to like and trust you if the engagement you're getting is not leading toward those goals it's not

good engagement and you should steer your engagement elsewhere so now you know a lot of different ways to build engagement but it's not going to be enough to get your videos to really spread because there's another factor that causes more spread of videos on YouTube than anything else I've ever seen that leads me to tip number five that is that when people come to your content again whether it's written content on your blog a YouTube video

or any other social social media post give people what they came for early then also Delight them give them even more but it's not just about delighting them it's every time you answer the question that they had when they came to the video there was some question there's some reason they wanted to see the video and then you answer that question don't bury the lead and save it for the end nobody likes that right in fact

they might get annoyed and just leave thinking you'll probably never answer the question because a lot of content creators never actually do answer their question early but when you answer the question that they have make sure you replace it with a new question that makes them want to keep watching if you paid attention you may notice that I did that at the end of step four maybe go back and rewatch that people will watch more of

your content or read longer on your article both of which mean more income from ads but also more time spent with you and more trust built they'll do that if and only if you keep them having questions and you keep promising the next answer now I'm going to say this and I want to say it very clearly on YouTube at very least watch time tends to be the strongest indicator of which videos are going to continue

to be spread by YouTube you can have a video that a very small percentage of the people watching it actually click on but if the people that click on it are watching it for a really long time YouTube will experiment like crazy with that video to get it in front of more and more and more and more people that it thinks might be interested but if people leave your video quickly YouTube will give up on that

video pretty dang quickly even if you have a great thumbnail a great title and everybody's clicking on it so now you know the secret to engagement and fandom keep people watching by keeping them asking more questions you know all the answers now but no actually there's more in fact there's a ton more to having success in digital marketing which that's what we're all about here at income school that's why if you haven't yet you need to

check out project 24 yes in Project 24 we teach a blogging system but that is a tiny piece of what we're doing and what we're talking about and what we're teaching in Project 24 in fact very recently we had a great discussion in a mastermind with a member of project 24 who has successfully not lost traffic at all this year through all the helpful content stuff and all of like the March apocalypse updates what I'm calling

it none of that he hasn't lost traffic and in fact the average number of page views per visit on his website is almost five that is insane if you don't know why that's insane but you have a website go look at your Google analytics at your own V views per visit page views per visit I can almost guarantee you the average number on your website is between 1 and 1.5 five is ridiculous his engagement is nuts

and he completely shared exactly how he's doing it in this Mastermind discussion in Project 24 we've talked about it further in the podcast it's something I'm going to be making a new lesson on here in the near future that's the kind of stuff we're doing in Project 24 now is that enough fomo for you all right so now you go create something that people actually want to engage with that's how you're going to build a real

brand and I invite you to go check out this video and we'll see you over there