Welcome to Module 3.
The next step in BATON is Tribe.
Remember that the 5 steps of BATON are:
Business – creating a product or service people want or need
Audience – attracting attention to your product or service
Tribe – establishing demand for your product or service with a smaller subset of the audience
Offer – selling your product or service to your tribe
Network – scaling the business to increase revenue
Module 3 is all about carving off a smaller subset of our Audience and bringing them close to us.
Now that we have a content system up and running and an audience that is growing day by day we need to look at moving them off platform into our Tribe.
Wait why? We just spent lots of time building out our audience infrastructure on X. Why are we now taking people off X?
As long as your prospects reside on a social platform they are not your prospects.
You are renting rather than owning your list.
If Elon Musk decides that the algorithm should change tomorrow you might be screwed.
This is the same for any social platform, not just X. As long as you rely on larger companies like Meta or X you don’t fully control your list.
Because of this we want to move Audience members off our list and into our own space.
There are a number of ways to do this.
We could set up a community for them on Discord or Slack.
We could build a forum website.
We could set up physical events in our city and invite people.
All of these provide a way to convert Audience into an actual Tribe.
What we’ll be using through is a newsletter.
Newsletters allow us to collect the email address of our prospective customers. Email addresses are the most powerful piece of contact information we can gather online.
Email addresses give us access directly with our Tribe via their inbox. This is a much less cluttered space than a social media app and we’ll have their full attention.
In this Module we’ll look at building a newsletter as our primary Tribe mechanism.
Newsletters are curated email publications that provide subscribers with regular updates, insights, and valuable content on specific topics of interest.
Importantly newsletters are NOT the email marketing you get from companies that you interact with.
You know the type - you buy some nails at Home Depot and they send you emails for years about their Thanksgiving offers.
We’re NOT talking about that.
Instead we’re talking about newsletters as a Tribe mechanism. A way to collect email addresses, provide ongoing value via our newsletter and a method to directly sell right in the subscriber’s inbox.
Newsletters have been around for years but they are particularly exciting right now because of the advances in AI that we’ve seen this year.
AI is particularly valuable for
curating content from your topic
idea generation
newsletter outlines
drafting your newsletter
editing and correcting your newsletter
social media to promote your articles
and more
You could set up an AI to automatically generate a whole newsletter. It would basically find other quality sources in your subject area and rewrite/compile them into a newsletter.
That’s not what we’re going to focus on, even if it sounds very appealing.
Why not?
It’s not a sustainable business model.
If it’s that easy lots of other entrepreneurs will enter the market and do exactly the same thing.
Supply will rise, demand will stay the same.
The value of the pure AI generated newsletters will fall to zero.
Instead we’re going to utilise AI alongside our own creativity to make something unique enough to stand out whilst still not being a full time job.
Just like we did with X content in the last module. AI is a tool we use rather than delegate all creativity to.
Capiche?
In this Module we’ll cover:
Working out what our newsletter is about
Setting up newsletter tools
Creating newsletter content
Growing our newsletter