341 - How to Build Online Communities and Which Platforms to Choose From

0:04 Good morning podcasting Morning Chat. Today is Friday, July 18th, 2025, and today we're exploring how to turn your podcast into a real two way conversation with tools, platforms and creative ideas that go way beyond just publishing. So if you're listening live on Clubhouse, hit the share button, bottom left hand side of the screen and share it. However, Clubhouse lets you. And if you're listening via podcast, please share this episode with a fellow podcaster. And now give us about 30 seconds and we'll get things rolling. Thanks for being here.

1:20 Good morning again, podcasting Morning chat. Thank you for being here. I am your host Mark Ronik, and currently on stage with me we have producer Ashley Feller, Dr. Faye, Nick Nalback, Alex Baelish and Amanda Sharp. And for those of you who are regular listeners, no Sid Meadows today. Sid is off to Europe I believe for his, I think it's a 10 day or longer vacation. So good for Sid. Looking forward to hearing all about his trip and he will be greatly missed while he's gone for sure. And Dave, I'm looking at you here flashing the Kermit on the phone emoji. I'm trying to figure out why. What?

2:00 What is what's? I love Kermit the Frog, so you caught my attention. And why do we have Kermit on the phone? I'm curious. And by the way, Dave, let us know. You often decline the invitations to come up on stage, which is fine. So if that is your preference, let us know how yesterday when I know you were part of Podcasting Made Simple, that's with Alex Sanfilippo of Pod Match. That's his event that he does quarterly. And I know you were one of those speakers. So would love to hear from you how it went, whether it's in the chat or up here on stage. Thanks for being here, Dave, and thanks to all of you who are here this morning. Bright and early. Couple of housekeeping items, if you don't mind. Again, a reminder, the Podcasting morning chat is up for a podcast award as a matter of Fact 2 and you just go to podcastawards.com to give us your vote. And then you when you get there, you just have to sign up to do it.

2:55 It's free to do. It takes a minute to do. And then go find us under the Adam Curry People's Choice Award. Scroll down for the list of nominees and look for us under the T section. It's alphabetically placed and they put us under TS for the podcasting morning chat, and we're also in the Education category, so look for us there as well. Search for the Education category and then search for us under T for the podcasting morning chat. Really would appreciate your vote. I know I'm sure you hear about this kind of stuff from other podcasters that you listen to. And if we've provided any value to you whatsoever in your journey, whether it's today for your first time joining us or you've been part of this community for years, would love to get a vote from you if you don't mind. Now we have some other housekeeping news. I was hoping Jonathan would make it here and perhaps he still will.

3:48 But I say that because Jonathan, as many of you know, he's been very active over on the the sister. Well, it's not really a sister app, the competing app to this very platform on Clubhouse Chatter and he's been killing it over there. I go and and follow him sometimes and he fills up rooms and lots of cool features over at Chatter. And here's the deal. Before you panic, I will. I'll just say it and then you'll panic for a second. We're going to be on Chatter. The podcasting morning chat is going to be on Chatter this coming Tuesday. However, if you don't want to be a part of Chatter, we're also going to be right here on on Clubhouse, on YouTube. We'll still do it.

4:37 We have a solution to simulcast from here and Chatter and I'm really excited about it. It will be a little bit of a challenge for me. I'll be now navigating a few platforms at once, but Jonathan's gonna, I think, join us and stay over on the Chatter side just to help me maintain manage that as we're doing a show. So I'm going to give you actually, Ashley, if you don't mind putting in the show notes and pinning it here on Clubhouse, the link to our empowered podcasting community that I did start over at Chatter to at least give you a head start. If you're interested and curious about that platform. If there's a lot of similarities to it, it'll feel relatively familiar with some additional bells and whistles like video. So now you won't necessarily have to jump over to YouTube to see yours truly.

5:30 You'll be able to. If you're already on Chatter, you'll be able to see me and whoever else wants to participate on video over there. Should be pretty cool. And coming soon, I think I'll be able to just go through Chatter and simulcast everywhere. I won't need any other platforms to do it. I'll be able to do it all directly through Chatter. Right now we've got multiple pieces in play connecting everything and some people over at Chatter yesterday walked me all through it. So we're good to go. I'm excited. So go check that out and thank you Ashley for sharing the link. Now I told you that we had we do have a topic today that we're going to get to this comes straight from our own Facebook group. And before I get to it, I just wanted to go to Nick quickly because Nick shared with us on Newsday this past week about something that Anthropic and Claude are doing over there. They basically created AI agents. Well, not really surprising.

6:32 ChatGPT just a couple days later announced their agents that are now out. And I think this is available for pro users and plus users. I'm not sure if it's available for all users, but let's see what Nick knows about this. Admittedly, I actually I think tipped him off to it first, but I have a feeling he dug in a little bit more than I did. I have not tried it yet, although I have the feature. So with that, Nick, what do you know about ChatGPT agents? Morning. Yeah. You. You broke the news to me. I did not. I was not aware of this. And. Always a proud moment for me when I can beat you to it. Yeah, I I didn't know it was coming. I didn't know the existed.

7:18 It just you sent it and then it was like, oh, it's here. Yes, ChatGPT release what they're calling their agent, as simple as that sounds. From what I've gathered doing a little bit of digging into it, yes, this will be available to plus Pro and potentially enterprise users. Not available for the free ChatGPT users from what I've gathered, at least not yet. And Nick, will you share for those people who may not have heard us talking at all about agents this past week, will you share a little bit about what that is? AI agents, this is kind of like the big thing of this year. I would say essentially like right now when you interact with AI, it's all been chat based interactions. You have conversations with AIAI converses back and that's about the extent of what you can do with it. These AI agents now essentially allow AI to take action on your behalf and actually go out and do things as opposed to just giving you responses.

8:24 So if you want I to build a an Excel document or a Google Sheets doc or update a document, it can actually go and update that document as opposed to just telling you how to update that document. That's a very simplistic example of the AI agent as a whole. But so we talked yesterday about MCP model contacts protocol from Claude, which essentially allows you to connect Claude to different apps through AP is and things like that, or it can go to those applications and take actions. This is slightly different in the fact that the AI itself is with ChatGPT, it's it's going to the web, it's not necessarily interacting with the dedicated app, but it's going to the web to make interactions and take it. And it's similar to I had shared once before. I was taking advantage of one of the features. It was the operator feature where it has its own web browser and you can give it an action and it does that. It wasn't perfect yet, but it sounds similar to that. From what I've gathered, again, I have not played with this yet, just from what I've seen online, it's very similar to Operator, which is what you've been using and that was the only available to the pro users.

9:48 So the the higher tier subscription model. And essentially you can tell it to you could tell it to go to Facebook and post for you on Facebook and it will actually physically, you can watch it go to Facebook and publish a post to Facebook as an example. This is very similar in that effect like it, it pulls up like a virtual browser, if you will, and it will start doing things in that virtual browser. Now, so far what I've gathered is that it, it combines operator with deep research. So it will more effectively plan out how it is going to tackle a given task, task that you assign it and then again inside of a virtual browser, go out and fulfill that task. You can tell it to go like an example I gave earlier, you want it to go to Google Drive and update a specific sheet that you have.

10:49 Maybe I don't know I'm I'm racking my brain. For, well, yeah, but you. Could have it go to a specific example to update sheets and it will actually pull up that browser, go to Google Drive, open up that sheet and actually fill out that sheet for you. Or maybe it's a a form online or an application online that you wanted to go fill out and it can actually go fill that out for you as opposed to just saying, hey, here's what you should fill in that form. That's really cool. I think that's going to be really that that could really be something that a lot of us could take advantage of and save us a lot of time. And I think ChatGPT Open AI has said this new agent isn't perfect yet, right? It does make mistakes over time.

11:33 And they feel confident saying, you know, if it can help you with 90% of the lift, that's still going to be a win for you, right? It's still going to save you a ton of time, a ton of effort, etcetera. So it's worth worth checking out. And it should be noted that this agent, it's not something that like, I mean, since chat GPD came out, I mean, everyone can kind of attest to how quick ChatGPT is to spit out responses. I guess it's within seconds. And this agent it, it will take a little bit longer. Like it's going to take, from what I've read about online, it could take anywhere from 15 to potentially 30 minutes to complete a specific task, depending on the complexity of it. But it's something that the way I, I view these agents, I want to assign these agents a task that I can give it the task, I can walk away, I can go grab a coffee, I can go go make my breakfast, do whatever and come back. And the agent has completed that task or is like on to the next step of that.

12:39 Task, right? Think of it like you've given it to a virtual assistant or somebody, a person that's helping you out, right? It's like, hey, can you take care of this for me? And boom, they go and do it while you go and do whatever else you have to do. Exactly. I've seen a lot of people like throw complaints about some of the AI agent stuff because like, oh, it's too slow and it's probably because they're sitting there watching the agent do the stuff. It's like, right, why are you watching the agent Go do other things while the agent is doing the things? Nick, they're all complaining it's too slow until their job is taken away. I do have a question for you. Is it possible for the AI to be where you're using just voice only? I don't want to say having a conversation, but is it always type or is it have they?

13:28 You mean for this particular new feature? In general? No, Just in general. Alex, if I'm understanding your question correctly, I think I, I don't know about agents specifically as far as can you have the voice conversations with it or is it text only? My gut feeling is it's probably text only, but then again, most of the things you do on ChatGPT, you can activate that voice conversation. So I'm not sure. Adam Adam posted in the chat and said yes, you can use voice. OK, there you go. Thank you. Well, there's from Adam anyway, so you can hold Adam to it if he's wrong. No, I'm kidding. Thank you, Adam. Appreciate that. And I want to keep things moving along. And before I do, thank you, Nick.

14:10 By the way, for the update, ChatGPT agent, you'll see it in the little field where you type to ChatGPT. There's a little plus button in that field. If you tap that, you can choose to activate Agent FYII. Want to first before I move any further, say hello to Paula who has joined us on stage. It's been a minute since Paula's come up on stage. Welcome Paula. Anything you wanted to say or are you just up here for the conversation? Hello. Hello. And I have something to say. Cool. Hi, Nick. I miss more than you. That's why I'm over here to be honest. And hi, Alex, I miss Alex Sarcasmus. So I'm here.

14:51 And Amanda, my sweetheart, and then y'all, you know, it is what it is. Now I'm joking. No, I miss you. I miss you guys. I just wanted to to be on the stage and share some love and feel the love. So yeah. I'm feeling the love, Paula. Thank you. I love it. Yeah. Feel free to hang around on stage. And. And that goes for anybody in the audience. I figured since you embraced me on my life, I should return the face. Aww, thank you, thank you. It was great joining you and loyalty up there on Instagram doing your live. It's awesome and congratulations for pushing yourself to do more of those lives. Again.

15:32 It's been a little while since you were doing those, so it was good to see you on there. I had to come support. OK, so with that, I want to jump in to the Facebook question that we got. So this came through to our very own Facebook group and kind of fitting based on the question. This comes from Kim Young. Kim, who has asked a question that we've answered in the past, not too long ago, I'm not sure when, but not too long ago, Kim Young says, how are y'all connecting with your audience? I've heard of podcasters having Discord groups, Facebook groups. Clearly he's in one of them right now. He said, I know Gary Vee was really big on texting. Don't know what he's recommending now. I think I, I don't know.

16:15 I think he still talks about texting every so often as I stopped listening to him. Oh, OK. So Kim Young stopped listening to Gary Vee. I'm sure some of you have built up an e-mail list. And then his two questions are, is there any format I'm missing? What's been working for you? I have so much I want to share with my audience that doesn't shoehorn well into a podcast episode and also want it to be more of a two way conversation. Thanks. I want to help answer this. And if you don't have your own group, right, If you're not using a Discord, if you're not using a Facebook for your community specifically built from your podcast, maybe you're part of 1 and you can share a little bit about what the tools that they're using to make that happen.

17:04 So let's kick it off with that. I'd love to hear from anybody here. If you're using a platform or a tool that helps you build an actual back and forth with your listeners, go ahead, Alex. Part of the podcast network we're on started out Patreon slash Facebook and it's always been Facebook. It's what's really interesting is the the gentleman that's that runs it, he's tried to do Discord and it took off when it first started. Then it was kind of like nobody did anything. Then it got busy again. It keeps trying to force people, not force people, but direct people to Discord and it just always comes back to Facebook. I just think it's funny because everybody really does have their own community way of doing it, and I think it's what your people really gravitate to.

17:58 I don't think there is one answer like this Community is all that clubhouse. I mean, as much as the Facebook group is important, I think more people just keep coming back to here and that's the best way of communicating. I could be wrong. You're saying that the community really engages more with the podcast than with the group that you provide them. Is that what you're saying? I think that the Facebook group is very active, but I think, you know, everybody's like trying to hit whatever trend is in, like I said, Discord or whatever, and it just really depends on your community. Like some people really try, like I just use Discord for one thing and just don't find value in it at all. But that's just me.

18:41 Maybe I'm just not engaging it the right way, but I just find it very telling that no matter how much you try to force groups to go to certain places, people are creatures of habit and they're creatures of what is easy. Like you just said before about chatter, about the chatter's good or bad, as though chatter's the just the example. I mean, chatter's great, but at the same time you're like, oh, yeah, with the, with the big cringy, Oh my God, we might go to chatter. No, I mean, it's just another platform. I'm interested to hear what everybody else does say. I appreciate what you were just saying there about I'm kind of paraphrasing, but you got to sometimes, well, not sometimes, probably always or at least most of the time, you got to meet your audience where they are, right? Like it, it could be more challenging if you're trying to get your audience to come over to join your Facebook group. If they are not particularly active on Facebook, to get them to come over there to do that could be difficult. And even sometimes the ones that do, because they don't use Facebook very often, they forget about it and then they don't, they may not be as active in your group because they just forget to even go there, right?

19:50 So that's one key feature. Key thing to remember is no matter what you're doing, make sure you keep talking about it, right? No matter where it is. If it's a Discord, if it's a Facebook group, wherever, make sure you are talking about it often. On your show and ideally you're bringing some of those conversations that are happening in those groups outside of your podcast, you're bringing them to your podcast. Thank you. Go ahead, Amanda. Good morning. I agree with everything Alex said. You got to find what your community will go to, but also you have to keep in mind what your preferences are. Because if you're trying to send them to a community that you don't even like utilizing or using or it's not your favorite, I think the bigger risk is choosing something that works for your community but doesn't even work for you because then you're not going there and actually meeting your community. So.

20:43 Yeah. And Amanda, while I have you, thank you for that, while I have you here, So what are you? Will you share what you and Chris are doing for Song Swap Showdown as far as engaging with your audience outside of the podcast? Well, because we're a live show, I feel like we have a lot of engagement within the episode itself. So I feel like YouTube for us is a place of our engagement, even though it's not necessarily a form like group, but I feel like within that alone we we have probably our most communications. And then Chris and I both like Facebook. So there is a group on Facebook, but it's we are on a summer break. So it's a little inactive at the moment, but that's OK. Our typical audience hangs out in Facebook and knows how to utilize Facebook and a Facebook group. So it was kind of just adding one little thing to what they were already doing.

21:32 It wasn't like they had to download a new app and then search out the community and then go into there separately every time they want to engage. You know what I mean? They're already there, they're already able to engage 'cause they're right there and it's not their first group, it's just one more group. So I think it was a, it's a much easier sell for our listeners. Yeah, and I think that live streaming is an an example of at least of what what we're talking about today, right. Like that might be some podcasters main way of communicating with their audience. And I don't see anything wrong with that. I mean, the only thing that makes that challenging is is if people are commenting, maybe finding you for the first time, that could and that they could come and go, right? Like they'll come in there, watch the live and leave. And then you may never know who they were or have never connected with them.

22:24 So I like having a group somewhere, a digital group somewhere where you have a list of all your members right there that you could reach out to privately if you so choose. I feel like that's a really important. And I think I think this this room is like our Facebook or our, you know, live recording. I think it's very similar. You know, you're doing it here well in on YouTube, but we do it exclusively for the most part on YouTube. So you've gathered your live listeners here and you hope that they'll go to the Facebook group, but I think there is way more engagement in this group every morning than there is even, you know, in the group on. Facebook. Yeah, there is that. That's very true.

23:05 And yeah, I mean, it works both ways too, right? Like some people will find me on one of my live streaming platforms and then they were going to follow us and be a part of it that way. And then they'll find out about the Facebook group and often times then they join over there and then vice versa. Some people find us on Facebook first in that group, participate for a while. I mean, Matt Bliss, who is on a break right now with us, but he's he'll be back. But Matt Bliss, that's his story is that he found us as a Facebook group 1st and actually wasn't even connecting the dots that were also a podcast. He just thought we were a Facebook group. And after some communication a little while, he discovered, yeah, in fact, we also have a podcast.

23:48 We also do it live. And he became more active there. So it can help you on both sides of the coin. DRI know you've been waiting to say something. Go ahead. Well, if I'm going to spend time on a platform, it has to be aesthetically pleasing to me. And there is nothing aesthetically pleasing on Slack for me. So I tend not to go to the platforms that are not aesthetically pleasing and enticing to me. Hey Dr. you said the most no honest to God, it is so right what you just said and I'm not talking just about Slack like all these platforms if. Discord I and I meant discord also really horrible.

24:32 I use discord for one thing I I game with friends of mine. We just basically use it as a phone and I don't understand the rest of the whole. I don't see what the whole like. It's almost like a call. I don't get it. So lately I have been getting a lot of advertisements on my feed for apps. You can have your own app where you can keep your community, you can do live streams, you can keep all of your courses that your community can take. So the one that has been in my feed lately is called Passion dot IO and and I understand that there are others out there just like it, but that's also another way to have a community.

25:22 Thank you. Dr. And Paula actually brought up something in the chat here and this was directed to Amanda, but I think this is really something that we all could take away. Is she saying that YouTube now has YouTube community and have you guys been using or experience experimenting with that? And my answer I think for Amanda is no, based on the fact that we know they're on a summer break right now. But that is a great a great point, Paula. I think that if you are actively using YouTube to go check out their new communities feature and see if that works for you because if you're building your audience over there, you may as well keep a community over there as well.

26:03 Go ahead, Amanda. I didn't know there was such a thing, so as usual, thank you my. Yeah. What's the difference? What's the difference between commenting under your video and YouTube community? Well, they rolled it out I believe a month ago. I think you have to have specific followers, subscribers, whatever, 'cause I know a lot of YouTube creators were getting it, were getting the e-mail. So it's just another community like creating on Facebook or anything where I guess those people comment on your post or whatever. If you guys want to have a more in detail or share more things in there that you can share out there, I guess I don't know. I'm not part of it, but I know a few friends who had it and they were sending us emails to join their community. I'm not big on YouTube so that's all I know. Yeah.

26:54 No, that's really helpful though. No, that's very helpful, Paula. Thank you. And watch out for oncoming traffic, OK? My morning walk with my Red Bull and I'm enjoying you all in my ear. Perfect Friday. We're enjoying you being here. Go ahead, Nick. One minute. Sorry, Nick. Nick, can you say hi to me? Fine. Hi, Paula. Hi, Nick. It's actually it is. Good to see you in here. It's been a while. I haven't felt uncomfortable or poked at for a while, so it's nice to have you back. In here. Oh my God, I'm going to make sure that all of next to come here, so just to give you what you want. I agree Janae posted in the the chat as well about it. But the the YouTube community thing I think unless they've made updates and adjustments to it, it has been around for a while.

27:47 I've actually on the next Gen. podcaster YouTube channel. I've used it and it it almost seems like a Facebook feed from what I've gathered. Unless they've changed and they've evolved it from that. But it essentially allows you, like within your channel to make posts, whether it's text posts, image posts, whatever, so that you can actually have interactions and engagement with your audience. To me, it basically looks like a Facebook feed. It is another way that users can interact with you directly as opposed to just in the comments. But I've never interacted with another channels feed. Occasionally I've stumbled upon it and just kind of scrolled through just to see what other people are posting, but I've never actually engaged in them and vice versa. We haven't really had anybody engaged back with us in our feed either, so it might be something. It is fairly new, I guess maybe people just aren't aware that it exists or even relevant they can do that, but I haven't had much success with that yet.

28:48 OK. And Janae is on stage and based on some comments I'm seeing from him in the chat, he may have some additional insights on a YouTube community. Go for it, Janae. Good morning. Welcome back to the stage. I've been seeing the community tab on on YouTube for a while, and they said that it's been out since 2018. They're trying to do the same kind of communication or, you know, kind of building a feed. But again, it's dedicated to a channel. They initially launched it back in 2018 and it required that you had 500 subscribers or more. So people with larger community subscriberships only had access to it, but I think recently they've enabled it for all channels because initially they were just testing it like, hey, who's going to use it?

29:34 And now it's available for literally any channel. I haven't seen the smaller channels to see how it works. Again, it all comes down to YouTube is trying to keep you on the platform and how many different ways can YouTube use to keep you on the platform? Again, most people go in there for the videos. Hey, let's test this out. Kind of trying to make it like a social media platform. That's it for me, yeah. Thank you Janae. I was. I'm just sitting here scrolling around YouTube. I don't even see a place that says community. True channel specific. OK, that's. What I think makes it more difficult to find right, You're not going to just go into YouTube and just stumble upon the community tab.

30:18 Like you have to be on the specific channel and you're in that channels community. And did you say 500 subscribers? Well, that was, I think what Janae was saying originally when this came out several years ago, you had to have a certain amount of subscribers, and I think he did say 500. Yeah. But now the understanding is, is that it's been opened up to just about anybody. But I guess they also probably have to turn it on because, like, I'm on our old next Gen. podcaster YouTube channel right now. I don't see anything about communities over there. And maybe that's just 'cause we didn't activate it. Because I have posted in it before. OK, all right. Well, oh, I see maybe it's under. Is it under posts? I think maybe, yeah, posts has a lot of, but that's just all of our posts, not necessarily our videos. It's the posts, you know, you can post polls and all sorts of stuff.

31:09 There. That is, That's exactly what we're talking. About. OK, so there you go. It's like a a wall or a feed that you can post to and that's where you could have interactions with other subscribers if. Right. So then it looks like it looks like they can't, right. It looks like only you as the channel operator owner, you can post stuff and then they can comment and they can like it or dislike it or repost it, but it doesn't look like they could start a thread over there. Yeah, Nick is agreeing with me about that. OK, cool. Well, that's good. I mean, this is this is definitely one answer to our question from Kim Young. So I'm sure that's helpful.

31:49 And I know we've mentioned Discord and it sounded like a lot of us here aren't big fans of Discord and and I think that goes back to D Rs point, right? I think for some of us, I think not just aesthetics, I think aesthetics is 1 and also just functionality, right? How easy is it to use to navigate? How intuitive is it? You know, can you just easily know where to go on those platforms? That makes a big difference. And I, I know that with Discord, if it's a new to you thing, it can feel really intimidating. Chaotic is another way to put it. Nick yes. Wasn't discord first developed just for gamers?

32:31 That's. Yes, yes. I mean gamers were the ones that really using it first and there's often times some crossover between gamers and podcasters. Elgato, the company I talk about often that has a lot of great equipment for podcasters that all started for gamers and then podcasters caught on and they're like, oh, look at all this great stuff that they're doing for gamers. We could use this too. And, and that was at least for me. And now I'm riddled with Elgato stuff. Yeah. There's also other places to go if you want to create community. Like many chat, right? Many chat is 1 and then another one. And that's, you know, where you can kind of build your own, we'll call them Facebook groups, but your own discord, your own Facebook group, your own community on your own website.

33:20 And we with Next Gen. Podcaster, we used something similar to it. We didn't use many chat, we used buddy boss. And by the way, if you've noticed I've been saying past tense, Nick and I did decide to officially close down next Gen. podcaster. It was great for the initial rush of AI and how we could use it as creators. And after a couple years, I think it lost its luster. I think a lot of, I think what it was serving, the purpose it was serving was no longer needed. So we shut it down. Little sad, but I think appropriately so. But anyway, that was a really cool, that buddy boss product was really cool. The advantages is you have full control over it and you can Add all sorts of different bells and whistles to it for your community.

34:09 The challenging part is, again, you're asking people to go to another place, right, to have these conversations as opposed to being on their own social media platform of choice or if they're Discord users as an example. But so there that there are some disadvantages to it and some advantages to it. I think it just depends on what you're going for. I personally like building communities on platforms that already exist. And I know that that's a risk because of that platform goes away tomorrow, you lose it. But I feel like I want to meet my community where they are. I don't want to force them into doing something else. Another thing.

34:52 Yeah, Dr., go ahead. Well, Speaking of, if it goes down, you lose them forever. This is a good reason to start your own mailing list. You can. You can create, you know, like a newsletter or an e-mail list, and that can be your community. That's yours forever. As long as you have that list, that is yours forever. Yep, absolutely. And I'm sorry to backtrack for a second, but Paula, thank you for texting me. She's showing me that there's one creator that she's following and there that she's shown me screenshots that there is a button that actually says visit community.

35:34 So it could be a whole separate thing than what we were just thinking it was 'cause yeah, it's an actual button that says join the community. And then she's showing me inside the community. It looks, yeah, it looks different. Yeah. YouTube. YouTube. Sorry, did I not say YouTube? Yeah, on YouTube. So it looks like we're all learning something new today. And thank you, Paula, for bringing it. All right, anything else? Oh, go ahead, Nick. And then I wanted to hear if anybody has any, any other solutions. And if you want to chime in on newsletters, I know Dr. just brought it up. So if you want to chime in on that, go ahead. But Nick, you have the floor. What I did like about the Buddy Boss, yes, you're bringing someone to a new platform if you will, but there are options and for anyone who's we, we were doing it through WordPress. So if you have a WordPress website and you're wanting to bring a community aspect, I think Adam posted in the chat about bringing a community to your website as well. That was what was nice is that you're bringing people back to your space.

36:37 Everyone's landing on your website and buddy boss did have a lot of functionality and features built in. So we had courses that we were able to build into that community section. We were able to put like a Facebook feed, like social media type feed inside there. There was a direct messaging. You could even turn it into a an actual mobile app if you wanted to and it all just lived from your website, which was really cool. I liked the freedom, the flexibility that it offered and to D Rs point, you could pretty much make it a aesthetically however you wanted to. You could organize it however you wanted. And it didn't just have to be like a, a slack feed that was forever long and confusing and stressful and anxiety. But the idea that you could have courses and things like that. Like if you didn't have that, you'd likely be buying another platform.

37:40 Like think if it or Coursera or something like that where you were putting more content on that people could purchase all of that can live within buddy boss, which was really neat on top of the the social aspect, the actual community features that were involved in it as well. So it it is a really cool application. If anyone is I, I think it's only WordPress, but I I could be miss speaking on that. But if anybody who has a WordPress website that's interested in that, I I would definitely check it out. It's yeah. It was pretty cool. Yeah, it was really cool. It worked really well. Agreed.

38:20 Thank you for digging into that more, Nick. I appreciate that. I think that's a good option for people to learn about. And I want to Janae, I know you wanted to comment and we're running short on time. I and I had to go back to Ashley. I forgot to go back to her. We also have Yvonne on stage and we haven't even shared our wins from the week. So I got to figure that out too. So first, let me go to Ashley. Go for it, Ashley. Just a couple more platform suggestions. One is Patreon. I've been running a Patreon community for a singer-songwriter for about two years now and they have an RSS integration feature And if you want, you could really take it egalitarian approach to your to how you do your tiers.

39:01 You don't even have to do the tiers. You can just set them all at 0 and you can use Patreon as sort of like a social media site in and of itself. You can set your post to go like completely public to where there's there's no pay wall behind any of it and you can really create some exclusivity there. And the other platform that I was thinking of that works similarly is Sub Stack. You can completely host your your podcast on Sub Stack and grow your community from there. Yeah, thank you. And I saw some activity in the chat about sub Stack as well. I know Dave, he says that he's starting, let's see, starting on Sub stack as an e-mail capture starting point. I think that's a great way to start getting involved with Sub Stack.

39:48 Yeah, that's an area that's one that I haven't dug into yet either. I mean, I play with it a little bit here and there and look at what other people are doing. I'm just in observation mode over there until I feel a little more comfortable with how I would potentially use it. But definitely a great option for sure. Let's go to Yvonne. Yvonne, good morning. Welcome back to the stage. What did you want to add to all this? Good. Morning, I don't know if anybody's brought up Kajabi, I came in a little bit late. Nope, that is where I host. I moved my my website to it and it is on the expensive side but it can do everything it can do. Website hosting, community.

40:29 I can even have a private podcast in there if I wanted to, which I have thought about doing emails, products, courses. It's it really has all of it and I am under utilizing it. Let me just say my, my community is in there and when I the reason I went there is because I hosted an online summit and put all the recordings into that and then had them released as the summit went on. So it's been, it's been a really good platform and I post my show notes as blog posts there. So it keeps feeding the SEO through blog posts.

41:13 It's been good. I am thinking of exploring Substack more and I did get an invitation or e-mail from YouTube to explore the community and just I haven't had the bandwidth lately. Yeah, those are things I'm I'm thinking of. I love the idea of sub stack as an e-mail collection idea. So now I need to dig into that. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. And I appreciate you bringing that up, Kajabi. And yes, it is expensive. And I think if you're one of those creators who has a lot of different tools in your toolbox that you're paying for, I think Kajabi could be still worth it, even though it's expensive because in the long run, you never know, it could end up saving you money.

41:53 If you add up all the different services that you're paying for with, you know, the separate services that you're paying for it, it may end up being similar to what you'd pay for Kajabi. It could be comparable, could be a little more, a little less. But I have a feeling, you know, once you do that comparison, it may still be worth it. It's worth looking into. And there are other alternatives to Kajabi as well. So you could always just Google or ask AI, you know, give me some alternatives to Kajabi and you'll find a bunch out there. Thank you, Yvonne, appreciate that. All right, Janae, I'm going to come to you. What did you want to add on while Nick was sharing? The first question I wanted to ask was what was the main question that started this thread?

42:37 The main question was from somebody in Facebook, our Facebook group who was looking for options, ways of having two way communication with his audience. So talking about communities, talking about what makes sense, and I like what you said, Mark earlier, is you like to go where the audience already is. And The funny thing is every single platform has your audience. We just don't know who they are. Or maybe it's the same people on the other platform. Like you and I were connected on six different platforms already. Yeah, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, you name it. And I remember back like 15 years ago when we had YouTube Messenger, we or Yahoo Messenger, we had MSN Messenger, AIM, all of these platforms. And it's interesting to see that one article that I read was you're not bringing all the people that are on one platform to another platform.

43:33 What essentially ends up happening is you find new people in your community or don't want to be part of your community when you go to a new platform. So all of these new platforms actually exposes you to new people. So when people are saying I'm going to go to sub stack, I'm going to go to LinkedIn, you're actually finding new people to join your community. Now it's up to you if you create a community or a group in that new space or bring people back to let's say your website or your e-mail list. It all comes down to, hey, how focused are you on your thing to be able to do that? Yes, there are different ways that you can bring people together. You can have a community on money networks, you can have a community on circles, you can have a community on Discord, Slack. It all comes down to what type of people are we attracting and which one makes most sense for you as well as I'm, I'm sure somebody mentioned.

44:26 Are you spending time on that those platforms yourself? Because if you are, then you're going to be more engaged as opposed to you trying to create a new community on that completely new platform and you find that you're not really spending a whole bunch of time. So that was that's what I wanted to comment. And yes, I did experiment with buddy boss. It's really cool if you have a WordPress website and we have a tons of people that are already coming to your website. That's the way to capture those people. So that's it for me, thank. You. Thank you, Janae. And yeah, good point, right. Yeah. If you set up a community on a platform, you're going to hopefully start attracting new community members.

45:09 And that's kind of back to what we were talking about earlier, how we've had people find the podcasting morning chat on Clubhouse, People find it as a podcast and people find it through our Facebook group. So yeah, when you go to a new platform, yeah, you're opening up those doors to more potential community members. Absolutely agree with you there. OK, listen, so we only have about 10 minutes to do wins. So I, I and I would love to do do this. So we'll try to rapid fire this. And if you're listening live right now, please feel free to come join us up on. I said up again, I'm trying not to say up on stage. Come join us on the stage this morning if you'd like to share any wins from your past week, big or small.

45:52 Maybe it's that you launched your podcast that might. You might consider that big. Maybe you've had a lousy week and getting up out of bed every day is your win. You might consider that small. We're not judging. We're not putting labels on those. We just want to celebrate whatever it is that you're celebrating because it's important to be celebratory no matter what the win is. It's important to stop and recognize the things that you're able to do, that you're doing that's making a difference. And again, even if that's getting out of bed every day, that's still a win for you, right? If this week is lousy, sure, it's going to be harder to get out of bed. And that in itself is the win. OK, so with that, I will go 1st.

46:37 And I think we're just going to try to rapid fire this and go down the line. I know Nick had to bounce. So that's pretty typical at this time. But Nick doesn't get always get to share his wins from the week. So anyway, I will start. I'd say the biggest win of the week is we got through the speaker announcements. We reached out to our speakers for the Empowered Podcasting Conference and let them know that they are in fact speaking. We unfortunately had to let some people know because we had so many applications that we couldn't do it this time around with them. But I will tell you it was a little sticky getting all of this information out correctly.

47:18 We started the process last week and then realized that the way because some people had applied more than once with different presentations, which was totally acceptable. The problem is, is that we were only accepting one of multiple applications. So for example, Jannade can relate to this. Jannade applied more than once and we had to accept 1 and reject the other. And unfortunately our system didn't realize, didn't realize that. And so Jannade ended up getting a rejection letter and then our system didn't send out the acceptance letter. So Janae thought he wasn't accepted and he was as a speaker.

48:02 So we had to pause because we didn't, we caught it as we were as we were sending all this out. So we paused it and made sure to clean everything up. We had to send a few oops letters to some people as well, but not many thankfully. So the win is, is that we successfully got everything out and everybody now knows if they are speaker at the conference at the end of September. That's probably my win to share for this week. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Ashley. Ashley, you want to share some wins? My wins for this week is just getting to be here with y'all everyday Tuesday through Friday. I love podcasting with y'all and my other win for the week is I get to play with the band tonight.

48:47 We only play about once a month now these days and we recently got our drummer back. He would been recovering from a really bad back injury for a couple of years so I'm just really happy to have him back and we're playing tonight. Awesome. Congratulations. Go ahead, Dr. OK, so my win for the week is that I've talked about the fact that I have a new launch client. His genre is all about robots. He is an autumn automation, an industrial automation expert, and I finally got some. I finally got him to record a couple of episodes for the launch and I started in with editing those.

49:29 So that's my win for the week. Amanda, what's your win? Dr. I'm so glad that was your win this week and not just the toilet. So I'm so glad you have a good toilet. I was debating should I? For those of you who may not have been with us last week, DRS Toilet broke down and had to get a new one. That was her win last week. And. Toilet. And to be clear, that's an excellent win because we all need toilets for sure. My win was last Friday night. I pulled off a sip sounds and sidewalks in my little town and it was super successful and everyone loved it so much. And so just kind of still riding on that high that it was a very good community event.

50:10 Yeah. And I'm going to point out also one of Amanda's wins with that wild petunia that grew out of the cracks of the sidewalks and how much that really was a big booster for your local community. Yeah, I mean, people are just coming in to take a little peek at it, take a picture at it, add things. We had a little chicken added yesterday, a little raccoon. So it just keeps growing. It's so fun. That's so cool, so cool. Paula, would you like to share any wins with us? Yeah, sure, Amanda, you make me want to move to you. Me too. I'm just saying, OK, I've always wanted to live in little towns until I went to Alexandria, LA, and I was like, never mind. But you make me want to move there.

50:51 My win is I had a meeting with my fellow panelists yesterday and it went amazing. So it got me excited to moderate this panel, as you all know. What panel is it? It's a podcast creator summit happening in Atlanta in August and it's with PXR. They just came back from I believe Austin, they did it last month and I believe last year they did in Atlanta and DC. They move around. They're amazing what is on my panel. So I am excited about that. I also got accepted. They do an incredible creative design workshop. It's a very three days intense workshop, but amazing opportunities come back from it. I've spoken to few people who got accepted last year. The application was intense so I wasn't even sure if I was going to get it, but I got it.

51:42 So I'm excited about that. I signed a new client yesterday, so there's that. And August is going to be a busy month for me. So I'm that's a slow win, but I'm also not looking forward to it. So yeah. Yeah, congratulations Paula. And also a cover girl as well. As you say this week, you know. I know, but we didn't hear from you last week so I wanted to shout that out. Yes, officially a cover girl for the edition of Female Entrepreneurship magazine. By the way, they're amazing people and they're looking for more females to feature and highlight. So any of you all here interested in in being featured in that, you can hit me up for the link or connection.

52:24 I'll be glad to to to pass that on to you guys. I think you should all be highlighted in future because you're badass women doing badass things. So yeah. Yes, and you are definitely a badass woman doing badass things. Paula, congratulations on all those. Wins. Badass shit talker doing shit talking shit talking. Thank you. She had to get that in. All good. Thank you, Paula Janae, please share a win or two with us. My win was I get to speak at Empowered Podcasting conference. Get it. Come on guys. I talked to somebody yesterday and he's like, I'm going to be going to part podcasting as well.

53:05 And he I think he was there last year and super excited for all the wins that are coming down the Pike. Thank you. Thank you, Janae. Excited. Definitely a win for me too, that you're gonna be speaking. Sorry, can I just yeah, Speaking of that, we have a community on WhatsApp and African community and podcasting and creative whatever doing that. But yesterday somebody actually share the link to empowered podcasts and community and the like. Has anybody been to this conference? Can you tell us about it? I was like, Oh yeah, I was a part of it last year. The lineup, the speaker lineup is good. And cause Rokaya and where you are also in that group and they've spoken. So we were all talking about it yesterday.

53:46 Awesome. And people are excited for the feedback. So you might see a few Africans there. I love it, Paula. Thank you. Thank you for wrapping Empowered Podcasting too. Appreciate it. That's really cool. I'll take that as a win as well. All right, Yvonne, we're coming to you. Please share any wins you have. Good. Morning, I'm skating. Oh, you're skating at the moment, Yes, I nice. I've had a rough month dude, and this has been a good release is to get on my skates every now and again, go for a walk every now and again, find a way to to breakthrough the stress and all. And yeah, loving it, loving hearing your. Good to hear yours and hopefully things are calming down for you over there.

54:33 And yeah, we're, we're here for you if you need anything, Yvonne and Yvonne regarding the e-mail I sent you, I will have a, a positive answer to share with you very soon. So be on the lookout. Yes. And all right, I'll just Yvonne is one of the people that got the, the wrong letter, if you will. So I am making sure that Yvonne, Yvonne definitely gets her chance to be on a stage at Empowered podcasting. So more to come on that Yvonne. And yes, I've, I've got some good news to share with you here very soon. All right, so with that, we are back on Tuesday. And a reminder, we will be on Chatter as well as Clubhouse.

55:16 So if you don't feel like learning a new place to go, as we were just talking about earlier in conversation today, that's fine. You can keep coming here on Clubhouse. We will simulcast to both platforms as well as YouTube live. So please pick your poison and come join us wherever you decide to come. We would love to have you here. So again, that's 7:00 AM Eastern on Tuesday. And if you can't make it to any of those platforms live, you can always pick us up on your favorite podcast platform. So until Tuesday, make it a great day everybody, and a great weekend everybody. Take care.