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The magic found in true community, with Gina Bianchini

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“When you’ve spent years valuing yourself, your brand and your value in the number of people who follow you or the size of your email list, making that shift to quality over quantity can be challenging. And yet when you do it, something magical gets unlocked.” – Gina Bianchini

My guest today is Gina Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Ning and more recently the founder of community-creation platform Mighty Networks. To let her contagious enthusiasm speak for itself, Gina is “passionate about how people come together in communities to master something important, together.”

Things We Talk About In This Episode:

  • Recognising the power of what’s possible when people come together with a common goal
  • The value of creating your own, distraction-free destination for group learning and support
  • Empowering creators to place higher value on the important business, community and content they are making – rather than being driven solely by the pursuit of money and influence
  • The importance of community, particularly when we are forging new paths (or making things up as we go along). Gina says, “the single best place to make things up as you go along is in a small, trusted community of people who are there on the same journey”
  • The important difference between “community” as opposed to audience, following or marketplace
  • The great value of having diversity within a likeminded group is in the different and interesting ways that community members apply the common concepts
  • The “fluff paradox” (the theory that content that is easy to judge – such as kittens or outrage – rises to the surface)
  • How content and course creators can now market themselves less on formal qualifications or years of experience, and more on how they make ideas and skills accessible to people who can’t yet do the thing we’re teaching
  • That networking is increasingly moving towards safe, trusted, creator-led online communities, which in turn is transforming in-person conferences and events less into “networking meet-ups” and more into reunions, with the capacity for deeper connections
  • How I use Mighty Networks to create community and support the members of my own 15 Minute Magic program
  • Pricing your services and wares, and in particular understanding that people value and pay attention to the things they pay for (a difficult concept to remember when our own self-doubt tells us to keep our prices low or give things away for free)
  • Gina’s top tips for building and facilitating a new community: 1. Fear of failure is the biggest challenge most people face, something we all need to recognise and overcome2. Go for quality rather than quantity in numbers of members3. Don’t get bogged down creating content: focus on creating results for your community4. Remember that community is about all members adding value to one another, not you preaching to an audience (“I’m not a sage on the stage, I’m on the side as a guide”)

Links mentioned in this episode:

Where to find Sara: