I had the great pleasure of attending the Summit of Greatness hosted by Lewis Howes.  Check out this video recap for all of my great takeaways! 

I had the great fortune of hearing Adam M. Grant speak at a data visualization conference. Dr. Grant is a professor at the Wharton School of Business and author.  I had so many good takeaways from that talk but here are my top five that I believe relate to nurturing an amazing community.

I want to break these five down and how they relate to nurturing an awesome community. 

Of course, content is king, and deserves a topic all on it's own.  But there's more than just great content.  There's this psychological aspect to it. But don't cringe!  What it means is that there's support for what you're probably already doing or some evidence-based recommendations to help you create this amazing community you dream of.  

Now if you're thinking, but why do I need to do this or how can I do this, read on, friend. 

Have you ever read an article or a book and immediately fell in love with a concept?  That happened to me several months ago.  I was planning to do some mini-training, I wanted to make sure what I was saying wasn't just my opinion, but something that was rooted in science.  

Cue my favorite article...

I love the background that Dr. Noam Shpancer includes, how easy the article is to read, and of course, the common threads he shares. 

You can read it for yourself here, but the aspect I love the most is that are the common threads; the need to be and the need to belong. Side note: there is a lot more in this article that you may find really useful, but the need to be and belong stood out for me! I'll cover the need to belong in a separate post. 

For me, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs was my go-to when I thought about what we need as humans.  Dr. Shpancer touches on this as well. Maslow's pyramid touches on the need to be/exist and the need to belong.  

The easiest aspect of the need to be is to the phsycial one.  We need food, water, and shelter to exist. So, if you're an entrepreneur working in that space, then you're helping people with the physical need to be.  

But we also know that there's the emotional aspect of our being.  One popular phrase is to be your authentic self.   This is something bandied about like it’s no big deal.  But actually, becoming your authentic self can be a challenge for a lot of people (I know it has been for me 🙋🏻‍♀️). 

What researchers have found is that being yourself leads to happiness. We also have seen story after story about how being authentic has helped business owners grow their business or become rich. My opionion as to why this happens? When you're authentic, the people who should be doing business with you get to know, like, and trust you.  

So let’s run through a few examples of work for entrepreneurs to see how they can easily tie to their work to the need to be (physically and emotionally).  

Health coach —> Without our physical health, our bodies cannot function and therefore we cannot exist. 

Insurance salesperson —> Without insurance, we may not have the funds to pay for treatment and our body is adversely affected, which impacts our ability to exist. 

Mindset coach —> We can take care of the vessel all we want, but if we have destructive or negative self-talk, then we are not able to be the person we are meant to be. 

Artist —> When people are able to truly be who they are (living that authentic life), then they purchase art that is a representation of who they truly are.

Those are just a few and are my take on tying what you do to the need to be. 

My next post will cover my favorite of the two needs; the need to belong.  

Who doesn’t love a good quiz?  Whether it’s for finding out what kind of entrepreneur you are or what kind of food you are, we love to learn more about ourselves! As a quiz creator, I have an objective for my quizzes.  I wanted to create a quiz that I thought would be fun and help create some engagement and start to create some awareness for my brand. But first…

The Topic
I looked through different websites with quiz topics (including the ones on the interact Live Examples page and looked at the type of games and quizzes my Facebook friends were playing. With the resurgence of clothes that look like they are from prior decades (oh hey, high waisted pants), I kept having this call to do something around being from a particular decade.  So I went with it! Time applies to everyone and wouldn’t it be fun if people shared their decade?!?

To Template or Not to Template

I considered using a template which would make it super easy and fast for me to get started, but to be candid, I love creating my own and it’s quite easy to do! ​

Building the Quiz
First up, is the cover page. I made the title short and selected an image that relates to time.

I was playing around with different colors and chose this purple-blue color for the button since that deeper color is nice contrast to colors in the image.  I really appreciate that I’m not bound by default colors or fonts.

​From there, I started building an assessment quiz. I wanted to keep it to about seven or so questions, so that people didn’t feel like it took a long time to complete.  You know when you take those quizzes or click on that enticing headline and it takes too long to get to the point? I
wanted to avoid that.

In this case, I knew what my results were going to be.  Since I could have up to four results, I picked that people could love the 70s-00s.  So as I built the questions, I correlated the answers to the results (I think this is an awesome feature).  As I developed the questions, I researched the information about the question to make sure the answers were accurate.

​Check out one of my favorite questions in the image below.

As I was researching a 90s food, I learned that Dunkaroos are in high demand in the US because they’ve been discontinued (I also learned that you can pair funfetti frosting dip and Teddy Graham crackers to make your own version of Dunkaroos. For all my Dunkaroos fans, you’re welcome for that tip).  I mentioned that you can correlate answers which is super helpful.  For the favorite food, here’s what the correlation looks like:

I included an image that represented the decade and had a call to action button on the results page in case anyone wanted to learn more about how to get a quiz like this for themselves.  Because my objective was only awareness, my messaging around the call to action was more FYI than take action now!

When someone opted in to get their results, behind the scenes, I’m able to integrate their email with MailChimp and because I had set up a tag for my leads, they are all tagged so I can tailor my content to them so they get relevant information!

Quiz Location
For this particular quiz, I only shared it on Facebook and Instagram as I’m in the process of making changes to the website and I wanted quiz goers to have a really great experience.  As an aside, I have put other quizzes on my website and I’ve found it super easy to embed or add as a pop up in my website. I love that it's just a few clicks to get it from Interact to my site. 

Engagement Analysis and Results
I wanted to create a quiz for brand awareness and engagement and I achieved my goal.  For transparency, I spent $68.27 in Facebook ad money to ensure that people saw the quiz.  Putting ad money behind a quiz is always a good thing. We need eyes on the post to help get people to interact with it.  My ad reached 4,214 people, which is way better than my new Facebook page would have been able to do on its own. There were 4,374 looks at the post (meaning, it reached some people and then they looked at it more than once).  But the best part, is that the cost per engagement was only 10 cents per post engagement! That’s above average!

While my objective wasn’t really to get leads, I did set up the quiz to capture leads, because I also wanted to measure the cost per lead.  So you might be wondering, as I did, how much did my leads cost me? Well, the numbers are in and each email cost me $1.43. Having that under the average of $2 (for all industries), I’m pretty pleased with this initial result.  

Being someone who helps others by using analytics, I love the analytics funnel within the interact website.  As you can see in just one week, 621 people viewed my quiz and 419 started it. My completions aren’t as high as what I’d like, but because I can go in and see the drop off, I’ll be able to determine where people dropped off and if I want to continue this quiz, I now know where to make changes. On the positive side, everyone who completed the quiz opted-in to get the results.

If I reflect on what I could have done differently to make this an even better quiz, one of the things that pops out at me is that I would have changed the cover image.  While it’s fine for the quiz, for Facebook, it was below average quality because of the numbers (the text) in the ad. Given that I had still had above average engagement, I’m pretty happy with it, but imagine what it could have been like if the image was average or above average!!
I love quizzes for so many reasons, but mainly because I think they can apply to any industry.  While my quiz was totally fun, quizzes can be built to meet anyone’s needs and they can be a great way to connect to your community and make you stand out!

​Want to create a quiz? Check out this post on Interact for making an interactive quiz! 
Note: This post contains an affiliate link if you purchase a subscription plan to Interact.  ​

I've recently started doing some mini-training sessions as a way to provide value to my community.  What I love about these trainings are that they are super short...five minutes or less. I'm not diving in detail to each topic, but rather, providing a really good overview so that the audience has a good baseline knowledge in a short amount of time and then dig in to each topic as time or resources allow.  
​Why training?I love helping others get the skills they need because I truly believe that we learn more, we have the potential to earn more. A couple of years ago, I coined this phrase, "Get the skills, show up, and go up." And I think it's so true.  When we have the skills, whether it's on how to price products, how to engage on social media, or understanding what non-financial things you need to track as an entrepreneur. 

Plus, I believe that when we obtain new skills, we obtain additional confidence, especially when dealing with subjects we don't have a lot of experience in.  

How to get these mini-training sessionsSubscribers will always get the first look at mini-training sessions and after awhile, they'll be publicly available on my site. Simply sign-up to get the mini-training sessions and you'll be cued up the next time one is released.  
​How can I request training? I'm more than happy to provide mini-trainings, webinars, and courses on anything I have knowledge of.  Feel free to request a topic by sending me an email or commenting and if it makes sense (I have the subject knowledge), I'll record a mini-training.