Carol Tice

Carol built and launched Freelance Writers Den in 2011, back when she had just 2,000 blog subscribers. She has grown it to 1,200 members with a combination of strategies including scarcity, premium content, forum interaction, a job board, and live events.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Carol’s ‘ success

Inviting the community before launching.

Result if you follow the steps in Carol’s session

A tightly connected community in the pre-launch phase.

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Transparency and honesty with your audience.

People love to know what’s going on behind the scenes of other people’s businesses. Who doesn’t like to spy on that you know? Everybody loves that!

People feel very special and included when you’re behind the scenes. We’re thinking about this and we want your opinion. We’ll give you goodies and people love this format.

I think of it as the equivalent as a self-publisher of when you put on Facebook, “Which of these book cover ideas do you like the best?”, “I’m about to put an e-book, why don’t you buy it?”

Let me involve you in the process of creating an e-book. It’s a totally different angle that’s very non salesy and people love it. They’re so excited to be involved. They feel very special and they know all about it.

If you build enough of this, when you open the campaign, “That thing you said you wanted, it’s ready now”.

It’s not like you’re hitting people over the head, “Please join this membership community”.

I want to say that when we opened it, we didn’t have a ton for them either. We were doing weekly live events so we were creating content pretty rapidly. I literally took some of my best blog posts and reposted them into the community. Where they were searchable and that was the basis of the original information.