If you’re short on time, take your pick👇 or otherwise read on:

How to grow your community

• A video channel with your brand on it
• Offer freemiums in exchange for emails
• Reward free users who promote you
• Don’t leave gaps in the pyramid
• Engage your most dedicated audience

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It makes total sense that you’d set up a Patreon. 

The current media landscape is really unfair to creators. You have to chase an algorithm, on a relentless treadmill pumping out content so you can get enough views to just scrape some dollars from ads. 

It’s only natural that you’d try to make your life easier, that you’d ask your most loyal fans to support you. 

Here’s the thing though: with Patreon, you don’t actually get the tools you need to truly grow your community. That’s why we built Quench, to give creators a better way to focus on what they love: making content for their fans, not for the algorithm. 

We listed five things that are missing from Patreon. Creators who implemented them have doubled their income and tripled their audience in just three months. 

(Warning: the fifth tip might blow your mind) 🤯

1. A video channel with your brand on it

As a video content creator, you have two bad choices :

A) You host your video on a platform like YouTube where you are the product and you have to chase an algorithm because you don’t know who your fans are.

B) You host your video on a platform like Patreon that wasn’t build for video and is designed for crowdfunding support, not setting you up to make an independent living off your content.

The worst thing these two approaches have in common is that your brand comes second.

The thing is, if fans follow you to a new site, it’s because they want to be part of your community. They should get that: your content and your brand. 

A website is important but a video channel is the real moneymaker. Give your fans a premium video experience like they get on Prime video or Netflix except it’s your content they can enjoy. 

2. Offer freemiums in exchange for emails

On Patreon, your fans have to pick a subscription. That’s great for those who know they want to support you but not every fan will pay. Some people might love your content but aren’t able to support you. Others might not be ready just yet.

Offering free gated content (a.k.a a freemium) means there are more, easier ways for your fans to support you. Many will be happy to give you their email. 

For you, this is gold dust – you now have a list of people who care about your content. You can send newsletters to advertise events or products as well as grow an engaged community. 

Read on to see why this is important.

3. Reward free users who promote you

Free users are important for two reasons. 

First, 1 in 20 of them will convert to a paying user later, that’s 1 out of every 20 people who previously would just leave your Patreon site because they had to buy. 

Second, you can use reward schemes to get them to promote your site to future fans who will buy your content. 

We’ve found that creators who combined a freemium and reward programme were able to double their income and grow their community by 300% in just 3 months. 

(Cheeky suggestion: try out Quench to get these results for own channel) 

4. Don’t leave gaps in the pyramid: engage all your community

Bear with us… Let’s talk about the segments in your audience. You guessed it, the segments in your audience build up to a pyramid. 

Passive and casual audiences make up the bulk of your viewership. This is what you’re on social media for: getting discovered by as many people as possible, in the hope that some become passionate about you and your content. 

Now here’s the challenge. When you send your active and passionate audiences to your Patreon, you’re sending them to a page that only appeals to those ready to buy (the tip of the pyramid). That’s a problem.

Subscriptions are becoming less and less popular. Many people refuse to sign up to subscriptions for non-essentials and according to Forbes, many won’t spend more than $30 on a subscription. 

However, people will buy one-time packages of much higher value than $30, if they think it’s of value. That can include 1:1 or small group Zoom calls, special courses or exclusive series that they can only access on your site. 

By offering a range of packages (from free to paid to subscriptions), you can appeal to a broad range of the pyramid (from casual audiences to passionate ones). That means that a larger part of your audience can engage with your site, growing your community. That in turn means that more people will eventually buy from you as well, as some of your casual audiences turn into passionate ones. 

So don’t leave gaps in the pyramid. Offer different ways to engage with your site so you can grow a bigger community. Do this and you’ll have a steadier and bigger income stream. 

5. Engage your most dedicated audience

This last one is special and we promise it was worth the wait. 

If you’ve made it this far you’ve got a good sense of all the ways in which you can grow your community and your income just by engaging them better in ways that make sense to them. 

This last one is for that extra special boost. Creators that choose to build their own branded video channel on Quench infrastructure get access to analytics about their members. Not just email addresses but detailed insights into which fan is watching the most videos and which fan is spending the most hours on your content. 

If you try out something new in a video, you can see who really liked it and ask them about it. 

You can also find your most engaged fans and offer them unique, expensive perks. Imagine an exclusive $1,000 opportunity that only your top 10 fans even know about. 

You can also use engagement data in your brand deals. You can make targeted offers to specific groups within your community, without having to compromise the authenticity of your videos.

All of this is just the beginning. 

The way you currently support your creator lifestyle isn’t really working.

At Quench we are rethinking it from the ground up. We think you should grow your community through your brand.

If you’d like to learn more or would like to share your views on what we’ve written here, get in touch. 

We’d love to know your views on how we can best help you be a successful, independent creator.