Michigan Web Design

This is a video blog in response to a post over at Danny Brown’s website – Make a living with your tribe (without scaring them off) which was a guest article from Brandon Mendelson.

There’s been discussion lately on how you can benefit your tribe while still making money from it. At some point, your tribe will become too large to work on it full time – unless you’re filthy rich already and do not need to work. So what do you do? How can you go about making money from the tribe, but not “marketing” to them or “selling” to them? The ideas they went over were to give out affiliate links for products and make money from that, send out sponsored messages and encourage your tribe to visit your sponsors or integrate a brand into your tribe.

My ideas was, why not be the brand yourself? If you’re a writer, why not write a book and let your tribe know. If you design, let your tribe know that is what you do and if they ever need work done, they can get a discount for being a part of the tribe. If you’ve got products to sell that pertain to the tribe, let them know. Do not sell, just mention it. Make sure it’s known, and move on. If your tribe wants to support you, they will. Hell, you could even let your tribe get a cut of the profits if they promote your product/service for you to non-tribe members.

Below is my original comment posted on the article on Danny Brown’s website (I bolded the words I’d like you to read and re-read):

Nice article and very true. It’s funny, I just finished reading the Tribes book last night and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I agree with you, pushing advertisements on your tribe will KILL any credibility with them and pushing affiliate links could work, but as you said, you need to stick that out for the long haul.

I think that if there’s something you can personally sell that will benefit your tribe and is a genuine product/service, you can win this way as well. Building the product/service because it’s beneficial to your tribe is key though. Without the benefit, you’re not helping – you’re selling – and they’ll know it.

So what do you think? Let me know in the comments.