Building an online business or establishing an online presence for your business can be a lonely road. There are countless unknowns, and each journey is entirely unique, leading to frequent confusion.
Don’t do this alone. By joining an online community centered around a shared purpose, you gain support, guidance, and feedback. It can help you improve your skills, fill in knowledge gaps, stay accountable, and effectively work towards your goals.
We at SPI Media know a thing or two about virtual business communities — we’re the founders of two of them! Through the experience of hundreds of members and the incredible success stories we’ve heard (like this one), we’ve discovered how to build healthy communities that contribute to real, meaningful results for our members.
Pat Flynn (our founder) shared his experience and the social-driven reasons for joining an online business community in this article. Below, we’ll share why joining an entrepreneur community is the best move for your journey, plus the unique ways our communities are designed to help you on your way.
Support for Every Part of Your Business Journey
A creator community isn’t just for YouTubers with billions of views, and an entrepreneur community isn’t just for folks with an idea scratched on the back of a napkin. Regardless of your stage of business growth, there’s a business community out there for you.
Many communities cater to new entrepreneurs — groups of people with great ideas who want to achieve structural progress like building a website or starting a podcast.
Others are designed for people who have an established presence, with a certain amount of recurring revenue or a volume of monthly customers.
Still, others are designed intentionally around a common interest in a niche — folks with brick-and-mortar stores or fitness coaches who primarily teach via the Internet.
Regardless of where you are in your journey, an online entrepreneurial community offers incomparable opportunities for support. Questions can be posted and responded to by people worldwide, and because that post is visible to all, everyone learns from the answers. Or, questions can be explored in real-time during community events via video conferencing.
Photo credit: Nathan Dunlao
Virtual Communities Combat Loneliness
New online communities — business-related or otherwise — are springing up constantly. The popularity of online communities as a response to the loneliness epidemic has never been as prevalent or critical as it is now. A 2023 report from the U.S. Surgeon General found that loneliness affected half of adults before the pandemic, linking loneliness with risks like heart disease, stroke, and dementia.
Combine those risks with the inherent solitude of entrepreneurship, and it’s clear that online creators and business owners are particularly affected by this.
An online entrepreneur community offers an antidote to this: peer connection, giving and receiving feedback in mastermind groups, and real-time events for networking.
Learning Entrepreneurship: Together
When entrepreneurs come together in a virtual community environment, there are lessons everywhere. These lessons happen organically simply because of the nature of being in an environment of peers. The opportunity to share findings, experiences, successes, and failures is unparalleled.
But some communities go a step further, like our own All-Access Pass community. We built this particular community with early-stage entrepreneurs in mind and designed it as a community-based learning experience for our members.
Through the All-Access Pass, members get access to our entire course library, covering everything from YouTube mastery to launching a podcast, building a community, affiliate marketing, and more.
But rather than just offering courses as a perk, the community is designed to facilitate cohort-based learning. One of the ways we do this is through accelerators, allowing students to go through a course as a “class” alongside support and guidance from our team. We also created pathways, which act as suggested navigational tracts through multiple courses, built around a specific aim — such as creating, growing, and profiting from a podcast.
These features, as well as community programming like fireside chats, ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions with Pat Flynn (our founder), networking events, and live teaching opportunities, create a community experience where learning is at the forefront. This robust and active community component supports and enhances growth and progress.
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Expert Advice at Your Fingertips
Online business communities are most often built by people with a stake in the game, and it follows that many of these communities — if reputable and built by the right people — attract experts in their fields as members. Often, these communities offer opportunities to network and have questions answered by experts as a perk of membership, enhancing the experience for members.
Our SPI Pro community — designed for established entrepreneurs looking to scale their business to new levels of success — is full of professionals, many of whom are experts in their niche or business.
We also boast a robust Experts in Residence Program that takes expert access a step further. This program consists of a network of renowned professionals who interact directly with our community members, offering opportunities for deep learning and next-level business advice. Much of our community programming is built with the help of these experts, including workshops, roundtable discussions, and more.
Photo credit: Microsoft Edge
Connection and Networking
Our community members have started podcasts together, collaborated deeply on marketing plans and cross-promotional efforts, formed lifelong friendships, and helped each other achieve new heights of success in their businesses. We wouldn’t dream of taking the credit, but the ability to provide a vibrant space for connecting people and facilitating learning opportunities is the very reason we exist.
Another huge benefit to online business communities like ours is the opportunity to form masterminds. These are groups that meet regularly to provide feedback, hold each other accountable, and align on next steps — all while working independently on their own businesses. The structure of masterminds can vary considerably — some take turns putting each other in the weekly “hot seat” for example — but they all have supportive growth at their core. As a perk of an SPI Pro membership, we offer to match members with existing mastermind groups, but we also love seeing folks forming new ones on the fly.
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What All Communities Have in Common
The right people, of course!
The best online entrepreneurship communities aren’t free-for-alls. Adding new members is kind of like fiddling with the ingredients of a complicated recipe — it can’t be done ad hoc.
That’s why we built an application process into our communities. For our SPI Pro community in particular, its important that we bring entrepreneurs together at the appropriate stage of their business’s growth. Including an application stage also helps us ensure that the folks coming in are serious about growing together and are aware of the community guidelines.
Many business communities exist. But with our combination of community-centered learning, access to experts, and robust events, we believe ours is the best one out there. Visit our Community page to learn more.
No matter which community you end up joining, get connected! Learning entrepreneurship is one of the most challenging things you can do in life, and also the most rewarding. Don’t make it harder than it has to be — find your people!
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