Most communities sell one thing: membership. A stranger arrives and the only offer in front of them is a recurring commitment to something they have not seen the inside of. That is a large ask to make of someone who found you ten seconds ago, and most people decline it.
Resources let you put smaller things in front of them first. This article is about arranging those things so each one feeds the next, instead of each one being a separate attempt to sell.
The problem with a single Offer
A membership is the deepest commitment you sell and it is priced accordingly. If it is the only thing you offer, then every person you reach either takes the biggest step available or takes none, and almost all of them take none. You never learn who the interested ones were, and you have no way to reach them again.
Everything below is a way of building steps between "never heard of you" and "pays you every month."
What can I offer them instead?
1. Something anyone can read. A Resource published publicly, free, no email required. Its job is to be right, genuinely useful to someone who will never give you anything. It is the only content of yours a stranger can read without signing up, so it is what every link you share has to land on.
2. Something worth an email. A Resource published publicly with email capture. Its job is to convert an anonymous reader into a contact. The template, the workbook, the checklist, the first module. The artifact people in your field would otherwise build themselves.
3. Something worth a small payment. A Resource with a one-time price, sold publicly with no login. Its job is not the revenue. It is to turn a reader into a buyer, which is the single hardest conversion you will ever ask for. Everything after it is easier, because a person who has paid you once has already answered the question of whether you are worth paying.
4. The membership. Priced and positioned for people who already know exactly what they are getting, because they have read your work and bought from you.
Each step has more people in it than the one below. Each step qualifies people for the next. Nobody has to jump from step one to step four.
How does this impact my community?
The list is yours. Social platforms decide who sees your posts. Your lead list does not. This matters more here than it would elsewhere. Public Resources are not currently found through search, so everyone arrives from a link you placed, which makes the contacts you keep the only audience that accumulates. An email address collected at step two is reachable for years, through every launch, every new Resource, every membership push. It is the only audience you own outright.
Buyers make more buyers. Every person who buys at step three and gets something good becomes a reason for the next person to buy. Testimonials, results, word of mouth: these come from people who paid, and step three is how you get people to pay.
The work stops being one-off. A public Resource keeps working every time someone shares it. A lead magnet keeps collecting. A paid Resource keeps selling. Unlike a launch, none of them require you to be present. You write them once and they run.
Later steps get cheaper to sell. By the time someone sees your membership price, they have read you, trusted you with an email, and paid you once. You are not introducing yourself, you are answering a question they already have.
Where do I start?
Not with all four. One good step beats four half-built ones, and there are communities running well on step two alone.
Start with the step you have material for. If you have already written something useful, publish it publicly today. That is step one and it takes an afternoon. If you have a template or a worksheet people keep asking you for, gate it behind an email. That is step two.
Build the next step only when the current one is producing. A lead magnet with no traffic pointed at it collects nothing, so step one usually has to work before step two matters.
Making the steps point at each other
The steps only compound if they are connected. Things worth doing:
- Link the gated Resource from inside the public one. The open page does the convincing, the gate collects the email.
- Pair every paid Resource with a free one that does the selling. You cannot mark a single document free inside a paid Resource, because access is all-or-nothing, so the sample has to be its own free Resource that links across.
- Give members the thing the public pays for. Publishing to Everywhere with a public price and free community access makes membership's value concrete, because outsiders are visibly paying for something members already have.
- Follow up with each capture group about the thing that follows what they captured. Which Resource they chose tells you what they want next. To reach out to your Leads and follow up with them, filter the list to either Hot, Warm or Cold leads, export it as a CSV, and send from your preferred outreach tool.
Two ways to sell the same Resource
Always open. The Resource sits there and sells to whoever finds it. No announcement, no deadline, no work from you after it is published. This is what most of your revenue should eventually look like.
A push. You point everything at one Resource for a week: emails, posts, community announcements. Deadlines make people who were going to decide eventually decide now.
These reach different people, and you want both. The always-open version catches people at the moment they go looking. The push catches people who were never going to go looking.
Reuse everything
The email you write to launch a Resource works again next year. The description that sold one thing sells the next one with the nouns changed. The Resource that started life as a lead magnet becomes the first module of something you sell.
The gap between a community that produces a lot and one that does not is usually not output. It is how many times each thing gets used.
A concrete starting shape
Three Resources, buildable in a week:
- Public, free, no email: your best existing explainer. Shareable anywhere, no account needed to read it.
- Public, email capture: the artifact people ask you for. Linked from the first one.
- Community, free: what members get. Referenced on both public pages, so the value of joining is visible before anyone joins.
Add a paid Resource once the second one is producing leads steadily. That is step three, and by then you will know from your Leads table what people actually want to buy.