Community Manager

About the Business

We started a party. And we’re looking for someone to keep the vibe alive! 😉

Could that be you?

My name is Ed Gandia, and I’m the founder of High-Income Business Writing. I help freelance writers and copywriters earn more in less time doing work they love, for better clients.

We’re a fun, virtual group of 7 professionals, and we’re scattered across the U.S. and Canada—from Atlanta … all the way to Ontario, rural Alberta, and British Columbia … and down into Utah, Southern California and even Mexico.

So, yeah … we’re very spread apart geographically! 😉

We’ve also been around the block for a while. This is an established business. We started in 2008, which is something like 77 years in “Internet” time! And most of our team members have been with us for several years.

We take tremendous pride in the courses and programs we create. And we truly take care of our tribe. This is a high-integrity business where “doing the right thing” leads all our decisions.

About the Community

Two years ago my team and I created a private, paid community called the Get Better Clients Academy (or the “Academy” for short).

Inside the Academy, members get access to a library of training courses and tools to help them land more and better-paying clients.

But we do things a little differently. Rather than overwhelm members with dozens of courses, we have them take an assessment that shows them where they need the most help … and where (and how) they can get the biggest and fastest improvements in their business.

That way they can focus on what will help them most the fastest—and prevent overwhelm!

A key part of this community is the member forum. It’s a private, closed-door Facebook group where members get feedback, ask questions from each other and provide support and encouragement for others in the group.

The engagement in the forum is OK. But it could be better. And this is important, because we truly believe that people come to the Academy for the content. But more of them would stay for the community if that community were better.

(We currently have about 250 members. But our goal is to triple that in 2018.)

So we’re looking for a fun, enthusiastic community manager to lead this community and help take it to the next level.

Your main function would be to create a healthy environment for members to connect with each other and facilitate, strengthen and encourage those relationships.

Essentially, you would be our main advocate. Specifically you’d advocate on our behalf by representing our business on a very personal level. You’d also advocate on behalf of our Academy members, monitoring conversations and providing feedback to Crystal and me.

Role Responsibilities

Tactical tasks will include:

• Adding and removing members from the community
• Welcoming new members
• Helping us establish and maintain the community’s culture
• Moderating community content
• Providing customer support to community members
• Gathering testimonials and feedback from the community
• Creating strategic content that will forge relationships among members
• Introducing community members to each other
• Developing and maintaining community guidelines and policies
• Hosting online events for community members
• Helping us deploy churn reduction strategies
• Reporting any potential issues or member feedback to us
• Follow-up via email and phone (when necessary) with inactive members

The right candidate will also be able to take on some strategic duties, including:

• Helping us launch a “small groups” effort. We believe that real progress happens in small groups, not in big settings. So our vision with this future initiative is to match interested members with each other and help them coordinate group Zoom meeting to discuss specific issues and challenges and support each other.

• Helping us identify and track relevant community metrics … and suggest ideas on how we can improve them.

• Bring us ideas for improving the community and the Academy. We’re NOT looking for an order-taker. We’re looking for someone who will also proactively look for opportunities to improve this wonderful community of creative pros.

Finally, we want to invest in the right person. That’s why a requirement of this position will be to complete the newly released “Community Management Mastery Course” from Digital Marketer within 60 days of starting our work together. This course includes a formal certification process at the end, which involves an exam.

We will enroll you in the course at our expense AND pay for your time to go through it. However, in order to continue our work together, you’ll be expected to pass the exam.

Personality, Skills and Qualifications

OK, that’s the day-day-to-day and strategic stuff. Now here’s a bit about the kind of person we’re looking for.

We’re primarily looking for someone who absolutely LOVES people. Someone who excels at creating and building community and connecting good people together.

We all know someone who loves hosting a party, cookout or get-together—the kind of shindig that everyone wants to come to because they’re always fun.

That’s the kind of personality we want to lead our community!

Essentially, we’re looking for someone who:

• Is a go-getter and self-starter
• Is easy and fun to work with
• Delights in making other people happy
• Takes tremendous pride in their work and in doing it well
• Looks for opportunities to over-deliver
• Is located in the U.S. or Canada

Qualifications:

• Experience in customer support is a must
• Solid experience working with and/or managing Facebook groups
• Technologically savvy
• Effective communicator
• Excellent writing skills — after all, this is a community of writers 😉
• And if you’re already a writer or copywriter, that’s a big plus (but not a requirement).

Compensation:

This is an hourly independent contractor (1099) role. Which means you’re working on your own and get to set your own hours.

Initial compensation for this opportunity is USD $30/hour with room for growth in the way of extra compensation incentives and/or increased hourly pay.

Your workload will be about 4 to 5 hours per week to start, and you can work those hours at your leisure. The only thing we ask is that you set aside time to do some of these tasks during daytime hours, since that’s when most of the forum discussions take place.

After a 90-day trial period—assuming we both feel we have a good fit and you’ve received your Community Management Mastery Course Certification—we will revisit your compensation and workload. Our expectation is that the workload will increase as we deploy new initiatives and grow the community.

Bottom line: We’re looking long-term here. We want to grow the right candidate into a strategic member of our team.

Application Instructions

If you’d like to be considered for this role, please respond to [email protected] by Friday, February 2, with the following:

#1: Provide a detailed description of your background. Please include how your experience would be beneficial to this position.

#2: Share 2 or 3 examples of how you have demonstrated responsibility, enthusiasm and integrity when working with clients.

#3: In 2 or 3 sentences, tell us why we should hire you for the community manager role.

#4: Describe as fully as you can, based on your own experience, how would you handle the following situations:

•  A Facebook forum conversation takes a negative turn with destructive comments.
• You’re assigned a task but do not understand how to do it. For instance, you’ve been given an outline and a process to follow, but it’s just not working for you.
• You have a deadline in a few hours and you realize that you will not be able to meet it (something comes up, illness, etc.).

#5: Tell us about a Facebook group in which you engage regularly (you don’t have to be an admin of the group), and a short explanation as to why you enjoy the group.

#6: What are your goals for 2018 and beyond, and how does this opportunity fit those goals?