I Built a Community of 245,000. Ten Percent of It Was Promotional

Updated September 2026. Originally published July 2024.

I built a cybersecurity community for a former employer and grew it to roughly 245,000 followers on LinkedIn and more than 150,000 newsletter subscribers.

When I moved on, the channel stayed with the company. That is exactly as it should be. It was theirs, built on their account, for their brand.

But it is also the first thing I would tell anyone about to build one, because “owned media” is a slightly misleading name. What you are building is owned by whoever holds the admin rights and the subscriber list, and that question is worth settling on the first day rather than discovering on the last.

The rest of this article is how I built it, what I would do the same way, and what has changed since 2024. The biggest change is that a well run community is now more than an audience. It is one of the places models read when they decide how to describe your category.

What owned media actually means

Owned media is a channel where you consistently produce content that serves people first, in order to build a community that belongs to the channel rather than to your sales team.

I do not mean literal ownership of a website or a social account. I mean control over a non-promotional platform where your audience behaves like the owners, because the content is for them and they feel it. The practical test is simple: unlike paid media, it keeps working when you stop paying for it.

Direct relationships with your target audience, your clients and your likely clients are the prize. If you want the fuller argument for why brands should behave more like publishers, Killing Marketing by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose makes it well.

Why it is worth the effort

• You set the agenda. Within what the community will accept, you decide what gets discussed, and you can prime your audience for what is coming without announcing it.
• It stops costing you per impression. Building it is slow and expensive, and nobody should pretend otherwise. But once it exists, you have a voice you are not renting.
• You hear things you would never be told in a sales call. Non-transactional conversation is the most honest feedback a brand ever gets. Fed back into your planning, it tells you where demand is heading before your pipeline does.
• It builds a database you control. Subscribers who chose to hear from you are the best contacts you will ever have, which I cover in the piece on building a marketing database.

Finding the audience, in the field

This sounds easy and never is. I have run a great deal of market research and it has never produced a clean answer on its own. Initial data gives you a foundation. The accurate picture of who you are actually attracting only comes from publishing and watching what happens, which means you have to be willing to be wrong in public for a while.

Once you have a starting hypothesis, test content by format and read the response:

• Purely informational
• Questions, including multiple choice polls
• Provocative predictions
• Humour, only if your niche genuinely tolerates it

Each one attracts a slightly different crowd. Watch who engages, not just how many.

Three kinds of objective

Separate them, because each needs a different skill set.

The main objective

For the channel I built, it was clear from the start: build a community that shapes the conversation in cybersecurity, based on what was actually trending rather than what the brand wanted to talk about. Your main objective will depend heavily on your business model, so be careful setting it. It is the one that is hardest to change later.

Daily objectives

These move the channel toward the main objective, and they have one rule: owned media is non-promotional by nature.

That does not mean it cannot build your brand. It means the ratio matters. I ran roughly 90 percent informative content to 10 percent semi-promotional, and that ratio is what took the channel to the numbers above.

Think of promotional content as credit. Every informative post earns a little. Every promotional one spends it. Spend it only when you genuinely need to, because a community that feels sold to stops being a community quickly and does not come back.

Conversion objectives

These come last, and much later than most brands want them to.

In that channel I held off on any real conversion ask until we were around 100,000 followers. The exact number will vary for you, but the principle does not: deliver value first, then ask for something in return, and when you do ask, make it layered and semi-promotional. Not “buy now.” Something like a free tool or exclusive material in exchange for a subscription, which turns followers into subscribers whose relationship with you no longer depends on a platform’s algorithm.

A community of hundreds of thousands that contributes nothing to revenue, product or brand is an expensive hobby. So before you start, answer this:

If 200,000 people from my target audience listened to what I said, what would I say so that what I hear back makes the brand better known, increases sales, and improves the product?

Answer it honestly and the content strategy mostly writes itself.

The content buffer

If your priority is revenue, you still cannot be salesy, because salesy is the opposite of owned media. The mechanism that reconciles the two is what I call the content buffer: deliberate distance between what you publish and where you make the ask.

The informative content lives in the channel. The ask lives somewhere a reader chooses to go. Between them sits material that walks people toward the funnel without any sales friction, and how much buffer you need depends on the product, the audience and how skeptical your category is.

Format and calendar come after the buffer is designed, not before. Most channels get this backwards, plan a posting schedule, and then wonder why the audience never moves anywhere.

Where it lives

Put the channel somewhere your audience does not already distrust. LinkedIn, Reddit or X, depending on who you are trying to reach and how they already gather.

Then give it a home of its own: a website that belongs to the channel rather than to the brand’s product pages. That home is where subscriptions get captured, and it creates a loop. What you share in the channel sends people to the home, and what you send to subscribers sends them back to the channel.

Other networks feed the main one. Cross-posting and promoting across platforms builds on itself when the underlying content is genuinely good, and does nothing when it is not.

What changed: communities are citation sources now

In 2024 the value of an owned channel was its audience. That is still true, and there is now a second value that may matter more.

When a buyer asks a model about your category, the answer is assembled from what the wider web says, and communities, newsletters and discussion threads are a large part of that. A channel that consistently publishes useful, non-promotional material in your category is precisely the kind of source that ends up shaping how a category gets described.

I argued in the value proposition piece that what others say about you now matters more than what you say about yourself, and that your own properties should corroborate the external picture rather than try to substitute for it. An owned media channel sits in an unusual position between those two. It is yours, but it is not your product pages. It carries far more weight than your about page precisely because it is not selling.

That does not change how you should run one. If anything it reinforces the 90 to 10 ratio, because promotional content is exactly what gets discounted when a model decides what to trust. It just raises the stakes of doing it properly.

Settle ownership before you build

Back to where I started. Before the first post, decide and write down:

• Whose account it runs on, and who holds admin rights. More than one person, always.
• Who owns the subscriber list, and where it is exported to on a regular schedule, so a platform decision cannot erase it.
• Whether it is a brand channel or a personal one. Both are legitimate. They are different assets with different futures, and conflating them causes problems for everyone later.
• What happens when the person running it leaves. Because they will, eventually, and the channel should outlast them.

None of this is glamorous. All of it is cheaper to decide on day one than to negotiate on the last day.

If you are working out where your own content buffer should sit, get in touch.

This article was substantially rewritten in September 2026. The original July 2024 version named and linked the community described; it belongs to a former employer and is no longer run by me, so it is described here without a name. The follower and subscriber figures are those at the time I stopped running it. The sections on ownership and on communities as citation sources are new. The 100,000 figure for conversion objectives describes what I did in that channel rather than a universal threshold.