Ever thought about building your own Skool community?
Well, you’re in the right place.
In this post, we’re diving into the world of community building.
In this blog post, I’m gonna teach not only how to setup your community, but to drive leads, grow engagement and monetize it.
So, ready to jump in?
Let’s get started.
Setting up Skool community
Before starting a community, you need to pick a profitable niche.
Essentially, you need to list your passions and the big problems that you solved in your life. Maybe outline all the steps that you took to solve them and also identify the target audience you can help resolve the same problems.
If you assist people who share the same values with you and who are in a similar niche solve a problem that you yourself have solved, that’s your niche.
“You are your niche” and you need to create content around this.
Alright.
Now.
You need to name your community and also add a description.
When people come across your community using Skool’s discovery feature, they are likely to join it. This is especially crucial if your community is a free community and you need to get more organic leads from the popularity of Skool.
When doing this, it’s essential to set up membership questions under the Skool plugins.
I will be setting up three questions:
- Could you please provide your email address to subscribe to our community newsletter?
- What is your objective for joining this community and what is your current status in relation to this objective?
- A random question to help you understand your audience better
While setting up the community, it’s good if you already have some free courses hosted on the community.
So, when you accept people’s community requests, once they become members, they can start consuming your content right off the bat. Once they’re accepted in the community, there will be a surge of dopamine, so you should not let it go to waste.
They need to consume 7 hours of your content before they buy from you, according to many pieces of research.
Along with all your training courses, consider having a “start here” course.
In this course, you will be sharing your mission, vision, the objective of the community, the results you got, and how they need to participate in the community.
Also, show how the gamification features work in Skool so they get to know what’s in it for them if they engage in the community well.
Once this is done, you need to set different categories in the community to group the discussions.
Don’t overthink this because you can create additional categories and move the existing threads to different categories in the future.
The three categories that I would recommend are:
- General (Chatter): This is for all the usual day-to-day discussions.
- Value bombs: This is a dedicated space for community members to share valuable insights. This is especially important as these insights may get lost if posted under the general topic.
- Celebrating wins: This is where community members can share their achievements and breakthroughs that they’ve attained through their involvement in the community.
This “share your wins” category is quite important because this is where you can get testimonial material for promoting your community.
Before launching your community, it’s very important to publish some initial posts.
You can publish three initial posts/threads:
- Start here: Start with a post that introduces the community, its objectives, resources, and how to engage with Skool’s gamification.
- Introduce yourself: Create an evergreen “introduce yourself” post that can be pinned to the top. In this post, introduce yourself and encourage others to do the same.
- Community guidelines (rules): A dedicated post on community rules outlining the need for interaction, prohibitions on self-promotion, racism, and offenses.
Once this is done, you will be good to go.
Create social media content
Creating social media content is a perfect way to attract highly qualified people to join your community.
Before doing this, you need to select a very specific niche and create content around it. This ensures that you attract targeted individuals to the community, establishing a deeper connection as they resonate with the content.
You can leverage short-form video content and publish it on Instagram, YouTube, and even TikTok on some pressing topics people face in your industry.
😕 One drawback with short-form content is that according to my experience a person needs to watch at least 10 mins of your videos to get a real idea about you, join and actually engage in the community.
This is where long-form content can be extremely useful. You can consider targeting short form video traffic to your YouTube long form videos.
When creating content, you should be speaking to a specific user avatar that you would like to target and have in your community.
Paid traffic
In addition to that, you could consider running Facebook and Instagram ads.
🚨 But be aware that if you’re running them on a cold audience, Facebook might provide you with leads it thinks are best for you.
In this case, you might need to run ads to your warm audience using retargeting pixels.
Also, YouTube traffic might work well.
👍 For instance, you can target people who are watching similar videos in the niche you target. As YouTube allows you to target people with ads who are watching specific videos, including videos on your own channel.
Free vs. paid communities
If you don’t have an existing audience who have bought your products, then I recommend starting with a free community.
This is what I recommend for most people.
♻️ Attract as many free members as possible to the community, nurture them with weekly calls and accountability groups, increase engagement, help them get results, document the success stories. Then, using those success stories and the proven methodology that you have for getting them results, you can transition your group to a paid one.
You can switch a free group to a paid group at any time, but the reverse isn’t possible. So it’s best to start your group as a free one with the intention of making it paid.
Market it as ‘it’s now free and I will be making it paid soon’ and let people realize the value of your group. This can, in turn, enhance the value of your group.
Also, you can keep the community free forever because Skool comes with the ability to sell courses for a one-off fee inside the classroom tab.
If I were you, I would keep the community free all the time without restrictions.
Spark engagement
Initially, until your community hits 50 to 100 members, you will be the only one posting in the community.
Although many people will be interacting, it takes a while for people to break the ice. So you need to be absolutely fine with being the only poster in the community.
You need to post content regularly, like one post every two or three days, and encourage people to interact.
Once they start interacting, you can DM them to attend weekly calls.
In the weekly calls, you can encourage them to interact with each other so that community fabric is developed among them.
To take it further, you can form accountability groups and let them work towards a common goal.
✅ Your job as a community manager is not only to help them form a connection with you but also to help group members connect with each other so that the group as a whole will stay together.
Monetization strategy
It’s important to emphasize that your objective in building a community should not be immediate monetization.
Instead, you should treat your community as a gathering place where like-minded individuals can connect with one another and provide mutual assistance.
You are the orchestrator of this party.
However, as time passes, you may come to realize that if you create a course, it could serve as a catalyst for helping your members achieve their goals. This realization usually occurs when you begin to notice recurring patterns in the problems your members are facing.
✅ When you are 100% convinced that providing a set of pre-recorded, result-oriented videos will expedite the results your members are seeking, then it’s time to consider creating a course and selling it.
You have a few options for doing this:
- Single payment: You can make use of Skool’s one-time fee feature to sell your course for a single payment.
- Recurring fee community: You can create a separate Skool community with a recurring fee.
- Exclusive community for course buyers: Or, you can start a separate Skool community exclusively for course buyers and host all your courses there, giving them a sense of exclusivity.
However, rather than starting a separate community, I recommend giving those who buy your courses access to exclusive calendar events once they join your community.
Skool has the ability to host community events specifically for people enrolled in particular courses allowing other community members to interact with those who’ve bought your courses also encourages them to consider purchasing your courses.
😉 When community members actively discuss your paid courses and raise queries, it motivates those who haven’t yet purchased your course to consider doing so. They tend to feel like they need to join in to be part of the family.
Wrapping up
Building a Skool community involves careful planning, content creation, and nurturing.
Starting with a free community can be beneficial, and switching to a paid model once you’ve demonstrated the value you provide can be very effective.
Remember, the goal is not immediate monetization, but rather sustaining a supportive, engaged community – with inter-member coordination!
Remember, monetization is a by-product; not a goal!
