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Tips for Building a Profitable Online Community
It's a beautiful feeling when your blog posts are starting to gain traction. You're no longer seeing dismal results; people are beginning to pay attention to your posts, leave comments, and interact with each other!
Readers are now learning that your blog site is a safe space for expressing their opinions and making meaningful connections – a clear sign that your hard work is finally paying off.
If your blog site is gradually transitioning into a community, you must find ways to improve engagement even more. Your long-term business plan should include making the community profitable.
What is an Online Community?
An online community is a safe space to communicate around shared interests, goals, or challenges. Your online community should provide a deep sense of belonging so people can share their knowledge and connect with fellow community members.
Every online community has a set of guidelines to support and encourage members to join the conversion and share their unique insights while preventing negativity. Initially, you can moderate the topics to ensure that people are sticking to the guidelines. As the community grows, you can create mods or community managers to help you out.
Apart from developing a platform to grow stronger relationships, your online community helps build authority in your niche, spread brand awareness, and create moneymaking opportunities for future marketing, such as lead generation and referrals.
You can also use your online community to improve customer service. Because you're providing a more personal space for users to share their insights, you'll find ways to improve your business, address problems, and reassure customers so any customer concerns won't escalate.
Be sure to check the feedback, take note of their challenges, and provide better offers to turn community members into loyal customers.
How to Make Your Online Community Profitable
Attract the Right Members
Engagement is an online community's lifeblood, and if you're not attracting the right people, members won't interact with each other. So, get to know your ideal customer. Measure the metrics, be clear about your niche, check out your readers' demographics, and start building your online following there.
Offer Exclusive Content
People love receiving free, branded items. Offering exclusive content is a great way to attract members and grow an online community. The incentives do not have to be expensive or big. For your exclusive content, you can offer:
- Newsletters
- Short email courses
- Free assets
- Discount codes or vouchers
- Branded templates
Offer Sign-Up and Membership Incentives
Offering value is virtually fail-safe in attracting members. You can create an opt-in page using tools like Flodesk to grow your list and attract members. At first, you can offer free memberships to attract more members. But as your following grows, you can start charging for community-only incentives. Incentives to offer can include:
- Early access
- Invites to special events
- Webinars
- Special podcast episodes
For example, you can charge a monthly subscription fee to everyone and give the first 100 members free memberships.
Maintain Meaningful Connections
People sign up for online communities to share ideas and insights with like-minded individuals. Your job as the community owner is to foster meaningful connections so members will continue engaging with each other and attracting more people.
Below are other ways to encourage engagement in your online community:
- Post a “Post of the Week” or “Weekly Roundup” of relevant content
- Host weekly or monthly challenges
- Share breaking news or relevant articles
- Set promotional posts on specific days like “Discount Tuesdays” or “Friday Promos”
Be the first to share your insights, experiences, and ideas, and encourage others to share their own. Host giveaways to incite excitement and boost engagement. This is also an excellent strategy for acquiring user-generated content to post on social media for further promotion. Organize events if you are ready to meet your community members in person.
Encourage Networking
It's not enough for members to jump into conversations to grow the community. You can curate the connections to accelerate its growth. Some suggestions are:
- Create specific, interest-based channels within the main community channel for members to join
- Asking new members to introduce themselves on the main channel
- Highlight interesting posts within the community at the end of each week
- Let older members connect with new members in specific niches
- Schedule meet-ups online
Controlling some aspects in which community members interact helps keep conversations going while tidying up the community content and discussions. This way, members will know which specific channels to go to.
Offer Subscription Plans
Offering a free membership to your online community is a great start, but to make it last, start offering more in-depth products. This way, you can earn serious cash through your online community and brand.
Depending on your niche or expertise, you can offer 1-on-1 coaching sessions, advanced digital assets, consultations, VIP online meetings, and group coaching. You can increase your revenues by offering bundled products or cross-selling relevant products/services.
Growing an online community may take time, but nurturing your blog readers today will lead to long-term success. Continue nurturing your fledgling blog site community, no matter how new or small, because being consistent will lead to higher engagement and more followers.
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