The Rise of Paid Communities: Should You Start One?

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Establishing a paid community has numerous benefits for businesses. It can increase customer loyalty, generate additional revenue, and even assist the business in understanding what its clients truly desire. It’s a clever technique to develop and forge closer ties.

In essence, an online paid membership community is one in which participants pay a yearly fee to connect and communicate virtually. There are a lot of platforms available that are designed especially to help people create communities around shared interests, communicate with one another, and exchange knowledge.

Fortunately, you can build a paid community here for almost anything. Teaching, planning events, networking for causes, and building a brand are all examples.

How to Build a Paid Community

It takes talent persistence to be able to draw in enough people to build a vibrant community. Furthermore, it is more difficult to provide a high-quality user experience that keeps users interested and eager to continue paying overtime.

But don’t worry! You can quickly become a proficient community manager by simply following the easy checklist provided below!

Launch with an adequate user-base: No one would be tempted to visit that has no activity. You need to give people a reason to be inclined to join and remain a member of the community. Make sure you have at least 50 participants before you go live. And an effective way to achieve that number is to create a waiting list and launch your site when you’ve hit the right number.
Streamline messaging around site’s content: What consistently drives participants to join a community in the first place is the promise of interesting educational content. So, emphasize that in your messaging, and let them discover the value of community interactions on their own accord, over a period of time by experiencing it first-hand.
Invest quality time upfront: Active participation by the site creator is essential in the initial days, especially because the community members have a connection with you but not among themselves. And second, an active moderator sets the tone for group discussions in a civil and creative manner. Hence, it is crucial to foster relationships in the early days.
Don’t let your site become a dull playground: Community cohesion can go wrong if not managed properly. For example, old members might get dismissive towards new ones with ‘rookie’ questions, or respond warmly to their friends’ posts and ignore the others. This can be avoided by hiring a community membership advocate for few members to promote community cohesion.
Help relationships bloom offline: Online communities are great but limited to a point. In order to encourage group cohesion, promoting in-person meetups and conversations is a powerful way to reduce feelings of animosity within a community. For example, members might like to attend a marketing workshop but, would be more interested if their friends are also attending the event.
Get an optimal sales balance: An active online community lands you the ability to survey your customers on a daily basis. You can receive feedback by asking them directly about the struggles they’re facing or let’s say, the products or services they feel would be most beneficial. Getting the right fit sales call is key to building a robust paid community.

What Are The Value Additions From A Paid Membership Community?

Ideas generated can save or earn you thousands: If a conference is worth X amount of dollars to attend, an ongoing community should easily match that. Who knows if you get a great idea from a community that eventually increases retention rates or conversion rates by 20% and also boosts ROI for your business.
Feeling that you are one of the best in the sector: This is an intangible benefit that you receive from a successful paid membership community.
Acquiring deals with partners/vendors to get discounts: Be it products or services, it can help you get discounts by cracking deals with vendors.
Receiving immediate assistance from subject matter experts: Experts in the field can render quick assistance in case of product or service-related queries.

How To Kickstart A Paid Membership Community?

Using an on-site forum platform: While a Facebook group may be the most convenient and more attractive option, there are several reasons why having an online forum is preferable. Members have immediate access to the community, and the flexibility of integrating forum solutions should be factored in while getting your community started.
Using a seed group: Running a ‘beta test’ by enrolling a small group of members at either a reduced rate or for free, before the final launch to extensively test out everything is a great idea. The seed group can comprise of people on the waitlist or existing clients.
Be a leader to drive the community: ‘Showing up’ is one of the most basic and impactful things a membership site owner can do & the same goes for your community. This doesn’t imply you need to live in your forum 24*7, but making it part of your daily routine by visiting twice a day, starting fresh topics, and replying to posts/queries goes a long way in driving community engagement.
Enable community building features: Private messaging, member tagging & profiles, and status updates are features that make your community more interactive and thereby drive community participation.
Get all of your team involved: If you are running your paid membership community in partnership with someone else – then having all the team members taking part in your forum goes without saying. It works towards boosting your community’s presence and visibility as well as increasing the chances that members will have their questions answered within a timeframe.
Share blog content regularly: If you’re publishing regular blogs or other nuggets of infomedia like podcasts, videos, or other content as part of your marketing for your membership site, then it’s worth sharing that within your paid membership community. This is something that adds great value to your community and makes it easy for people to participate.
Curate a list of questions and inspiration for discussions: Doing this will quickly help you build up a list of fresh, relevant topics that you can initiate within your community when you find yourself at a dearth of ideas. As a founder, you are expected to set a pace particularly in the early days of the community.

Finally

Most of the tips above fall into a few key actions that you need to take to build a valuable membership:

Focus on getting high-value members. The more specific the people in your membership, the more you can charge. This is why paid communities versus free communities tend to work better as right out of the gate, you’re creating a gate that only attracts high-quality members who arrive with purpose and the desire to contribute to your community. Setting an entry requirement (such as everyone needs to be director and above in your career development community) is a simple way to make your community instantly more valuable as the people inside will be more motivated to contribute and teach each other new things.

Focus on helping members contribute. Once you have high-value members, you need to create a structure to encourage them to engage and share their valuable experiences with each other. For example, in the Tiger 21 community, members are expected to do “portfolio defenses” where they share what they invest in and why they made choices in their investment portfolio. This is incredibly valuable for other high-net-worth individuals to see and learn from their peers. And it is knowledge that you would never find on YouTube or Instagram. But also knowledge that wouldn’t have happened without the Host of the community creating that structure.

Focus on delivering a premium experience. It makes sense that high-value members don’t tolerate amateur stuff. Simple details matter. How hard is it to purchase and access your paid community? Can they access your community from their phone, join a group coaching call or contribute to a member chat on a walk or commute? Does your branding and UX make members excited? Or does it feel clunky and old-school?

Focus on reaching Level 2 of content marketing. As your community grows, the more members you’ll get from members referring new ones. In addition to organic growth, figure out a few key content formats and one social channel to help more people discover your paid community. Commit to a weekly output and remember you can do a lot by mastering one channel to start.