Now you have an online community, but how do you monetize it?
Online communities are becoming a great way to build brand awareness – but also for diversifying revenue.
So if you’ve been looking for ways to get the most out of your community and turn it into something sustainable, here are 10 ways you can monetize your community no matter the size.
Now, you might be a bit hesitant to monetize your community – after all, shouldn’t your community be about providing value first?
The answer is yes! But in fact, monetizing the experience in a few ways is a great strategy to help you provide even more value going forward.
Why should you monetize your community?
As a creator, you need to be able to support yourself in order to devote more time and resources to the experience. This is why monetizing is a great idea for your community.
Not only is it great for you as a creator to have a chance at earning a living doing what you love and diversifying your revenue streams – but monetizing your community also allows you to put more into it.
Here are a few main benefits that come from monetizing your community:
- It grows your credibility as a brand
- You can invest in more tools that will improve the overall experience
- You can spend more time producing content and value for your members
- You can afford to move your community to a more community-focused platform that can house more people, be more efficient, and is more secure than something free like Facebook or WhatsApp groups
- You can grow your community to new heights and connect more people with each other
In short: the possibilities become even more endless when you can invest some money into your community experience.
Start monetizing your community today
10 ways to monetize your community for beginners
1. Create paid challenges
Creating challenges is one of the effective ways to increase engagement in your community. For community owners, a challenge takes less time to create but is easy to sell.
A paid challenge will promote more commitment and encourage members to finish what they’ve started. Members are also less overwhelmed because they are now achieving goals alongside others
If you have existing online courses, you can turn them into a challenge by turning your modules into checkpoints. The challenge participants can ensure they finish each course because you can set the duration and due dates for each checkpoint.
2. Offer 1:1 coaching session
Provide your members with one-on-one coaching sessions as an extension of your community experience. Whatever industry you’re in, you can offer paid, hourly coaching calls to help guide your members through their journey on a more personal, one-to-one basis.
Fees for these calls tend to vary depending on the industry, but some experienced coaches can charge upwards of $200 an hour!
Start earning with 1:1 coaching today
3. Membership subscription
One of the main ways that creators monetize their communities is by turning them into membership subscriptions.
This means members will pay a monthly fee to get access to your community experience. The price range of access to communities will vary depending on the type and what value is offered within this community at no extra cost. Do a cost analysis for the experience and take into account how much money your members have to spend and find what works for you.
Many community-building platforms will offer a pay-gating feature that will process payments for you, handle subscription fees, and more. Nas.io offers this option, even for free communities, and only takes a small percentage once you start earning an income.
However, this gets more difficult if you’re using a platform like Discord or Facebook. However, some will gate access to their communities by requiring each member to hold a token or membership or purchase a product or NFT to get the invite link to the community platform.
4. Sell courses
A very common way to monetize community experience is to create educational courses around something your community would find interesting.
Whether it be a class supporting them in creating their content, building a community of their own, business, Web3 – anything – a course is a perfect way to earn some income from your community experience.
On Nas.io for example, you can upload class videos to a library and offer them to your community as an exclusive, extra experience. People will pay for access and knowledge – so you may as well share what you have to teach!
5. Create eBooks
If you’re looking for a less tech-intensive way of providing more learning material outside of producing class videos – ebooks are a great alternative!
You can create downloadable ebooks from how-to guides to informational texts based on your community’s interests, and then offer it as an extra extension of your community experience for people who would like it.
All you have to do to create one is use a simple, free platform like Canva and design it with simple tools and pre-made designs. Depending on the length and depth of your ebook, you can charge upwards of $20 each!
6. Start newsletter subscription
Writing community newsletters is also a way to monetize your audience’s involvement in your community. You can offer free value through these newsletters, use this as a platform to promote and make sales on your products – or even monetize access to the newsletter itself.
If you monetize the newsletter itself, make sure your newsletter experience offers exclusive content and value to make it worth the price you’re charging.
7. Host paid events
While you might host some free events in your community already, consider offering some paid events as well. The events can be around anything you’d like. From hands-on workshops to public events, expert panelists – offer something exclusive to these events that would be worth the price.
There are plenty of online event services that you can use, like Eventbrite, Tix.com, or Cvent. While these platforms usually take a percentage to run your ticket sales for you, the convenience of platforms like this is worth it when you’re trying to host paid events.
It will distribute tickets and process payments to help make it much easier to monetize your community.
With that said, some community-building platforms will already have events services integrated into the platform to make it easier to manage.
Start earning from your community today
Start a community of your own for free at Nas.io
If you’re ready to start monetizing your community – no matter the size – Nas.io is the perfect place to begin.
With Nas.io. You can build an improved, customized community space at no cost. You can create opportunities for growth, connection, and learning – and our series of user-friendly tools will help you monetize your community experience so you can keep it running.
We are a platform directly committed to building functional, collaborative communities online for your brand. Whether you want to start a community for fashion, sports, writing, Web3, NFTs – anything – this is the place to do it.
Reach out to our incredible support team and learn how to start your own community today. We’ll be with you to help from Day 1.
