Why hello there, My Writers Club just hit the tasty 500 member mark, & our paid community has just reached 11 people. I quite enjoy swinging by here & discussing things that have helped me grow a truly thriving community. Hopefully some of these pointers help you out 🥂 🥇 COMMUNITY CHALLENGES If there’s one thing our community loves, it’s our weekly challenges. Every Monday, we launch a new challenge & incentivise participation by pinning the winner’s post at the end of the week (pretty simple incentive, but it works). Our challenges are designed to engage our niche, making it worthwhile for members to contribute, as each one expands their creativity & teaches them something relevant. 🥇 YOU MAY JUST FIND YOUR TEAM ON SKOOL I started this venture completely solo, but as I built, I discovered two brilliant individuals who shared my vision and desired to join me. They possess complementary skills that would have taken me years to develop, & have solidified the value in my community more than anything else I've done. Always keep a weather eye for those who might be the perfect fit to build alongside you, as everyone on this platform is ambitious. Lone wolf just isn't it I'm afraid. 🥇 TREAT YOUR MEMBERS LIKE FRIENDS You're a community owner, cool story. Yes, you have more expertise in your field than your members—that’s why they joined. However, you’re never above commenting back, sending appreciation messages, & publicly highlighting them in posts. Acknowledgment goes a long way, & I’ve made it a point to publicly and privately recognise every single one of my active members. We all want to feel seen, & your acknowledgment has a greater impact on your community than you realise. 💭 Oh, & here's something random I learned recently: I was rackinggg my brain, trying to figure out how communities were adding hyperlinks to their about page copy (not the dedicated links on the side). This may be obvious, but if you paste a link within this section, then write your desired text in the middle of it, you can backspace the rest, & it will retain the link, appearing as a hyperlink.

I keep seeing posts questioning if $99 for a community is worth it and if you shouldn't go with a free Facebook group instead. I didn't see/understand this when I started on Skool, but if you want actually to build a community of a meaningful size, you need to hear this. I have deep regrets. If you don't want to read... watch this video instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXUH7yVgdAs Yesterday I was listening to @Matthew Thompson latest podcast and one thing really struck me that I want to share with you: It's insane how much community management costs you save when you use Skool vs. a Facebook group. For context: In my own communities, we manage over 11,000 paying monthly members. Combined with Jessa and other partners over 20,000. Because there is a.) No payment integration and b.) Facebook is restricting our paid reach down to an average 300 out of 6500 members in our biggest group, the Coach Growth Hub inner circle. We have to pay a team of people to a.) Find and remove people who don't pay because FB doesn't do that automatically like skool b.) Provide 24-hour workday written support because in skool members actually see each other's posts and want to help each other out because of the gamification element and the connection that comes from having started to engage Honestly, this is so genius. The digital offer builders is now one of our most profitable communities because: #1: We don't run ads to it at the moment: 234 members NET GROWTH in the first month after playing the skool games. All organically from the skool discovery page and this community #2: We haven't promised 24h written support and don't deliver it. Members helping members works amazingly in here (I am really mind-blown; this would have never been possible with a Facebook group) It might be the amazing community, the lower cost, or the fact that I can finally reach my own community again, but I am becoming a super fan.

Lots of value

Very stoked about this!! If I can get 5 members...I can get 500. SKOOL is a great and simple platform to use! I know this is nothing compared to what the biggest accounts are doing but ...... You have to start somewhere!!!

Just hit a record month & made $200,000 USD from my free Skool community. Total ad spend: less than $5,000. Here are 2 mistakes I see 99% of people on Skool making, including many Skool games winners who I spoke with in Vegas last week. • Mistake #1: Not having a free Skool community. Going directly from an ad/social media to a paid group looks sexy on paper, I agree. But the reality is: A free Skool community nurtures leads & gets them to convert at a rate like nothing else I've ever seen. With a free Skool community, you can nurture leads in 4 ways: 1) The DM's (auto-dm to kick things off) 2) The community feed 3) The classroom 4) The calendar All without ever coming across as salesy! • Mistake #2: Telling people to join your free Skool community. I used to tell people to "jOiN mY fReE SkOoL cOmMuNiTy!" but nobody was joining :( I thought it was an issue with Skool. But then I started doing something insane... I started leveraging human psychology and talking to people about their DREAM OUTCOMES and frustrations. I started saying stuff like: "If you want to achieve <dream outcome> in <X timeframe> without <pain/effort/frustration>, click here to download my new free training that shows you how." And then I'd link them to my free Skool community. Guess what happened? People joined by the TRUCK LOAD. Turns out, nobody gives a 💩 about your free Skool community - until they're in it. To get them to join in the first place, you need to use bait. The best bait I've found? Free (GENUINELY HELPFUL) stuff like courses, pdf's, etc. that help people achieve their specific dream outcome in a specific time frame without a specific pain point. Hold nothing back in your free content. Give give give. Upsell the DFY/Done-With-You implementation - but give away all the DIY instructions. Growth has been insane ever since I started taking the above 👆 seriously. $200,000 in 30 days!!! Hope this helps, Ted P.S. I've attended 5 Skool Games events in Las Vegas and even a lot of the top winners don't know this stuff... but once they implement it, they make even MORE money.