Community operation: How to create a high-quality paid community?

This may be the most comprehensive explanation on the entire Internet on how to build a high-quality paid community . It teaches you step by step how to build a paid community. It is 6,500+ words of practical information on community operations without any nonsense.

It is recommended to save it first to avoid missing it and finding this useful information.

This article will start from the perspective of my own establishment of a paid community. Unlike the analysis of ideas based on results in the market, the details of this article will be more comprehensive.

I hope this sharing can help everyone and can be reused in your own community work.

The following is the directory of the full text:

1. Why - Find out why you want to create a paid community

1. The original intention of creating a paid community

2. External reasons for creating a paid community

2. What - figure out how to plan the community and what value this paid community can bring to users

1. Growth & learning needs

2. Resource link requirements

3. Emotional needs

3. Where – Where are our paying community users? On which platform are paid communities created?

4. When: When can I create a group?

5. How: How do we build this community?

1. IP positioning

2. Price positioning

3. Content positioning

4. Service positioning

5. Ritual Design

1) Welcome ceremony

2) Award Ceremony

3) Planet output rewards

1. Why - Find out why you want to create a paid community

1. The original intention of creating a community

Everyone who creates a community must have a clear positioning, so that there will be clear goals in the subsequent traffic and conversion, and you can better help this part of the people.

First of all, the objective reason is that I used to be an operator who did odd jobs. I stumbled along the way and took many detours. I also know clearly that there are too many courses on the market. One moment you tell you to learn the three-piece office suite, the next moment you tell you to learn Python, and the next moment you tell you to learn XXX... Faced with so many courses, we seem to learn a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and in the end we haven't learned anything. This is also the current situation of many operators.

Without clear goals and guiding directions, many operators can only be harvested like leeks by these so-called essential operations courses one after another. After completing the course, they find out that these are actually useless.

I can’t say anything about the others, but I have taken the Python class and it was really useless (the only benefit might be that it made me understand the difference in the brain circuits between programmers and operators).

Nowadays, the Internet is not only filled with a lot of useless homogeneous content, but no matter where you go, there will always be a group of people selling courses who will tell you through various anxiety-creating forms: your peers have received promotions and salary increases through XX means, and I have summarized their methods of success into courses for you. Come and buy my course, come and buy my course!

Therefore, in this environment, it is actually very difficult to fully absorb the knowledge you want and grow quickly without guidance.

Therefore, I particularly admire those operators who are very determined in their goals when they start out and can achieve results within 2-3 years. There are several such examples in our group.

In the early stages of most people’s operations careers, they have more or less created some popular cases/tweets/projects, which have successfully become a stepping stone for them to get a high salary in their future work.

However, the first successful case inevitably has some element of luck, and only by constantly summarizing the rules can the value of these successful experiences be continuously magnified and truly become one's core skill.

After some discussion, we internally feel that building a good learning environment and allowing everyone to grow with external motivation may be the only way to truly help everyone.

The WeChat group is a relatively good closed learning environment. High-frequency sharing and communication in such an environment will be much more effective than studying alone.

However, given that such high-quality services require corresponding human resources, we cannot simultaneously adopt the high-intensity sharing and learning model for more than 20 groups in the existing research institute. Therefore, creating a paid community becomes the best choice.

For us, this also allows us to invest our limited time and energy into serving high-value members.

After we clarified the purpose of establishing a paid community, our direction became clearer. Our target is operators aged 0-3. Of course, if you are an operator at this stage, you are welcome to contact me through the official account.

2. External reasons for creating a paid community

Another reason is that 95% of free communities basically do not survive more than 3 months, because if a community wants to exist for a long time, it must have someone to operate and maintain it. A community without anyone to maintain it will be full of advertisements, and there will be no value in the group. People will quit the group, block the group, and finally only a dead group will be left.

Payment is actually a way to screen members. Members' payment can help us obtain some value returns, and it can also ensure that the community further upgrades its services and brings more professional and continuous high value in the future.

In fact, we have done so. The membership service system has been continuously improved and has been upgraded to version 2.0. We are also constantly launching new membership systems.

Another point is that paid communities actually screen a wave of users. Users who are willing to pay for value are actually a kind of value in themselves. And because everyone has paid money to join, users will also cherish the opportunities in the group more.

So now I have basically quit all the free groups, except for company-related groups and groups with relatives and friends. All other groups are paid groups. Because now can be said to be an era of information explosion. Too much information makes us impetuous and even difficult to distinguish right from wrong.

Paying money is an extremely simple and effective way to help us screen out a lot of worthless information. Basically, the value and resources I get from the paid group are far greater than the entry fee I paid.

However, free communities and connections are not cherished, and people are not grateful for them. Perhaps this is the naked nature of human beings.

These are the external reasons why we create paid communities.

2. What - figure out the community planning and what value this paid community can bring to users

1. Growth & learning needs

In terms of community planning, our first target is operators for children aged 0-3.

As mentioned before, our original intention is to help operators grow, not just improve their personal skills, including attracting new customers, activation, conversion, and various operational strategies. In addition, we also want to help operators develop good work and study habits.

We have all experienced that persisting in doing something meaningful will ultimately yield huge rewards and produce huge results, such as persisting in reading, persisting in reviewing, persisting in learning a certain skill, etc.

However, it is difficult to develop a good habit solely through personal persistence, unless there is a strong internal driving force, and maintaining continuous self-motivation is a very difficult task.

Compared to "self-drive", it is relatively easy to put yourself in an environment with good external drive and use external drive to motivate yourself to develop habits.

Therefore, what we want to create for our membership base is a good externally driven environment.

A good atmosphere is conducive to growth. Frequent sharing and communication in such an environment will be much more effective than studying alone.

A good relationship is itself a kind of healing. In this circle, it will be easier for you to break through current bottlenecks and difficulties.

All of the above ideas did not come out of thin air, but were the direction we formulated after conducting a lot of user research in the early stage.

Then we will output content, professional knowledge or skills, which is the value of paid communities.

2. Resource link requirements

I would like to emphasize here that we must explore the needs of users, because only when we have demand will a project or product we create have real meaning and value.

Originally, we just planned to create a [Knowledge Planet] to accumulate high-quality content within the community, so that community members can achieve self-growth by viewing the essence of the content. However, after investigation, we found that although everyone has a desire for things like "dry goods", very few people can actually apply them in practice. Most people just collect the dry goods first.

After investigation, we also found that many users, in addition to fighting alone, one person or the leader does not understand operations, which leads to many detours in the process of struggling and wasting a lot of unnecessary time and energy on trial and error. Everyone is still eager for the need for a circle, and hopes to find the same frequency of communication and encourage each other.

Therefore, after we have clarified what we want to do and whether it makes sense for us to do it, we can design projects for our membership group. Therefore, our content must revolve around the growth of operators.

And we will actually implement this matter later. Many groups will say that they will accompany growth, but in the end no one will answer the questions. So we pay much attention to this aspect. In the early stage, we let our official staff answer the questions, and the atmosphere in the group was created. Later, everyone took the initiative to answer the questions, and the whole community was more like a group of friends rather than a group of strangers, with only the official person speaking there.

Therefore, the sense of ceremony of joining the group is indispensable. We have compiled the self-introductions of group members, the homepage of the member group, and all the rights and interests of members. These will be sent to new members when they join the group so that they can quickly understand the various members of our member group and their specific rights and interests.

At the same time, we also help everyone provide internal referral positions and operator resources in the same industry.

3. Emotional needs

The community itself is a place for information exchange, resource exchange, and relationship connection. The existence of links enhances the value of the community and is no longer limited to the depth of the community leader's own abilities, knowledge, and skills.

Therefore, we often hold tea parties, chat about work in the group during the day, and chat about family matters at night. We directly chat in the group voice, talking about how the latest hot cases are played, everyone’s recent situation, and the problems everyone encounters. The chat can last at least two hours, which is actually a further in-depth connection.

3. Where – Where are our paying community users? On which platform are paid communities created?

When we think about this problem, we need to consider the age group of the user population. People in the workplace basically don’t use the social software QQ anymore, and most of them use WeChat groups, so we created this community based on WeChat groups.

Many people will ask, where do your paying users come from?

To build a paid community, basic trust must be established in the early stage, and there must be a traffic pool of a group of seed users. Before building a paid community, we spent a lot of time attracting new users and temporarily stored them in WeChat lists and ordinary communities. The atmosphere in ordinary communities was also very good, so that when our reputation spread among this group of seed users, they would also spontaneously invite their colleagues to join the group.

The key point here is that paid communities are not created right away. When you have a basic traffic pool and enough users who trust you, then you can talk about creating a paid community. You have to think clearly about why these people are willing to buy into it.

For example, we used to spend a lot of energy to operate our ordinary community. We would eat melons every day, and post useful information in the group every day. The communication atmosphere in the group was also very good. Everyone had a common label, and they were all operators. They also had common topics to talk about, including resource matching and recruitment, which we did very well before.

When we were doing the cold start, a large number of users volunteered to endorse us, so we had a basic base of seed users.

4. When – When can I create a group?

Before creating a group, we need to think through the above questions, and then plan the recent community activities. Promotional posters, materials, detail pages, and group-building language all need to be prepared in advance. After these materials are prepared, you can start creating the group.

These materials are only prepared in the early stages. In the later stages, we need to continuously explore user needs and continuously iterate the content of paid communities and community service systems.

5. How: How do we build this community?

1. IP positioning

First of all, the name of our community is [Community Operation Research Institute]. You can also find that most of the content I output on Zhihu is about community operation. Because it is vertical, it is more professional. I will first delve into one field and then expand to other general operation fields.

Therefore, most of our users are engaged in community operations, and there are also users engaged in product operations, event operations, data operations, content operations, etc. The essence of operations is the same, and they all revolve around traffic, activity, retention, and conversion. It’s just that the carriers of different operations may be different, some are platform-based, and some are based on WeChat groups.

Therefore, there is no problem for us to start from such a point direction in the vertical field and expand from point to surface.

2. Price positioning

Taking into account that some of the operators with 0-3 years of age are recent graduates, and our original intention of establishing this community is to help everyone, our pricing is very favorable.

Compared to the communities on the market that cost thousands of dollars, our threshold is extremely low, with a price of just over two hundred. If you are interested in the community we are building, please feel free to contact me.

Of course, the price will definitely increase in the future as the number of members and the value of the community grows, so that those who joined early will feel that it is a better value.

3. Content positioning

Our user positioning is for operators aged 0-3, so our content is also centered around these people. To improve them, we have designed many different forms, as follows:

1) Live broadcast by community celebrities

Every month we will invite at least one big shot to share his project management experience in the form of voice or text live broadcast, and the shared content will be organized into the form of audio + refined draft + golden sentences, and added to the member course column.

We have accumulated more than a dozen courses so far, and we have organized the content into the form of audio + refined articles + golden sentences. You can watch and listen to these courses immediately after paying.

Such a design can help newcomers learn quickly, and the content is practical and easy to use.

If you are also running a paid community, you might as well refer to this form: big names can go to more professional communication forums, find some authors of high-quality articles or big names who have already shared in your field to do such a sharing.

What you need to note is that this must be mutually beneficial. We have operational resources in vertical fields, so we can help these experienced bigwigs to further expand their influence. Therefore, they are also willing to come to our community to share.

2) Weekly operational practice seminars

This part of the design has been mentioned before. It is actually a co-creation part. One person's thinking is always limited. We are all operators and have experience in different industries. By brainstorming, the ideas we finally get will definitely be multi-angled and not too one-sided.

Anyone who has experience in output must know that continuous and stable output is very difficult. Some people are continuous, but the quality is uneven; some people have stable quality, but unstable time. What should they do?

Content co-creation.

Therefore, we designed a topic discussion session on Tuesday and will summarize everyone’s ideas into a document. These topics are basically based on users’ daily needs.

3) Sharing books and lessons

This is mainly shared among our internal team members. We break down 1-2 high-scoring operations courses/operation books every month, organize them into live broadcasts for sharing, and form a group of essential documents for repeated viewing. The content themes of the split courses are concentrated in the field of operations, and group members can recommend relevant courses or books in advance.

High-scoring books breakdown:

4) Daily snacks

This requires continuous discovery of KOLs in the community and users who are good at sharing. This can be done when guiding new members to introduce themselves after they join the group.

As community operators, we need to help group members to smooth out relationships, eliminate unfamiliarity, establish connections, and form a network framework.

Therefore, we can allow some of the more active users in the group to share some work experience and content in the group regularly. This will help cultivate a group of opinion leaders within the group while increasing the activity of the community. Currently, there are many KOLs in our community.

For example, there is Mianmian, who has 2 years of experience in Top 3 e-commerce operations and later transformed into a trader. His projects have been worth hundreds of millions and he has a lot of experience in private domain monetization, distribution, learning methods, etc.; Zhizhong, who led the operation of Zero One Fission's "Explosive Case Library", started it at 0 cost, sold more than 8,000, and realized more than 500,000, becoming a case that swept the operation circle in 2019; and Hanhan, a former NetEase K12 education product operator with 5 years of experience in the education industry, who is good at community, data analysis, copywriting, growth, and team management.

Everyone is willing to share their knowledge and insights in the community, and has gained a large number of community fans.

5) Knowledge Planet

In addition to content co-creation, we also encourage everyone to output their personal thoughts and reading notes on the planet. We have also held a 14-day reading check-in event, which is also one of the concepts of co-creation.

Of course, our internal team members will also summarize and analyze what they have learned. In addition, we will also invite experienced community leaders to share their own experiences.

The content accumulated on the Knowledge Planet is not actually available all at once. We started to fill our Knowledge Planet frantically a few months before we established the group. We uploaded high-quality case analysis, useful documents, interview tips, some tool sharing, daily reading notes, and personal daily learning and thinking to the planet.

Later, after creating a group, the uploaded content will be richer. The sorted operational practice research documents, book and course sharing, and live sharing by big names will also be uploaded to the planet. In this way, the information of the planet will gradually grow. Currently, there are more than 1,000 operational content. You are welcome to learn together.

4. Service positioning

As mentioned before, our service positioning in the early stage is to help operators aged 0-3 years old grow, and we want to build a good external driving environment. So on the one hand, we instill knowledge into users, and on the other hand, we cultivate good habits for operators.

Therefore, someone in the group can definitely get a response.

At present, our group has spontaneously formed an atmosphere group and a question-answering group. Basically, every time a group member asks a question, there will be more than 5 enthusiastic group members who will spontaneously answer it. This aspect is part of daily service.

Other daily services include regular live broadcasts and practical operation seminars.

During this process, we also constantly communicated with users and iterated the community's services. The problem we encountered at this time was that there were thousands of messages in the group, and it was not convenient to scroll up the shared content.

Our solution to this problem is to use tools we developed ourselves to create a group essence. Our internal team has someone dedicated to collecting valuable content from the group every day. This is a service that has been continuously iterated and launched.

Because only by constantly communicating with users can you know what they need. This process is time-consuming and labor-intensive, but it is worth it because all the good content is accumulated and new members can quickly view past sharing, live broadcasts, questions, and topic discussions.

In this way, users can gain a lot of useful information when they first join the group, which can be regarded as the user's Aha moment.

In order to cultivate users' learning habits, we have also launched daily evening sharing of useful information and weekly summary of useful information to help users filter information and enable users to develop a daily learning habit.

In order to make it easier for newcomers to view past content, we will also regularly update the categories of past content. In addition to the search function of Group Essence and Knowledge Planet, basically, all operation-related information can be quickly obtained.

In addition, we will add a case disassembly camp in the later stage to cultivate everyone's operational replication capabilities.

A wise person not only looks at the surface, but also thinks about the reasons behind it. Only by seeing the essence of the problem can we make fundamental changes. When you see an operational plan going viral on WeChat Moments, learn to break down the underlying logic, such as how the user’s pain points were discovered?

When you get a project, you can continuously improve by thinking more about the underlying logic.

5. Ritual Design

1) Welcome ceremony

There is also a spontaneously formed atmosphere group within the group. When new members join the group, there will be a lot of welcome ceremonies, which is also a part that can surprise users.

2) Award Ceremony

In terms of output, our community will report on the monthly awards ceremony every month, and there will also be an annual awards ceremony at the end of the year to give users enough sense of ceremony.

3) Planet output rewards

In addition, our planet will hold reading check-in reward activities, and high-quality outputs will receive red envelope rewards every week. These can all motivate users to output.

The above is a partial sharing of my experience related to high-quality paid communities. I hope it will be inspiring and helpful to those who are preparing to or are currently operating paid communities.

Author: Community Operation Research Institute

Source: Community Operation Research Institute