6 ways to monetize community operations

I always encourage you to build communities because the brand and commercial value of communities will be very high in the future.

Of course, what everyone is most concerned about is, if I spend so much time and energy on building a community, how should I monetize it in the future?

Today, the editor happened to be sharing "The Whole Process of Commercial Monetization of Interest Communities" with the villagers in the community. One of the sections includes content about community monetization, so I have excerpted some to share with you.

01 Membership Monetization

Collecting membership fees from a community is the most direct and short-term way to generate the largest amount of revenue.

Toll route

a. Free to paid

Many communities may not have enough confidence in their services or value at the beginning, or may not have set up the entire membership monetization process properly.

Therefore, a free community will be created first, and then paid membership will be collected through subsequent services and stratification.

b. Pay to Member

We also spend a lot of time on early-stage content and service investments to attract users to pay directly and become community members.

Although this takes more time in the early stages, it is equivalent to helping the community screen and ensuring a certain quality of community members.

c. Beginner to Advanced

Although it is a paid membership, the fee is not just a one-time payment, nor is it just one price.

Many communities are divided into beginner, intermediate and advanced levels, which may correspond to roles such as newbies, managers and executives (founders). The fees charged at different levels are also unclear due to the differences in the services provided.

The annual membership fees of some mid- to high-end private board meetings start at at least RMB 50,000, so the quality of such communities is naturally higher.

02 Knowledge payment monetization

The vast majority of communities are industry groups, interest groups, and skill groups, so related courses will always have a market.

There are two types of community paid courses:

One is a temporary, one-time learning course. The guests are either from the community itself or big names hired from outside.

The second is a fixed, pre-recorded series of courses.

The content of paid courses may be basic common sense, marketing knowledge, or practical cases.

Courses also have different levels of difficulty, such as introductory courses for beginners, elite growth courses, and president courses.

Of course, selling courses is a rather tiring job for community monetization. It is not as easy as the rumored community bosses can sell tens of thousands of copies.

The advantage of paid courses is that they can be used repeatedly and charged multiple times.

03 Consulting Monetization

Communities that can truly monetize through consulting fees and service fees are still more dependent on personal IP, unless the community IP exceeds the personal IP and has well-known business cases.

a. Charge by number of consultations: a certain fee will be charged for each consultation.

b. Time-based charging: Generally, the standard charging is based on hourly rates, ranging from several thousand to several hundred, or even charged by the minute.

There are also consultations that are based on an annual fee. Annual consultations are a high-priced service for the community, but it also means paying more.

c. Project charges: Fee-based services are provided on a case-by-case basis or at a specific node. The service relationship can be terminated after the project is completed as agreed.

If the community wants to earn high customer orders, case numbers, and word of mouth, it can adopt this approach, but the project-based charging model will greatly test the team's service delivery capabilities.

Some people may also ask, what are the general charging standards for consulting services?

The village chief personally thinks that it depends on the length of the service and the difficulty of the problem itself , but any business consultation must have a basic reserve price.

04 Activity Monetization

An active and valuable community will definitely hold various types of activities frequently.

The village chief will also try to spare more time in the future to organize some exchange activities.

So how can we charge reasonably for activities?

1. Application Fee

For example, common resource matching conferences and private meetings for big-name guests, these types of activities have certain value, so tickets for the events can be sold.

Of course, whether a community is successful or not depends on how many people will convert into registered users.

2. Exhibition Fees

Most resource-based communities or communities that focus on offline delivery hold various resource matching conferences regularly every month.

If you want to participate in the exhibition, you must pay a participation fee.

By the way, I would like to emphasize: do not deny the value of exhibitions, especially for customers who prefer offline physical services.

3. Naming Fee

No matter how big the community’s activities are, as long as the activities are valuable, you can find sponsor partners.

Even if you only have a small group of 200 people, what if these 200 people meet offline at the same time?

Or if your group of 200 people holds 50 events a year, can you charge sponsorship fees?

remember! The more vertical and precise the community is, the more commercial value it has, because for businesses it means accurate customer acquisition.

05 Product Monetization

If you are creating a fishing community, your products may be your courses, event tickets, fishing gear, and models.

If you are running a beauty community, your products will be various beauty products, such as facial masks, facial creams, essences, etc., which are both good product recommendations and group purchases.

If you are running a pet community, your products would be pet toys, food, and clothing.

In this case, what we can directly think of is the monetization of the main products, as well as the monetization of some peripheral products.

For example, you can collaborate with some brands/merchants, or produce T-shirts, hats and other products for the community.

06 Franchise and cash out

If your own community is doing well, you can recruit franchisees or agents.

There are two ideas here:

The first is to recruit distributors/group leaders: their purpose is relatively pure, which is to help you sell goods through your training. This approach is also more suitable for communities such as maternal and child, beauty, and food.

The second is to recruit branch presidents: for example, the Hangzhou branch and the Beijing branch, they sell resources to help you deliver to members across the country.

This is more suitable for reading clubs and resource-based communities.

Of course, the fact that the community has developed to this extent already shows that it is already very strong in terms of scale and commercial monetization capabilities.

The above are several ideas for community commercialization. In fact, each monetization method can greatly amplify the commercial value.

For example, if you sell training courses, maps, calendars and other related products, you can really earn 10 or 20 million a year.

For those who organize offline commercial study tours, exchanges and other activities, they can collect tens of millions in registration fees. If they are more pure, they can also make money by simply charging entry fees for resource links.

In the process of community commercialization, there are 4 reminders that I need to communicate with you.

1. Charge directly and boldly

You must be clear about the ultimate purpose of your community building.

It must not be charity!

It’s definitely not just about making friends!

Since you are going to spend so much time and energy on building a community, the ultimate goal is to monetize and make money.

So, be simple and direct and charge a fee at the very beginning.

Make it clear to members of your community that the services you provide are not free.

Because you have to remember that more than 80% of users will never pay, no matter what you do.

2. Do a good job of paying for services first

Many community founders have included diversified monetization in their future development plans, but it will take time for these fantasies to be realized.

You have listed so many paid items. The key thing is to think clearly about why each business can receive money?

So focus on one core charging business and ensure good delivery.

Don’t try to make maps, calendars, and sell products before the courses are well-made.

3. Do a good job in delivering paid projects

No matter what name you charge, users are paying for the goods/services.

If the core service of your community is to connect resources, allow users to actually connect to resources within the community.

If the core delivery of your community is courses, carefully polish each course.

If the delivery of paid projects is poor, it is conceivable that subsequent renewals will naturally be poor, and the subsequent development of multiple commercial values ​​will also be more difficult.

4. Community basic services are important

There is one thing you all need to understand: the premise of all paid items comes from whether the services, content, projects, resources, etc. provided by the community itself are valuable.

Therefore, you must provide good community-based services, as they are the root cause of your continued traffic.

Author: Shili Village

Source: Shili Village (ID: shilipxl)