The six core elements of paid community operations!

The threshold for joining paid communities is getting higher and higher, and it is becoming more and more difficult to join. Many people often end up not making any money, losing their reputation, and exhausting themselves, which is really not worth it.

Many people around me are running paid communities, and some are planning to set up local, industry-specific paid circles.

There are many methods on the Internet on how to create paid communities, but many of them are just scraps.

I have run a paid community myself and spend tens of thousands of dollars on it every year, so today the village chief will talk to you about the six most important points of running a paid community.

Only these six points are the key to determining whether a community can continue to operate.

1. The community must have a threshold

Don’t build a cheap community. There are three types of cheap communities:

The first is that it is free . In a free community, users don’t care. No matter how good the service is, it is taken for granted and cheap. The management cost will increase, and the subsequent paid conversion rate will be extremely low.

The second reason is the low price . All kinds of people have joined, and the content and user quality in the circle have declined.

The third is diversity . Don’t do everything. The wider the circle you operate in and the more services you provide, the lower the value users perceive, because none of them is professional.

Only by setting a reasonable price range, focusing on a certain industry, and providing professional services can we attract people with a high willingness to pay and complementary community resources.

2. The community needs the community leader to personally participate

Many community owners easily fall into a misunderstanding, that is, they create content and attract members by mixing in the circle, and then leave all the services to the community operators below.

Of course, some small matters can be left to them to handle. For example, answering daily questions, finding information, etc.

But the circle owner must be the most soulful person in this community. Some circle owners are very popular on Douyin, official accounts, Zhihu, and live broadcasts.

However, they rarely show their faces in their own communities, offline activities, training programs, and member meetings. This will greatly weaken the members' feelings and the appeal of the circle leader.

Real paid community operations must be centered around the circle owner, who will take the lead in providing guidance in producing content, providing services, and organizing activities.

3. The community should have a sense of receipt

In some communities, members will be welcomed, introduced, and given small gifts when they join the group. These small elements do seem to increase members' favorability, or a sense of ritual.

But from the essence of user payment, what members need more is a sense of gain!

If the sense of gain is not satisfied, no matter how good the other services are or how many gifts are given, members will feel that they are just using their own membership fees and are being ripped off.

So what is a sense of achievement?

You have to understand why users want to join your paid community. There are three main aspects:

1) Learn knowledge

Users join circles to make up for their own information gaps, get more information sources, and see how others operate projects.

Therefore, you must ensure that the content in the circle is updated regularly, and at the same time, you must ensure the quality of content sharing in the circle.

• First, strengthen the review of content shared by members.
• Second, encourage members to share their project experiences.
• Third, invite guests with results to share.

2) Find a project

Some members don’t know what to do now, some want to transform their projects, and some want to explore some potential investment opportunities. They regard some paid circles as project libraries to find projects.

If your community is defined as this type, you need to make sure users can find the projects they want to learn about.

• One is the richness of the project library.
• The second is the timeliness of project updates.
• The third is the detail of project operation.
• The fourth is the operability of project learning, such as special project training every month.

3) Find resources

Another type is a pure resource community, which requires almost no content sharing and whose core is the matching of resources.

For example, if you are a merchant, your purpose of joining an e-commerce circle is to find channels, such as e-commerce platforms, internet celebrities, and self-media.

It may even be for the purpose of finding upstream and downstream channels. This purpose is very direct and has almost nothing to do with whether or not you learn knowledge.

No matter how many guests you invite to talk about operations in this kind of community, it is better to organize more merchants and channels to connect resources.

If your community can satisfy members' needs for one of the above three points, other services, such as sending information every month, are just scraps.

4. The community should be vertical enough

As I said just now, you can’t make the community too broad. The broader the community, the lower the renewal rate.

You must establish a perception in the minds of users that you are the most professional when it comes to a certain type of community.

Some people would say, I have seen some private board meetings, which were filled with bosses from all walks of life, and they were not vertical either!

In fact, this group is also vertical:

First, the goal is vertical. For example, if you are working on the Douyin IP, 100 bosses from different industries come here to learn about Douyin.

Secondly, the crowd is vertical. Even if the things shared in a circle are very diverse, they are all entrepreneurs who can afford the private board membership fees of 30,000 to 50,000 yuan, which is also valuable for members.

In addition to these two types of verticals, there are two other aspects:

The third is vertical industries, such as specialized e-commerce circles, food circles, technology circles, SEO circles, clothing circles, beauty circles, and traffic circles.

The fourth is vertical region. In fact, it is very valuable to build paid communities in third-, fourth- and fifth-tier regions.

In a city like this, although people who come to create a paid community come from all walks of life, because they are all people with local resources and who want to learn, it has very high value. I hope you will focus on this.

5. The community should have representative cases

Based on the three points I just mentioned, you must create your own representative cases.

For example, how many featured posts are there in your community content, how much project information is covered, and how many platform and business managers are there.

How many people earned how much money after project training, and how many people completed transactions in the community.

Building a community is about creating a role model. As long as there are influential role models in your community, your community can continue.

So we should look at the departure of some members rationally, but the key is to allow some members to achieve results in the community.

6. The community must hold activities

In order to enhance the community’s sense of delivery and members’ sense of gain, we must organize activities.

Many communities may cite the pandemic as an excuse, but unless there is a strict lockdown in your area, you should continue to carry out normal activities.

1) Project training

The vast majority of paid social media materials are not read by anyone, and the average reading rate does not exceed 10%. Even if you write well, many people still don’t read it.

Even those who read the essential posts may not fully understand them and be able to implement them.

Therefore, training is necessary. We should organize one or two training sessions every month and take members to do projects. Only when they do it can they feel the delivery of the community.

Only when there are one or two sustainable, reputable and fruitful projects in the community, will the community continue to attract a certain number of people to join.

2) Offline activities

Be sure to do offline activities. Offline activities are indeed very complicated, requiring organization, guests, and venues.

But this is exactly the ratio at which you build your own community. Even if only one or two people participate, you must maintain a regular schedule.

Paid communities only operate online, so members don’t feel very rewarded.

Of course, there are many kinds of offline activities, such as organizing community members to go on study tours, attend offline meetings, etc.

If you can hold an offline event every month and attract 50 people at a time, you can cover 600 people in a year, and these 600 people can drive 3,000 people to renew their subscriptions.

If we hold another conference every quarter or in the middle or end of the year, we will have the marketing rhythm and momentum for the whole year.

No matter how much you charge for your community, as long as the number of paying users exceeds 3,000, the income is considered considerable.

Author: Shili Village

Source: Shili Village (shilipxl)