How do online communities make money?

We need the community. Bringing individuals who share the same ideals, interests, or hobbies may benefit everyone.

But developing an online community that gives such value takes effort. Those that invest in a community must find out how to monetize their efforts.

If you’ve already built an engaged community, you’re in an excellent position to monetize it. Make your community profitable without hurting its value to members: There are many ways to do this.

So how do online communities make money?

A community is the most sustainable way to make money online

Direct ways to monetize your community

Indirect ways to monetize your community

The bigger your community is bigger is the earning

A community is the most sustainable way to make money online

A community is the best way to make money online because your audience will always be there to buy your product. You have the freedom to launch all the products you want, and when you do, they will be there to buy them. They love what you sell, and they love that it’s from you.

Another reason is that your community will tell you what to sell and what they need. That’s a huge advantage. You don’t spend time on something that will do cricket. Doing a Pre-launched and start collecting money before creating the product is the power of a community. They trust you and are willing to wait to have it.

Another is selling products consistently without spending money on ads that might not convert well and lose money. A business that relies solely on Facebook ads always regrets it over time and tries to create its own audience.

Finally, since your community has already bought from you before, changing niches won’t stop them from buying again!

Direct ways to monetize your community

Memberships

Memberships are a way to monetize that works well for communities that have grown beyond building the initial core membership.

It’s a great way to raise revenue when you already have a large community. Membership adds value for your members by offering them exclusive content, events, or discounts on products.

You can offer various levels of membership with different benefits and price points.

Here are some examples of what your members could get in return for paying a fee:

Exclusive content such as articles, videos, webinars, or podcasts
Discounted events like conferences and workshops
Access to an online forum where they can connect with other members

Memberships are a great way to ensure you’re only getting real-life traffic to your website.

When you set up a membership, you can limit access to your site by running the IP address of users through a database to verify that they’re not one of the thousands of bots trying to infiltrate your website.

This is an excellent way to protect yourself from spammer audiences and make sure that what you’ve built is accessible only by people who are really interested in it.

Membership is one of the best ways to bring in revenue for your brand. It allows you to have a predictable income and provides you with an opportunity to create a greater connection with your audience.

You can offer multiple types of memberships:

One-time payment where members will have access for life.
Monthly subscription to access exclusive content or event, workshops, additional benefits, etc.

Donations

Believe in the power of “just ask.”

If you don’t, you will get nothing. I understand you feel ashamed, or you don’t dare to ask. But if you are delivering good quality content and helping people for free is not begging. Your audience will be glad to help you.

When we start, we need every money to keep going on most of the time. Even small amounts of money can make an enormous difference to skyrocket your project.

Patreon and BuyMeACoffee are websites that allow creators to collect donations from fans based on the value of their work. It’s easy to sign up and get started with these services.

Digital products

Digital products are another great way to monetize your online community. They’re affordable and scalable, and easy to create.

Unlike physical products, you have control over the sales process, meaning you get to keep all of the profits instead of sharing them with a third-party distributor.

You can sell digital products on your own website or through third-party sites like Amazon or Etsy.

There are two main categories of digital products: instructional content (such as ebooks or video courses), and design assets (such as photos, music, and illustrations).

Online course

If you have expertise, skills, or knowledge that your community would find beneficial, then creating a paid-for course is an excellent option. You can charge for online courses, training workshops, or webinars.

People are more willing to pay for online courses than ever before. The market is there:

The online education industry is growing at a rate of 9% and will be worth $10 billion by 2023.
The average student spends $1,200 per year on educational materials.

Having an online community is the easy way to sell an online course those who don’t have it have to make some paid ads and pay an influencer to promote their courses. That’s harder.

E-book

Same like an online course your expertise can be monetized. E-books will target those who like short-form and summarized the content. It is cheaper than an online course so easier to sell.

Whether you’re a writer or not, you can write or externalize an e-book and sell it for profit.

What’s cool about e-books is that they are super low-cost to produce—after all, it’s just text!—and once the work of writing and publishing is done, you can keep earning money with little to no additional effort. It is a passive income.

Templates

People love templates because it :

Save time and money.
Stay organized.
Avoid formatting hassles.

Here are some examples :

Notion template
Excel sheet to track expense
To-do list template for …. wedding, travel…
Coloring
Starting kit
administrative steps

Art

You already know that your community is a big fan of your work. If you sell some art, they will love to buy it!

Selling your art to your community can be a great way to make money doing what you love. Whether you’re selling photos, NFTs, music, illustrations, or the like, you’ve already got a fan base of people who love what you do.

They’ll be excited to buy from you, and it can open up a whole new stream of revenue for you.

Coaching and Services

Coaching and Services will be your most expensive offers because it is a one-to-one offers. Why? Because your time is limited. Coaching and Services are the best to get to know deeply what are the needs of your community.

Leverage your community to build a massive email list.

Once you’ve built a massive community, it’s time to leverage it to grow your email list. Remember: an engaged email list is one of the most powerful marketing tools online. It’s how you get people to buy from you, and it’s how you build long-lasting relationships with them.

Let your audience help you brainstorm profitable service offerings!

You can use the power of your community to craft new service offerings. Here are a few ways to do it:

Ask for feedback about what your audience is looking for. You can put together a survey, or simply strike up a conversation in your group. If you don’t know what services or products to offer, then asking your audience is the best way to find out!
Ask for testimonials about products and services they’ve already bought from you. People love sharing their experience with a product or service that they liked and were happy with. This works especially well if you have an engaged community of people who trust your recommendations and advice (which you should be building anyway!). Use their testimonials on your sales pages and freebies and in any ads they agree to let you run!

If you want to sell more, upsell and cross-sell your content and services.

Affiliate income

One of the ways that you earn income from your community is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when you get paid a commission for referring someone to buy a product or service.

Most often, the product or service is something that you use and recommend anyway.

When someone clicks on your affiliate link or uses your coupon code and converts into a paying customer, then you get paid a commission.

You do not need to own your own product or have any direct relationship with the tools you recommend in order to make money via their affiliate program.

When the link is set, it is like passive income.

Selling physical products

Merchandise, branded t-shirts, mugs, and more

It may sound old school, but selling merchandise is a great way to generate revenue. Having your own branded t-shirts, mugs and other merchandise will not only increase brand awareness of your community but also allow you to make a profit.

You can either decide to print these yourself or use a third-party company. You can then sell these online on your website or social profile, or at an event if you have one planned.

Create your brand

E-commerce is also relatively easy to set up using a platform like Shopify (where you can create an online store that integrates with your forum), or WooCommerce (if you’re using WordPress).

If you’re thinking of starting an e-commerce business, there are two main things to consider: capital and advertising.

Capital is important because you need it to pay for the goods you’re selling in order to make a profit—even if it’s just enough to keep your business going.

On the other hand, advertising can be a very expensive endeavor. But if you already have a community built around you, then the cost is negligible and your advertising will be much more effective than if you were trying to build a following from scratch.

A community can help you build a strong brand for yourself or for your company by keeping you accountable and focused, pointing out areas of improvement, and by helping to spread the word about who you are and what you do.

Indirect ways to monetize your community

Advertising

Advertising is one of the most common revenue sources for online communities. If you are able to attract significant traffic to your site, you can monetize that traffic by placing advertisements on your site.

Advertising can be a good way to supplement other revenue sources. However, it is not a reliable source of revenue on its own: advertising revenue tends to be low and unpredictable

Google Adsense is the easiest to set up. Then you can apply to Ezoic or Mediavine.