How To Start an Online Community

I’m going to let you in on a secret: I’m a total nerd. Ok, it’s not that big of a secret. Most people who know me know this about me. They just don’t know the extent or that I’m still regularly talking with people who I met in an online community I joined in 2004. 

The community, now long gone, was called Mugglenet Interactive (yep, I was a huge Harry Potter fan as a 13-year-old). I was invested. I spent way more time there than I probably should have, roleplaying Harry Potter with other teenagers who turned into life-long friends. 

If you’re looking to build an online community, you probably aren’t interested in the middle school nerd crowd – but you should be. While they’re likely pretty far from your target audience, you should pay attention to what MNI was able to create, and how it continues to have a lasting impact a full two decades later. 

Your online community will be your first adopters, your biggest source of referrals, and how you will take your brand to the next level. Today, I’m going to talk to you about how to build an online community that engages your audience and keeps them coming back for more. 

Understanding the Purpose of Your Online Community

The steps to building an online community begin with you gaining a full understanding of why your community exists, its purpose, and where your community is going. 

Defining these ideas and then clearly communicating them with your audience will tailor your group to the people you want to reach – those who are most likely to engage and keep engaging with your content. 

Identifying Your Core Values

The core values that you put in place are going to influence how people interact with your brand and with each other. It is your responsibility, as the creator of the online community, to identify and communicate the core values that you want to be present in all of the interactions with your community. 

It is not enough to make a set of rules or community standards. Your core values go deeper and are there to guide your community standards and influence your community members’ behavior. 

Harvard Business School Online features their Community Values on their website to make it very clear what is expected from their students and faculty:

Without making a single rule, every student or faculty member reading the Community Values knows exactly what is expected of them in every interaction. They also know whether they’re going to fit with the vibe of HBS – professional, respectful, and honest, with integrity and accountability at the forefront. 

You may already associate those words with Harvard as a brand, and that is intentional. Your community’s core values should align with the core values you’ve already put in place for your brand. 

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Your online community should be a natural extension of your other marketing efforts. 

Defining Your Community's Mission and Vision

As the Cheshire Cat told Alice, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” 

While your core values guide your community’s behavior, your community’s mission and vision guide your community’s direction.

Again, it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. You likely already have a mission and a vision for your brand and content. Take that a step further and really hone in on where you see your community going. 

TED built a community of people sharing ideas and hosting educational talks around the world. Their mission statement communicates not just their core values, but where they intend to take their non-profit in the future:

Reading TED’s mission statement, you know exactly what values they hold and where their community is going. Better yet, you can see a macro, a big picture view of what TED sets out to achieve, and how smaller goals naturally fall under that umbrella. 

Your goals are your opportunity to get into the nitty-gritty, while your mission and vision are the bigger picture. Your mission and your vision should align with the goals that you want to achieve with your community. 

Why listen to me: I’m not just a Harry Potter nerd -- I’m also a copywriting nerd. I’m honored to have helped to nourish numerous communities in my career, from writing for a health and fitness influencer on Instagram to working with some of the biggest channels on YouTube. 

Planning Your Community Strategy

Once you’ve clearly defined your core values, mission, and vision, the next step is to plan a strategy to get you to where you’re trying to go. Your strategy should include identifying your target audience and their preferences, deciding what content you want to produce, and breaking down your short and long-term goals. 

The Role of Community Feedback in Strategy

Your community’s members are going to be the best source of feedback for what’s working and what’s not in your strategy. It’s important to make your community feel heard and refine your overall strategy accordingly. 

You can collect community feedback in a number of ways: 

• Driving conversations with your audience on social media by using compelling calls-to-action 

• Asking your audience to review your content or fill out a feedback form

• Reading comments, emails, and social posts about your community and content

• Reaching out directly to members of your audience and asking, “What do you think?” 

Once you get feedback, the key is to own it and make changes based on what your audience says they want and need. If it doesn’t align with your strategy, that’s your cue to switch it up. 

You want your community to be engaged, so it’s important to make your community feel heard and respected. Taking the time to really listen to what your audience has to say and then implementing it into your strategy is one of the best ways to drive engagement. 

Fortunately, collecting feedback just got even easier. beehiiv just released all-new Surveys to get information about your subscribers, making it easy to collect actionable data. 

Assessing Your Target Audience's Needs

Your target audience is going to tell you what their preferences and pain points are. It’s up to you to listen and adjust accordingly. 

By continually trying out different methods of growth and listening to the feedback from his audience, Justin Schnell grew his newsletter, Even the Odds, to 10k subscribers in only one year. 

Justin also talks about another experience – his experience as a member of the beehiiv community. He chooses to work with beehiiv over other newsletter platforms like Mailchimp or Substack because he knows that when he has feedback, he’ll be heard. 

For Justin, his target audience’s preferences drive his successful strategy. He also makes decisions as a consumer based on his experience as a member of the beehiiv community. Both examples show the impact of community feedback and how it can be leveraged to successfully grow your business. 

Developing a Content Roadmap

Make developing a great content calendar one of your highest priorities. It will be your best resource to keep on track with your long-term vision.

When creating your content roadmap, keep your community’s thematic goals and member interests in mind. You want your community to stay engaged and keep coming back, so make sure that all of your content is aligned with meeting those goals.

Your content calendar doesn’t need to be complicated, but it should be consistent. If your community knows to expect your newsletter every Monday, you can generate excitement for upcoming content and drive your audience to actively seek out your content in their inbox. 

Setting Short-Term and Long-Term Goals

When setting your short-term and long-term goals, make sure that they are SMART goals: 

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Relevant

• Timely

Following the SMART guidelines, you can establish achievable objectives using metrics like Click-Through Rates as your Key Performance Indicators.

Did you notice that I said Click-Through Rates and not your number of subscribers? When you measure the growth and success of your community, you want to measure how many engaged subscribers you have. 

If your goal is to build an online community, you not only want your audience to subscribe to your content, but to actually engage with it. This will give you more accurate criteria to evaluate your success. 

Pro tip: If you have a large email list, but your engagement is decreasing, it might mean that it’s time to scrub your list of any inactive or uninterested subscribers. Trust the process; losing a few subscribers pays off in the long run when you increase your deliverability, engagement, and, ultimately, your ROI.  

Choosing the Right Platform for Your Community

The platform you choose while building an online community is going to make or break your success. Make sure that you take into consideration everything that you need like features, user-friendliness, and ease of use. 

Platform Security Considerations

It’s hard work building your email list, creating your content, and cultivating your community. Security is a big deal because you want to protect what you built and protect your audience.

When evaluating the security features offered on different platforms, look for things like reCAPTCHA v2 and two-factor authentication. 

beehiiv offers reCAPTCHA v2 to help keep your account secure from automated spam and 2FA to keep your account secure from unauthorized access.

Beyond the software features, look for a platform with responsive customer service that can resolve issues quickly and get your newsletter back up and running. Here’s what one user had to say about beehiiv’s support:  

Customizing Features for Your Audience

Make sure that the platform you choose has plenty of customization features to enhance your community’s user experience and meet your community’s specific requirements. If the platform you’re using doesn’t meet your community’s needs, why would you want to use it? 

Look for features that let you create a bespoke experience for your community:

• Design tools that allow you to make your content look visually amazing

• Web page building tools that help you build great landing pages

• Monetization tools that let you custom tailor paid subscriptions  

• Segmentation tools that enable you to hone in on the content that specific community members receive

beehiiv just launched new subscriber tags that let you segment your audience and send tag-specific content to your email list, giving your community an elevated, custom experience. For example, you can tag your most engaged community members and thank them for being such an integral part of your community. 

How your community is run will look unique to your community. Make sure that the platform you create your content on offers all of the customization features you need to optimize and enhance your community members’ experience.

Evaluating Platform Scalability

Scalability is the key to long-term community growth, and it is crucial to evaluate potential platforms to make sure that they will still meet your needs as you grow. 

Maybe the platform you’re considering will work when you have 150 subscribers, but will it still make sense when you have 1.5 million? Think long-term about your goals and your needs and how you will get to that 1.5 million subscribers.

beehiiv’s growth features are unrivaled, with options like referrals and boosts to help build your newsletter and make you money. Because, let’s be honest, you put a lot of work into your content and you want to get it out there to the world, but you deserve to continue growing the amount of money you get paid to do it. 

Creating Engaging Content To Attract Members

Building content that will attract and engage your audience just requires putting forth some extra thought to take it to the next level. Your content should go beyond words on a page and give your audience consistent value. When your content keeps your audience engaged, creating an online community becomes that much easier. 

Utilizing Multimedia To Boost Engagement

No one wants to read a giant wall of text. Keep your content interesting and drive engagement by incorporating multimedia elements like videos and images to enrich it.

Think of the multimedia images like a visual palette cleanser for your written content. Your images and videos should be relevant and add value to your writing, while giving your content new life and visual interest. 

Multimedia elements can also help to tell a story in a way that words alone cannot. An infographic or an instructional video can help reinforce ideas and get them across to multiple kinds of learners, for example.  

beehiiv offers a robust multimedia library with a direct integration with Giphy and Unsplash, so you can easily add visual interest to your content, right on the platform. 

Just make sure to follow accessibility best practices by adding alt-text and making sure that your content is ADA compliant. 

Creating Content That Reflects Core Values

Your community’s core values should guide you in all of your content creation. For example, if you want your community to be relaxed and casual, your content should have the same vibes to foster a sense of identity and belonging. Your community members joined for a reason, and your content should reflect that. 

Nicole Ripka’s newsletter, Gayjoy Digest, began from the core value of giving people in the LGBTQ community a safe and inclusive place to connect. Nicole saw a need to create content for a target audience that is underserved and built a community based on her core values. 

And although Gayjoy hosts lots of events and meetups in NYC, Nicole “is obsessed” with building her online community for the people who don’t live in the city and don’t have the same access to connect in person. Her newsletter gives her a way to reach the people who need a sense of community the most. 

Content Types That Drive Engagement

Creating content that drives engagement starts with knowing your niche and owning it. Your subscribers subscribed to your content because they want more of what you’re creating. Own that and give your subscribers a consistent experience every time. 

That does not mean, of course, that you can’t venture into other content, but understand your audience and what they might be into. 

Here are a few examples of some content types that kept audiences engaged on beehiiv in 2023

Optimizing Content for Search Engines

When creating your content, make sure to optimize for search engines to increase your visibility and help new members find your community. Here are a few helpful guidelines to follow: 

• Keep your content aligned with what people are searching for. If your content is a recipe for spaghetti and meatballs, your content and the keywords you choose should be about spaghetti and meatballs. 

• Include plenty of keywords in a natural way, without keyword stuffing. Your SEO should flow with the content. 

• Keep your titles and subtitles relevant to your content, so search engines know to put it in front of the people looking for it. 

• Make sure to consider things like Alt-Text for your images and Meta Descriptions to describe your content. These add to the overall user experience and help your content rank better. 

SEO can be an art, but there are plenty of free resources online that will teach you the basics. For example, you can become certified in SEO from Hubspot Academy. 

Incorporating Gamification To Increase Engagement

Pop Quiz. True or False: gamifying content adds value to your content strategy. 

If you guessed True, you’re right! 

Incorporating gamification elements into your community is an excellent way to drive participation and engagement. You can do this in a lot of fun ways: 

• Trivia (about your industry, your content, or even a weekly theme - get creative)

• Marketing quizzes (What style newsletter are you?)

• Achievement (a reward for reaching a certain goal, like a badge)

• Fun competitions (How many candies are in this jar?)

To drive competition, you can even give something away -- and it doesn’t have to cost money. For example, you could give a shoutout in your next newsletter (and bragging rights) to anyone who gets 100% of your trivia questions correct. 

Check out how Big Desk Energy on beehiiv gamifies referrals:

Crafting Your Community's Unique Voice

Establishing (and maintaining) your community’s unique voice is what will set your community apart from the crowd and continue to bring in new members. The best brand voices are authentic, genuine, and one-of-a-kind. 

To find your voice, tune into what makes your content great and why your audience felt drawn to your content in the first place. 

Take Cristine of Simply Nailogical on YouTube, for example, who pronounced “top coat” like “taco” in her nail polish tutorials.This became so endearing to her fans that in 2019, she launched her own nail polish brand called Holo Taco.

Leaning into what makes your content your content is like putting a signature on your work of art. It elevates your community to something exclusive that people want to be a part of. 

Ben Siman Tov, aka BenGingi, and his wife, Zikki, kept this in mind when creating their culinary newsletter YASSSletter. They built a direct and authentic relationship with their audience and curated the vibe of their community to be like an exclusive club. 

Ben and Zikki’s focus in their newsletter is to “give, give, give” to the community that they built, fostering growth and mastering their content production. They are authentic and honest, and it keeps their audience coming back every week for more. 

Growing and Managing Your Community

Starting an online community is one idea, but how do you build an online community that continues to grow? Your strategy for growing and maintaining your community should be focused on solid community management and empowering your most active members to spread the word about your amazing content. 

Identifying and Empowering Community Advocates

Active members who can be community advocates will emerge pretty quickly. They will likely be the first adopters of your content and a driving force behind bringing in new members. These are the people you want to empower to help manage and grow your community. 

You can offer them leadership roles like a moderator position or an affiliate role on social media. Let them be a part of helping you grow and empower them to help spread your content through word of mouth. 

Implementing Effective Moderation Policies

Moderation is increasingly important in 2024, as the internet becomes more and more polarized and divided. 

Make rules that align with your core values and apply them evenly and fairly. Don’t let the trolls ruin everyone else’s experience. 

Also, it’s important to pay attention to the rules put in place by your platform and any applicable laws. If your audience is posting anything that may violate the terms of service of the platform your community is hosting on, remove the violating content and take steps like blocking, banning, or suspending the user. 

If your community grows on Facebook or Instagram, for example, Meta uses a strike policy for violating content. In the worst case scenario, your community could be suspended or deleted for violating Meta’s community standards, so it’s important to stay up to date on what is and isn’t acceptable content and moderate accordingly. 

Leveraging Social Media for Community Growth

Speaking of Meta, social media is an excellent place to both attract new members and keep existing members engaged.

An active social media presence is an excellent way to develop more personalized relationships with your community. They can get to know you and engage in conversations with you that wouldn’t be possible via a newsletter, and you can get valuable feedback that can guide your strategy moving forward. 

Samir Mezrahi from Zillow Goes Wild realized that his Facebook audience, in particular, converts well to a newsletter format. Mastering conversion from Facebook to his email newsletter on beehiiv was a challenge, but it was a valuable asset that allowed him to reach a bigger audience. 

Analyzing and Improving Community Engagement

There is always room to improve your tactics. Optimize your online community-building strategy by tracking engagement and honing in on data that improves your community’s overall experience. 

Leveraging Community Success Stories

Shout your community member’s successes from the rooftops. Testimonials and success stories highlight how your brand is having a real-life impact on your community members, and sharing them with the world will both inspire your existing members and attract new ones. 

Consider creating a wall of love for your community that showcases the best examples of your community members’ successes. The proof is in the pudding, and anyone on the fence about joining your community will be able to see real-life examples of how great your community is. 

Adjusting Strategies Based on Community Data

Remember how you set your short-term and long-term goals and considered your KPIs? Now is your chance to look at your analytics and make informed strategy adjustments based on the data you collected. If something isn’t working, that’s your cue to change up your strategy and try something new. 

With that being said, numbers don’t mean much in context. Feedback from your community members is going to give you the context you need to make evidence-based decisions. 

In all likelihood, the feedback you get from your community members is going to align with the numbers that you’re seeing and give you clearer insight to take action. 

Creating Feedback Loops With Members

Establishing a feedback loop is essential for receiving and implementing community member feedback and helping your members feel like they have a voice in your community. 

The steps of a feedback loop are simple: 

1. Ask for Feedback.

2. Analyze the Feedback.

3. Take action. 

4. Communicate the results.

The final two parts are absolutely critical to building transparency and helping your community members feel empowered. And it’s possible that the action you took based on feedback didn’t work; but in that case, you’re communicating why and building trust with your audience. 

Using Surveys To Gather Member Insights

Surveys are a great way to gain insights into your community members’ pain points and how you can improve. It’s also a great way to find out what your community members are loving, so you can do more of it. 

Implementing surveys into your feedback loop can help you get honest, direct feedback from your community members, so you can take action, build trust, and continually make your community better. 

Engagement Metrics To Monitor

We’ve talked a lot about engagement so far, but how do you measure it? The following metrics are some great indicators of an engaged community: 

• Open-Rates: This stat tells you how many subscribers opened your email.

• Click-Through Rates: This percentage tells you how many subscribers clicked links you shared in your email.

• Spam Rate: This metric tells you how many emails went to spam. While not directly measuring engagement, this critical number lets you know if you have issues with deliverability. 

• Conversion Rate: This number tells you how many people converted or took the desired action of your email’s CTA.

When you take these numbers, combined with the feedback from your audience, you have a great place to start to take action and improve your community’s experience. 

Utilizing Analytics for Community Insights

The best analytics tools are absolutely free, are already built into your community platform, or integrate with the software you already use. 

Google Analytics is probably the most well-known and the gold-standard for tracking analytics (and it integrates seamlessly with beehiiv). Don’t know Google Analytics? That’s ok! Google offers free courses to learn the basics. 

beehiiv provides you with 3D Analytics that are tailored to newsletters, giving you the most relevant and comprehensive source of information to take action for your community in an easy-to-understand format – and they look pretty great, too.

Benchmarking Against Industry Standards

By now, you’ve gathered a lot of internal, relevant information, but what about turning to external data? 

You need to know how your community performs against industry standards and your competitors. Benchmarking is a great tool to get clarity and to see how your community stacks up. 

Email Marketing Open Rate by niche is a great benchmark to start with. How does your content strategy perform when put up against other content creators in your industry?

Armed with an idea of how your community is performing, you have an excellent opportunity to identify areas of strength and areas of opportunity for growth. 

Take the First Step 

Building your online community is essential to getting your content in front of engaged readers. 

Your community is going to be your biggest fans and the people most likely to keep coming back. They are going to give you the most honest feedback and be your best source of word-of-mouth advertising. 

That’s why building your community requires an innovative platform that is designed to foster online connections and growth with all of the tools you need to succeed. Take the first step by starting your free trial with beehiiv.