Global Community

Today, it’s a whole new world for the community website.

Community.

For a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, it’s also one of the most misunderstood, underutilized tools in the toolbox of any creator, small digital business, or entrepreneur operating today.

Especially when you’re offering paid online courses or memberships, exploring community website software shows a certain level of savvy in building your business. Why? Because it means that you understand that the value of what you’re creating isn’t just about content. When you choose to build a community website, you’re creating a network of people that gets more valuable to every member with each new person who joins.  

A community website is typically offered via a hosted software platform similar to a website builder like Squarespace or Wix, but with a few big differences:

A community website has people. It has member accounts, member profiles, member direct messaging, message and activity notifications, @mentions and member tagging, and other member-specific features. 

A community website has things for people to do together.  Beyond members and member profiles, a community website has activities for people to do together from contributing posts with text, photos, and videos to threaded conversations, polls, questions, events, sub-groups, and even online courses. 

A community website gives people a compelling reason to come back. By connecting people to each other, community website software gives people a reason to keep coming back to your website to contribute, message, and meet up with other members.

What are the Benefits of a Community Website?

In the past, 99.9% of the population in search of community website software simply started a Facebook Group, or, more recently, a Slack Channel or WhatsApp group. However, there are more reasons than ever to avoid these platforms.

When you make the break from a Facebook Group, a Slack Channel, or a WhatsApp group and choose a community website builder instead, you unlock three key benefits:

You can bring your online courses, memberships, subscriptions, sub-groups, and community together in one place with ONE login. One of the more classic reasons someone stays with a Facebook Group work long after they’ve outgrown it is that “my members don’t want to have another login.” 

Then, in an effort to make their members happy, they proceed to use separate platforms for online courses, subscriptions, and more. This then defeats the purpose of avoiding “another login” by requiring members to create 2-3 new logins to use other services. 🤦🏻‍♀️ 

More logins become unnecessary with your own community website

The new generation of community website software is designed for a small digital business to deliver a complete set of digital products and services. The community is the glue that holds together online courses, memberships, mastermind groups, and content that a person or brand wants to offer.