What is the First Step to Building an Online Community?

Creating a community of people who have the same interests and goals is a great way to build an engaged audience. Being passionate about your community will help it flourish, but the question you are asking is, what is the first step to building an online community?

Great question – to be completely honest, we’ve already covered the first step in our audience building articles, so we want to dive into more detail here.

The vital first step

The first step is knowing your target audience and focusing on helping your members achieve their goals.

What challenges is your target audience struggling to overcome that you can guide them through in this community? What journey are you going on together, and what is the end goal?

• There needs to be a purpose for this community.
• Why are you bringing people together?

The Remote Hive is a community of people seeking to secure a remote job. The remote work coach guides them through the challenges and the members can learn from each other. All of the members have a joint goal.

This type of community is powerful.

Knowing who your target audience is, what niche you will focus on, and the journey you want to take your members on is a vital first step.

Answer yourself these three questions:

• Who do you want to help?
• What challenges do they have that you can help them with?
• What would be the joint goal of your community?

We’d like to dig deeper into the first step to building an online community.

Where will you host your community?

Have a think about how much time you want to put into building and hosting your community. Sending out a weekly email to your subscribers is less time-consuming than having to manage and moderate a Facebook group.

Build an email community

Many creators make the mistake of thinking that an online community has to be a place where people can engage with each other. It could simply be an email newsletter you send out to subscribers with the same goal.

We love Mailerlite. The support is like no other email product. It’s simple for beginners, and you do not even have to pay; it’s free for up to 1,000 subscribers.

Create a community on a social network

Sadly, social media has killed off forums and blog comments, which were great places to meet people with similar interests and goals. Nowadays, most communities are built on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

These are places where your community members can engage and help each other out. You will have to fight against algorithms to get your content seen by members. You also have very little control of your content.

Build your own community platform

Another popular social platform is Circle, a community platform for people like you! You can bring together discussions and host live streams, chats and events for members. We’ll be sharing more about Circle soon, but if you want to create a community without algorithms, this is the platform for you.

Other online communities

Other community platforms are Spotify for podcasts and YouTube for videos; you might also want to check out Patreon, where you offer perks in return for a monthly subscription fee. Substack helps you host an email, and you charge subscribers to gain access.

Yes, you can build communities and generate revenue in the process.

Hopefully, this post has answered the question, what is the first step to building an online community? We want to provide you with options so you can make the right decision and create the best community for your audience.