Online Community Examples: 6 Communities You Can Build on WordPress

Online community examples you can build on your own WordPress site: an interest community, a learning community, a professional network, a local community, a team community and a paid community.

Transcript

Your audience is already talking to each other. The only question is where. Right now it is probably a group you do not own, on a platform that decides who sees what. Here are six communities people are running on their own WordPress site instead, and what each one gets that a borrowed group never will. One. The interest community. A running club with a feed of its own. Members vote on Saturday's route and post their photos. Nobody is fighting an algorithm to be seen. The club's posts, photos and members stay with the club, not with a feed that can change its rules overnight. Two. The learning community. A course with a private room for its students. Students ask, the teacher answers once, and the whole class has it. Lessons, questions and live sessions sit together, so students stay, instead of drifting off to a chat app. Three. The professional network. A member directory people actually search. Members find each other, message each other, and hire each other, from a job board that belongs to the group. Every profile, every message and every job post belongs to the network, not to a social site that can close the group. Four. The local community. Every business in the neighbourhood, on one map. And every event on one calendar, with a list of who is going. Local businesses look after their own page, and the reviews come from neighbours. Five. The team community. A help desk where each question is asked once. And announcements that stay where people can find them. New colleagues search before they ask, and find the answer in seconds. Six. The paid community. Some spaces are open. Some are for members only. You set the plans and the price, and the payment goes to you, not to a platform taking a share. Members upgrade right there on your site, and can change or cancel whenever they like. Six different communities, with one thing in common. Each one lives on a website its owner controls. The members are theirs. The content is theirs. And the income is theirs. The owner sees every member in one list, and can export it any day. They set the plans and the prices themselves, and can see how many members are on each one. Side by side. Their rules, or yours. Their member list, or yours. A feed that hides your posts, or a community where every member sees them. Every month you wait, your audience builds its habits somewhere else. BuddyNext is the free community plugin for WordPress. Pick the community that looks like yours, and start it this week. Get BuddyNext. The link is below.