Your best friend lives in your phone, and your closest confidant might be someone you've never met face-to-face. Welcome to the age of online communities.
A staggering 77% of internet users participate in some form of online community, a figure that exploded during the pandemic when we all became experts at virtual connection (and professional waist-up dressers). These online gathering spaces have become our modern town squares, where people unite over everything from sourdough techniques to cryptocurrency trading.
The boom in digital communities isn't just about avoiding awkward small talk at physical gatherings. It's fueled by a perfect blend of global connectivity and urban solitude – plus that universal human desire to find "my people," even if those people are scattered across different time zones and continents.
In this article I take a look at what an online community is, why it matters, and how you can start your own.
What is an online community?
An online community is a digital gathering place where people with shared interests, goals, or experiences come together to connect and interact. These virtual spaces can exist on social media platforms, forums, or dedicated websites, allowing members to engage in discussions, share knowledge, and build relationships regardless of geographical boundaries.
Through regular interactions, community members often develop a sense of belonging and collective identity, creating unwritten social norms and expectations. Strong online communities frequently feature active participation, mutual support, and collaborative problem-solving.
Communities can serve various purposes, from professional networking and skill development to emotional support and entertainment.
Whop is the home of online communities. Creating a community on Whop is easy, and the platform offers features specifically designed for community management, like member authentication, chat channels, forums, access control, and more. Intrigued?
Check out this step-by-step guide to build an online community on Whop.
The importance of online communities
In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory released a report titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” This report found that around 50 percent of all adults in the United States are feeling lonely, and that people of all ages are spending much less time with other people.
There are many factors that influence this - increased work hours, burnout, and global pandemics are just a few factors that have resulted in us spending more time alone at home than out with others.
That is why online communities are so important. They help people form meaningful connections despite physical distances. These virtual spaces provide invaluable support networks, particularly for individuals who might feel isolated in their local environments or those seeking others who share their specific interests and experiences.
But there's also another side to online communities - democratized knowledge sharing.
Whether you’re a professional looking to exchange industry insights, a hobbyist who wants to discuss your craft, or just someone keen on supporting people through personal challenges, an online community facilitates that. Online communities are often incubators for innovation and creativity, where ideas can be refined through collective input.
Types of online communities
This may seem obvious, but it’s worth putting some thought into. There are many types of communities - some of these could be useful especially if you’re a content or course creator.
Let's take a look.
Learning community
A learning community brings together people with shared learning goals. It complements digital products like online courses by facilitating social learning and peer-to-peer support.
If you sell online courses, setting up an online community alongside makes total sense. It's a way to pick up valuable information from your community members, understand what they want, and develop more advanced courses or other digital products suited to their needs.
With Whop's communities (aka 'whops') you can learn anything from cryptocurrency to day trading, selling craft, and more.
Brand community
Brand communities are typically made up of customers, partners, and employees. They are set up by brands to enhance stakeholders’ connection with the brand and offer a forum for support.
Customers receive support from these communities and feel gratified that their voice is heard. As a brand owner, a dedicated brand community gives you deeper insights into your customers’ mindset. After all, customer retention is the name of the game. And, engaged, satisfied customers in your brand community are the best brand evangelists.
Travelcraft’s community on Whop, priced at $14.99 a month, puts travel enthusiasts in touch with top-tier agents who help them score hotel discounts and perks.
Interest-based community
Several online communities are formed around a common interest, hobby, or passion. It's true that these communities tend to be quite niche, however, these interest-based communities are often all about bringing together people who go against the grain.
One example is Van life and nomad communities, which connect people who've rejected traditional housing to live and work from converted vehicles. The Digital Nomad community on Whop is one such community.
Action community
Action communities are formed to create social or political change. They range from decentralized hacktivist collectives like Anonymous, to large-scale social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, to grassroots organizing efforts like March For Our Lives and Fridays For Future.
Some action communities focus on specific causes - for example, r/WallStreetBets mobilized retail investors to challenge traditional financial power structures, while mutual aid networks coordinate community support and resources.
What unites these diverse groups is their use of online platforms and social media to organize, spread awareness, and drive real-world action toward their objectives.
Geographical communities
There are plenty of online communities focused around different places. If you're planning a trip to a particular region, you might look for online communities that offer travel tips, teach the local language, or tell travelers about the best hangouts in the area.
Take this Maltese Language Course on Whop for example. It also has a private language learning community where course-takers can improve their language skills with other students. Pretty invaluable, huh?
Some communities are set up by expatriates to get to know other expats. These are especially worthwhile when you’re relocating to another country, where you may not know the language or how things work.
Profession or practice based communities
These communities are typically set up by members of a certain profession: cryptocurrency, investing, or sports betting are some examples.
They are extremely popular as a way to network within an industry, work towards the profession's development, and learn from each other.
Whop is home to hundreds of such communities. If you’re a community enthusiast, the platform offers a prime opportunity to monetize a community of your interest via paid memberships.
3 online community examples
Now that you know what online communities are and how they work, let's take a look at three examples of communities on Whop.
1. Wealth Group
Wealth Group is the world's leading cryptocurrency trading and educational community that offers community members the opportunity to join and learn from the top trading experts in the field.
The Wealth Group community educates its members on everything from trading signals, to meme coins, risk management and portfolio management. With daily livestreams and exciting networking opportunities, Wealth Group has created a thriving online community.
2. Cook Along with VIP Seasonings
This online community is one for the foodies. Cook Along with VIP Seasonings teaches its members how to cook with 'VIP Seasonings'. Members of this community get access to live cooking sessions, exclusive vlogs, recipe cards, and even monthly VIP boxes with seasonings to use in their next cooking session.
3. Highest Paid Nurse Community
The Highest Paid Nurse Community teaches nurses of all kinds how to make more money in their chosen career path. Here, nurses come together for guidance, career advice, resources and job opportunities.
The benefit of online communities
Benefits for members
Online communities have become invaluable spaces for personal and professional growth. As a member, you'll find yourself surrounded by people who share your interests and understand your challenges.
Whether you want to learn new skills, seek advice or simply connect with like-minded individuals, these communities offer a supportive environment for growth and collaboration. The knowledge and experience that you can learn in these groups is invaluable, especially when navigating challenges or exploring new opportunities.
Benefits for businesses
For business owners, online communities are dynamic platforms for market research, brand building, and networking. You can gain direct insights into your target audience's needs, establish yourself as an industry expert, and form meaningful partnerships. These connections often lead to collaborative opportunities and business growth that might not be possible through traditional networking channels.
Creating your own online community
Perhaps you want to start your own online community - here's how.
1. Define your online community’s purpose
You’ve already thought about why you’re setting up your community. Now it’s time to refine those ideas and formalize your goals. A mission statement can remind you of why you’re doing it, any time you feel overwhelmed. It also lets members know the purpose of the group.
A mission statement like “teaching new traders a solid trading system to help them earn a living from home” is basic but so powerful. It communicates the purpose of the group in a single, neat line while highlighting what members can expect to get from being a part of the community.
One critical rule of marketing is "be as detailed as possible about your target customer". So, you could consider upgrading "new trader" to "remote workers interested in trading". It's more specific and establishes that you're looking at people who spend an extended amount of time at their computers during the day and have the ability and freedom to multitask.
And, of course, the part about earning a living from trading sets the right expectations. It is realistic and lucrative—who wouldn’t want to give up their day job if they could make the same amount from trading using an automated system?
The businesses above on Whop ensure their purpose is clearly visible, even in a limited thumbnail view. They advertise benefits like “gateway to guide you through the bull run”, and "automate how you trade".
The bottomline is, a clearly expressed community purpose helps ensure it stays on track as time goes on, while giving members a definite idea of why they should join.
2. Identify your target audience
Create a ‘consumer persona’ to accurately define your core community member. This means looking at demographics (where they live, their age, earnings), behavioral aspects (attitudes, habits, personality type) and more.
Consumer research helps you market to your ideal customer via the most effective channels while meeting their product development needs. The insights you can gain by studying your ideal audience can help you make important future decisions.
Let's say you're teaching cryptocurrency trading skills to aspiring traders. Should you charge a fee for community membership or entry? The easy answer would be no since logic dictates that someone looking to enter crypto trading might be careful with their money and minimize expenditure while they learn.
However, your research might point you down a different road. What if most crypto enthusiasts are already financially stable and looking to diversify their portfolio or want to learn advanced trading strategies for higher returns?
Alternately, let’s say your target customer is a high-net-worth professional like a successful tech entrepreneur or institutional investor, and you're helping them move into the sophisticated world of cryptocurrency trading and DeFi. You'd be missing out if you didn't charge an absolute premium in either case.
In addition to these broader insights, seek out ‘alpha’ members. In simple terms, these are the sort of potential community members or consumers who fit right into your ideal target group and have significant insights to share. If you’re in tech and alpha is an early adopter or someone who works in the field. In sportswear it might be a triathlete or pro runner.
Talking to alpha members gives you first-hand insights to refine your concepts and ideas. It will also help you better grasp members' goals and motivations and assist you with marketing to prospective future members.
3. Outline your community structure
What do you want your community structure to look like? Every group needs structure to work. Whether it’s a round table-like structure that Mastermind groups typically use or a more traditional hierarchical setup, what’s important is that you define this structure.
As your community grows, consider having a dedicated community manager or a few moderators help manage it for you.
You'll also need to think about customer support when issues with your products or the community crop up (Whop can help you with this!).
Finally, consider whether you want to involve any of your other stakeholders in your community. For example, if you're running a brand community, the product development folks should be directly interacting with customers to get feedback.
If it’s a community centered around other digital products, get your marketing team in there to learn from customers and understand what works.
4. Set out guidelines and rules
Let’s put this plainly—people can, sometimes, behave quite badly. We’ve all seen this in everyday life. And if people can’t stay on their best behavior in the real world, those tendencies blow up when they’re behind a screen and the relative anonymity of an online handle. Here’s where rules and guidelines help - along with moderators to enforce them.
Most groups have rules similar to the one above to ensure members adhere to at least a basic standard of decency.
If you employ moderators, it’s a good idea to mandate what they can and can’t do—that will alleviate any claims of moderators going on power trips and nobody can have complaints down the line.
Rules like the ones shown above are taken from one of Reddit’s top finance subs r/Superstonk; these are more specific to the niche, content quality, and chosen platform.
One more thing: add a rule that forbids discrimination and harassment. You’d think it’s hardly necessary, but with the rise in misinformation and hate speech, conversations on the internet aren't rose-tinted anymore. Ultimately, what’s important is that your members feel safe and appreciated in the community irrespective of who they are, where they come from, and their personal beliefs.
5. Choose a community platform
Discord, Reddit and Telegram are common choices for online communities, but they aren't the only available platform choices. Some people use Facebook Groups to meet a certain target market, and others use LinkedIn for professional groups.
However, these platforms have their own sets of rules and regulations and control is in their hands, not yours. You could be deplatformed at a moment’s notice; a risk you need to be comfortable with. And, it could happen for no fault of yours.
And that’s not all —many of these platforms bombard your community members with advertisements, including invites to join other groups.
A platform like Whop is a better option for your online community. It’s free to use and you’re only charged a small amount whenever people pay you for a product or service. This puts you in full control of your membership community.
Whop also enables discoverability; this means you can attract new members with Whop Discover. The number of distractions is massively reduced—Whop doesn’t serve your members ads, and they certainly won’t be spammed with invites to join other groups.
With Whop you can create your community, your way. Whop has native apps that let you pick and choose your community features, including chat, forums, video calling, giveaways, courses, and more. Even better - all of these are completely free to add to your whop.
Plus, Whop takes care of customer service, offering a response time of under three minutes and a satisfaction rate of 97%. Whop also has a built-in payment processor, so you don't need to worry about having an ecommerce architecture on your website if you're building a paid community. All you really need to do with Whop is sign up, and you’ll be well on your way to setting up your online community in minutes.
6. Set up your online community
Whop is an outstanding online community platform, so we’ll show you exactly how to get started here.
On Whop, all you need to do to get started is click on the Start Selling button.
Now, click Create an account to get started.
If you have an account with Discord, Google, Twitter/X or Apple, you can simply click on the relevant icon to sign up.
Next, name your community (aka whop), pick a category, and you’re done. You’ll be taken to your shiny new dashboard. It should look like this:
Getting started with Whop is easy. A fully functional community is just a few clicks away.
Need help? Get in touch with the Whop team via the link on your dashboard; they’ll be happy to answer your questions and guide you through the process.
7. Begin your marketing campaign
While you get the building blocks of your online community, putting your marketing plans in motion is equally important. What’s the point if, after all your effort, people don’t know that your community exists!
That said, your online community is likely being built to support an existing business or digital product. So, you already have an audience to start with. If you don’t have an audience, try to get website visitors to sign up for your newsletter, or customers or prospects onto your email list.
Do you have a social media presence and a bunch of followers? That makes things even easier. Start in advance, get the word out and start building up awareness of your community. Get some hype out there. You’ll also get lots of feedback at this stage which could inform critical decisions (such as what features to include).
Keep accelerating your marketing, especially close to the launch date.Your audience needs to know what’s coming. Incentivize them to spread the word. You'll win big if your customers or followers spread the word through their social networks.
8. Launch your community
It’s time to open your community door. And, there are a few different ways to do this. Communities run by mature businesses often go for a soft launch to control some of the metrics and work out the kinks before a full public launch.
Interested in a soft launch? Try opening up to internal stakeholders such as members of your team or a few trusted friends and associates. If your business model is larger, launch in one geography before going global. It gives you a chance to fix any problems. Consider it like a product beta test, and keep an ear out for feedback from your first community members.
Going public means you need to be everywhere at once. Think about a musician releasing a new album, or actors when a movie comes out. They're on every chat show and magazine they can get. You should be doing the online equivalent of that by starting a discourse around your business and community wherever you can.
Podcasts are a great way to do this. They have a small but highly-engaged listener base which makes conversions easier. Try to make a guest appearance on relevant YouTube channels as well. Consider guest posting on blogs as well to get your brand and community out there.
9. Adjust, adapt and keep growing
Staying flexible and adaptable is essential when you’re running an online community. There are so many variables, members joining and leaving constantly and unforeseen challenges despite the most thorough plans.
Community members’ feedback is your best indicator of how things are going. Interacting with them will let you make the little adjustments and tweaks necessary to keep up the morale and community engagement levels. A toxic atmosphere and declining participation can quickly destroy a community, so it's crucial to actively monitor and stay on top of things.
Diving into analytics is another essential piece of keeping your community thriving, and having the right platform in your corner makes all the difference. Platforms like Whop put powerful data at your fingertips, showing you exactly what's working and what isn't so you can keep your members engaged for the long run.
Whop: The home of online communities
Whether you're looking to join an online community or launch your own, Whop is the place to be.
Looking to find your people? Whop is home to thousands of online communities covering everything from sports betting, to trading, to fitness, cooking, traveling, and more. There's something for everyone on Whop.
Want to launch your own online community? It's a smart move. An online community could be just what you need to grow your business and take it to the next level.
Whop offers a comprehensive toolkit designed to help you create and maintain the ideal online community for your needs, fostering positive member engagement through its diverse selection of platform integrations.
Whether you want to share premium content with your members through files and courses, or connect with them through events and giveaways, Whop's platform makes every aspect of community management straightforward and effective.
