Kajabi communities are a fantastic tool for your business. They help create a dedicated, loyal audience and provide additional monetization opportunities and business growth.
I wouldn’t be without my Kajabi community, so I’m sharing why I think they are crucial and how you can grow engagement with one too.
Key Takeaways:
- Communities can be free or paid
- Each Kajabi account can create one community
- Each access group you create counts toward your Kajabi plan limit
4 Reasons Why a Kajabi Community Is Great for My Business
1. Increased Value
Creating learning products is all well and good, but it can be isolating for your students if they don’t have anywhere specific to discuss the course content or engage with fellow students.
I quickly realized this when I started getting tons of questions about my content and requests to start a Facebook group.
Attaching a community to my courses became the norm because it provided my students with additional value by giving them more for their money.
Once they had a space to converse, I found the overall satisfaction and feedback of my products increased.
2. Connect Directly with My Audience
There are plenty of ways to connect directly with an audience, like Facebook. The problem is that they typically come with a whole bunch of distractions.
Having a dedicated community has allowed me to create a distraction-free space to engage and converse with my students about relevant subjects.
Better still, it has allowed me to fully understand my audience so I can fine-tune my content and refine my marketing strategies to reach more people.
I ask them what they like and dislike about my products, what they want to see more of, and what could use improvement—then I act upon the feedback.
I have also created a safe space where members don’t feel afraid to ask questions or give responses. My community appreciates and values my presence and attention to their needs.
3. Additional Monetization Opportunities
You can easily create a standalone paid community in Kajabi. However, there are plenty of other ways to monetize the community feature.
Having an attentive and engaged audience means I can pitch new products and services directly to them without deploying any complex (or costly) marketing techniques.
And, since my community members are there because they already like my brand and products, they are far more likely to buy from me again.
Besides offering new paid courses and other learning products within my community, I also create paid community spaces and provide exclusive “member-only content.”
I offer this as a subscription service to generate an ongoing revenue stream.
Another way is to create a paid membership site that contains a community. There are some fantastic examples of this toward the end of this article.
4. Increased Customer Loyalty
When you put a face to the brand, you become relatable, and when you engage directly with your audience, they feel that you care about and understand their needs.
This is incredibly powerful at inspiring loyalty, and there’s no better way to do it than through a community.
My customers are loyal. They recommend me elsewhere online, buy my products, and bring me new business. I can’t ask for more than that!
4 Kajabi Community Features That I Love
1. Great Customization Options
Many course-building platforms tack on a community feature without giving it much thought. In many cases, you can’t do much beyond posting a comment and having people respond.
You may not know this, but Kajabi got its community feature by acquiring Vibely in 2022.
Vibely was a standalone community platform, so it had already developed many great customization features, which Kajabi has since incorporated into its platform.
For example, you can change the names of the community features to something more “on brand.”
You can even change the name of the emoji reactions!
I also like how you can organize your conversation circles into an order that makes sense for you.
And, as far as the community member email notifications go, you can customize these too.
2. Challenges of Every Kind
Sometimes keeping a conversation going or thinking of new topics to write about can be tough. This is where challenges step in—they provide a fun way to motivate everyone.
You can set up a challenge for almost anything, whether a one-off event or a recurring thing like daily meditation.
At first, I wasn’t sure what types of challenges to run, so I found Kajabi’s prebuilt challenges useful. Using them inspired me to come up with my own ideas.
My community members LOVED them—even the “silly” ones like “dance for ten minutes a day.” Lots of members uploaded videos of themselves. I found this injected more life into the community as people felt they were getting to know each other better.
The community leaderboard also helped engagement. People got super competitive in trying to get to the top spot.
3. Kajabi Live Rooms and Meetups
I love that I can jump into a live session at any moment. This allows me to surprise my audience (in a good way) by adding extra value they weren’t expecting.
The instant live room has all the basic settings you would expect from a live stream tool. You have a chat feed and in-video emoji reactions, and you can mute and unmute people as needed. You can also share your screen whenever you want.
Kajabi also has several background effects, or you can upload your own. This is perfect if you’re like me and prefer to hide your messier-than-it-should-be workspace!
If you prefer a more structured method of engagement, you can create “Meetups.” These are events where you can set the time, date, and even place for your meetup.
Members can indicate they are coming by clicking the little hand icon on the meetup listing.
I have found meetups ideal for structured topics of conversation or for announcing new products, etc. Running a live session creates a real buzz, and I’ve found that community members appreciate the opportunity to chat with me in real-time “face to face.”
My only complaint is that I wish I could create one-off paid events to offer my members more exclusive content. (Currently, there is no option for this when creating meetups.) There is a workaround, but it’s not especially convenient.
4. Kajabi Forums: Chat Circles and Access Groups
People love to chat on community forums, and the newsfeed can soon get clogged up with messages. To counteract this issue, Kajabi allows you to create “Circles,” which are separate areas for different chat topics (similar to subreddits).
This keeps all your chats and engagement neat, making it much easier for people to find the information they need.
You can also create something called an “Access Group.” To do this, you have to create a new offer for each access group, and each one counts toward your Kajabi plan limits.
The best way to describe an access group is that it’s like a price plan. The more your customers pay, the more they get access to within the community.
For example, you could have Bronze, Silver, and Gold access groups. The Bronze could be free and have a limited number of chat circles, while the Silver and Gold groups may be paid and include more chat circles, challenges, and meetups.
I found that having a free access group was essential because it easily convinced people to join my community. Once they were there, I could then upsell to a paid tier.
So, if you want to run paid meetups and live events (like I mentioned above) you will have to create an access group for them.
How I Created My Kajabi Community in 8 Steps
Kajabi is a user-friendly platform, and you can have a community up and running in minutes. Here are some of the basics and what I did to get the community up and running.
Step 1: You can find Communities in the “Products” tab, so click to create a new product, select “Communities,” and click to get started.
Step 2: You are then asked to create a new access group and determine whether it’s paid or free.
Remember, you can add more access groups to your community once it’s set up, so here you need to decide:
- Do you want a community that’s free to access initially and then offer paid options once people have joined? This option will make it easier to build an audience but harder to monetize.
- Do you want to create a paid community from the offset? This will take longer to build an audience, but you’ll get revenue from the get-go.
I chose to set up a free community, and after building my audience, I started introducing paid options. However, you need to choose the option that aligns with your business goals.
Step 3: Your community is now set up to the most basic standard. To customize it further, click the “Go to Community” button, as this is where you will find all the editing options.
Step 4: As the community creator, you have access to many on-page tools. The two most important ones are the little cog found on the community’s main image and the plus sign in the top-right corner.
- The cog opens up all the customization options.
- The plus sign allows you to create new challenges, circles, meetups, and announcements.
Start by clicking the cog to get your community looking the way you want it to.
Step 5: After clicking the cog, you get a range of options down the left-hand side. I will quickly run through them so you understand what they are for.
The “Stats” tab is self-explanatory. Once you start adding members and they begin engaging, it will display the key stats for your community.
Step 6: The “Community details” tab allows you to add your business social links and also create community guidelines. Clicking on “Advanced” lets you change member aliases to something more on-brand.
“Email notifications” give you control over which emails are and aren’t sent. You do this by toggling the switch on and off next to each notification type.
There is also the email customization tab where you can adjust the wording of the emails to suit your needs.
Inside the customization tab, you can change the names of the community features and reaction emojis. You can also decide whether or not community members can message you directly.
Finally, the navigation menu allows you to change the menu layout and add additional pages.
Once you have customized the community to align with your brand, it’s time to fill it with content!
Step 7: Initially, your community will look as empty as the Sahara desert, so you need to add some content and engagement. This is so new members don’t walk into what is essentially a bare room, turn around, and leave right away.
I did this by roping in a few friends and family members. They joined my community and spent a few days engaging with my posts to make them look as active as possible.
You don’t have to do this, but it helped kick things off for me.
Here’s what I did:
- I created half a dozen circles and posted in all of them.
- I made a “Welcome” announcement and invited members to introduce themselves.
- I created a couple of one-off challenges to get people engaging with each other (I just used the Kajabi templates for this).
- I scheduled a couple of meetups and started building hype around them by posting teaser information.
Step 8: Once my community looked like something worth joining, it was time to invite “real” people!
- Using Kajabi’s email marketing feature, I sent an email blast out to my existing contacts and student list and invited them to join.
- I also created a form for my website that enabled new contacts to request to join.
From there, it was all about keeping the momentum going. Initially, when there weren’t many members, I had to post frequently and keep inviting people to engage.
Once the member count got high enough, people started engaging amongst themselves, and I could step back slightly to concentrate on building new products for my members.
The key to all of this is to have patience. Kajabi provides you with the tools, but your success will depend on how you use them. Building a community is a long-term strategy, not a quick fix.
4 Kajabi Community Examples
If you’re stuck for inspiration on how to set up or monetize your Kajabi community, here are a few other successful examples.
Conscious Collective
The Conscious Collective provides an academy with courses designed to awaken your inner self. Once you join the academy, you get access to all courses plus an online community offering support and shared resources to help you on your journey.
Although you cannot access the community for free, it is offered with all course material for a subscription price of $24 per month or $16 per month paid annually.
Level Up Club
The Level Up Club is a free Kajabi community that boasts over 1,500 members. The community aims to bring entrepreneurs and creatives together to share ideas.
The community owner Teri posts regularly and encourages engagement through her monthly book club and podcast meetups. She uses the community as a platform to grow her coaching business.
Christopher SIU
Chris teaches music creation and composing. His site consists of several courses you can purchase, but what’s interesting is that he has chosen to create a paid community with two pricing tiers.
Rather than bundle the community with courses, he provides continuous value by running monthly masterclasses within the community, along with regular Q&A sessions.
Members can pay $37 per month or opt for annual billing of $370, which gives them access to additional bonus content.
Spanish Obsession
Spanish Obsession is a learning hub with weekly tutorials, worksheets, and other resources for learning Spanish.
The community comes as part of the product bundle and gives its members access to four monthly live meetups, thematic sessions, weekly challenges, and more.
A monthly subscription costs $41, while a full year is $420.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Many Kajabi Communities Can I Have?
You can create one community in your Kajabi account. Your community can have multiple access groups (paid or free), and each one counts toward your chosen plan limits (Basic plan: 3, Growth plan: 15, Pro plan: 100).
Is There a Kajabi Community App?
Yes! There is a Kajabi app that allows members to post and engage with their communities. The Kajabi Community app is separate from the standard Kajabi and Kajabi Creator apps.
