5 Ways To Grow Your Skool Community No One Is Talking About

Everyone is talking about Skool right now, and for good reason. The platform is a blue ocean compared to Facebook groups, which are so saturated that standing out feels nearly impossible. Skool keeps everything in one place, lets you email your members directly through the platform, and supports digital courses and products all under the same roof. But here is the thing most people miss: launching a Skool community is the easy part. Getting the right people into it is where most creators get stuck, and almost nobody is talking about the full range of options available to you.

In this post I am walking through the five ways Alston Godbolt covers in the video above, including the one method almost nobody in the space is talking about that can actually pay for its own traffic. Whether you are starting from zero followers or you already have an audience somewhere, at least two of these methods will fit where you are right now. By the end, you will have a clear view of which approach matches your situation and how to start moving people into your community this week.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Why Skool has a genuine edge over Facebook groups right now and what the built-in affiliate component actually means for your income
How to use short-form content on TikTok and YouTube Shorts to drive community signups by targeting pain points instead of promoting your offer
The YouTube keyword strategy that works even when you have zero subscribers
What solo ads are, how to buy them on Udimi, and the one real drawback you need to know before spending any money
How to run Facebook ads that send people directly into your free Skool community without a landing page
The self-liquidating offer method that funds its own ad spend so you collect warm buyers for under a dollar each
Alston’s personal ranking of all five methods from best to worst and the reasoning behind each placement
How to figure out which platform fits your exact starting point right now at finder.platformproof.com

Why Skool Is Worth Your Attention Right Now

Facebook groups have been around long enough that you can find thousands of them on every topic imaginable. That is not a compliment. It means the market is exhausted and standing out requires an enormous amount of content, consistency, and luck before anyone notices you exist. Skool is different because the market is far less crowded and the platform is built around focus rather than distraction. Your members stay inside the community experience instead of getting pulled away by a news feed full of ads and posts that have nothing to do with your topic.

Beyond the user experience, Skool has a built-in affiliate component that gives community builders a real financial reason to grow their free community as fast as possible. When someone joins your free community, their account gets tagged to your affiliate ID. If they later start their own Skool community, you earn lifetime recurring commissions from that relationship. You do not have to recruit them into anything, pitch them on a program, or even bring up the affiliate angle. You get people into your free community, add value, and the affiliate math takes care of itself over time. That is the real reason so many online marketers are rushing to grow their Skool memberships right now.

Method 1: TikTok and Short-Form Social Media

TikTok and YouTube Shorts are the most familiar starting point, but most people use them wrong. The default approach is to talk about your community, describe what it offers, and invite people to join. That rarely works. The better approach is to stop talking about your community entirely and start talking about the symptoms and pain points your target audience is living with right now. The distinction matters more than people realize.

Alston uses a consistent example throughout the video that makes this concrete. Say your target audience is men over 50 who need to lose 20 pounds or more. You do not open your video with “join my free Skool community for men who want to lose weight.” You open with something like “do you have trouble walking the golf course without stopping to rest?” or “do you struggle to get from the parking lot to the front door without running out of breath?” That question hits the exact person who needs what your community offers and scrolls right past everyone else. When they feel seen, they click. When they join, their account is tagged to your affiliate. From there, you can monetize later with a digital product, one-on-one coaching, or an upgrade to a paid community tier.

There is one honest caveat here. If you are starting from zero followers right now, short-form content is going to be a slow build at first. You will see a trickle of people coming in, not a flood. That is fine as long as you expect it going in. If you already have a meaningful following on any platform, you can simply announce the Skool community and grow by hundreds or even thousands within a few days. The method works at both ends of the follower spectrum, but the timeline looks very different depending on where you are starting.

Method 2: YouTube Long-Form Content

YouTube long-form content operates on a different logic than short-form video. Instead of being algorithm-driven and follower-dependent, YouTube search is keyword-driven. People are going to Google and YouTube and typing specific questions, and YouTube’s job is to connect those questions with the most useful available answer. That shift in how the platform has evolved means that a channel with 50 subscribers can get meaningful views if the content actually answers what people are searching for. Alston points out that subscriber count used to almost guarantee front-of-line placement for uploads, but those days are gone. Today the algorithm is trying to match video content with viewer intent, which opens the door for new channels that would have been invisible five years ago.

Going back to the weight loss example: men over 50 might be going to Google and searching for “how to lose weight over 50 without spending 8 hours in the gym.” You create a video that genuinely answers that question. At the end of the video, or in the description, you invite viewers to join your free Skool community for a deeper resource, a printable workbook, or a group of people working through the same challenge. The people who click that link already trust you because they just watched you spend 10 to 15 minutes actually helping them. They are far more likely to become engaged community members than someone who clicked a paid ad from a stranger.

The long-term advantage of YouTube is that it compounds. A video you upload today can still be surfacing in search results and bringing new people into your community 18 months from now. That is not true for most other traffic sources. You do not need a big subscriber base to start. You need content that matches what your specific audience is already searching for, and you need a clear invitation to take the next step into your community once they find it. The channel grows alongside the community rather than being a prerequisite for it.

Method 3: Solo Ads

Solo ads are a paid traffic method most beginners have never tried and most experienced marketers have complicated feelings about. Here is how they work: you go to a marketplace like Udimi, you purchase a set number of clicks, and the person who owns the email list sends an email on your behalf to their subscribers pointing them toward your offer. Within a few days, those clicks start arriving at whatever URL you provided. You can point them directly to your Skool community join page or to a brief landing page that captures their email address before sending them to the community. Either approach can work.

The appeal is clear. You are borrowing an audience that someone else spent months or years building, and you are paying only for the clicks you actually receive. You do not have to wait for SEO to kick in or spend weeks producing short-form videos. For a new community with no organic traffic yet, being able to get a batch of members in the door quickly has real algorithmic value. Skool ranks communities based on engagement, and a more active community gets more organic visibility. More visibility means more people find you without paid ads, which is the longer-term goal.

The drawbacks are real though, and Alston is direct about both of them. First, you lose targeting precision. You cannot tell the list owner to only email 50-year-old men who want to lose weight. You have to write copy broad enough to appeal to a wider slice of their audience, which means your messaging loses some of the specificity that drives conversions. Second, and more importantly, many solo ad buyers are what Alston calls freebie seekers. These are people who have been on multiple email lists for years, have collected dozens of free downloads, and have very little genuine intention of buying anything or engaging deeply with a community. They may join and pad your member count without becoming the kind of active participants who actually help your community grow. That combination of weaker targeting and lower purchase intent is exactly why solo ads rank last on Alston’s personal list despite being one of the faster ways to add raw numbers.

Method 4: Facebook Ads to a Free Community

Running Facebook ads that send people directly to your free Skool community removes the landing page step entirely. You create an ad offering something free, a workbook, a guide, a short training, and the link in the ad goes directly to your Skool community join page. When someone submits a join request, you approve them and they receive the free resource inside the community. Alston has been using this method himself and reports that it works, though it comes with a specific challenge that is worth being honest about upfront.

The challenge is the relationship gap. Someone who clicked a Facebook ad knows nothing about you. They came because of the free thing you advertised, not because they trust you or care about your community. That means your job once they are inside is to close that gap as quickly as possible. Alston’s recommendation is to use the tools Skool gives you: ask new members questions when they join, make the gamification features visible so people have a reason to come back and engage, and give existing members reasons to stay active and interact with newcomers. The platform has points, levels, and engagement mechanics built in. If you use them intentionally rather than passively, you can turn cold ad clicks into warm community members over a relatively short time window.

Not sure which of these five methods fits your situation right now?

Answer five quick questions about your skills, budget, and starting point and get a personalized recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.

Method 5: The Self-Liquidating Offer

The self-liquidating offer is the method Alston ranks number one, and once you understand the mechanics it is not hard to see why. The idea is to create a low-ticket product, something like a $7 to $17 workbook or ebook, directly related to your niche, and then sell it using paid ads on Facebook, Pinterest, or YouTube. The revenue from those sales covers the cost of running the ads. If you execute it properly, you end up with a growing list of buyers who effectively paid for your advertising and still walked away with something genuinely useful from you.

Here is where the Skool component comes in. Once someone buys your low-ticket product, you have their email address and you have proof that they are willing to spend money in your niche. You start emailing them regularly, inviting them into your paid community or a higher-priced offer. Converting an existing buyer into a community member is a much easier conversation than converting a cold lead who has never spent a dollar with you. The person who bought your $7 workbook already crossed the psychological threshold of paying you once. Getting them to cross it again, at a higher price, is the natural next step in the relationship.

You can start this with as little as $5 per day in ad spend. Alston makes that point clearly, but he also adds the honest caveat that the less you spend per day, the longer it takes to gather enough data to make good optimization decisions. At $5 a day you are collecting data slowly, which means it takes longer to figure out which ad creative, which headline, and which audience combination actually converts. If you have a slightly bigger budget and can push that daily spend higher early on, you get actionable data faster and can stop wasting money on what is not working much sooner. The goal is a self-funding machine where ad costs are covered by product sales and buyers flow into your paid community on autopilot.

How Alston Ranks All Five Methods

At the end of the video, Alston puts these five methods in order from best to worst based on his own experience testing them. It is worth understanding the full ranking rather than just picking the method that sounds easiest, because his reasoning reveals something important about what actually drives community growth versus what just generates member count.

Self-liquidating offer (ranked first). You are acquiring buyers for under a dollar each because the product sales fund the ad costs. These are people who have demonstrated real purchase intent, which makes every downstream ask easier.
YouTube long-form content (ranked second). You have a very clear picture of what these people are looking for because they searched for it themselves. The traffic compounds over time and becomes free once the video is published and indexed.
TikTok and short-form content (ranked third). Building a community through two-way short-form content creates a sense of familiarity that makes people more likely to stay active and engaged once they join.
Facebook ads to a free group (ranked fourth). You will get plenty of clicks, but the conversion rate into active, engaged community members tends to be low because people came for a free item, not because they know or trust you.
Solo ads (ranked last). List quality is unknown. Many people on these lists have been marketed to heavily by multiple senders and are in a freebie-collecting mindset rather than a buying mindset.

The pattern in this ranking is consistent. Methods near the top tend to produce members with higher intent, more prior trust, or a demonstrated willingness to spend money. A YouTube viewer who searched for your exact topic and watched your full video is a fundamentally different person than someone who clicked a solo ad for a free download. The raw number of members in your community matters far less than the quality and intent of the people inside it, because an engaged community ranks higher in the algorithm, draws more organic visitors, and converts more readily when you eventually make a paid offer.

The Honest Drawbacks to Know Before You Start

No promotional method comes without trade-offs, and Alston is clear about each one. Short-form social media is slow from a standing start and depends heavily on your existing reach. YouTube takes time to gain search traction, and there is no guarantee your videos will rank even if the content is good. Solo ads are the fastest way to put raw numbers in your community, but those numbers may not represent the engaged audience you actually need to monetize. Facebook ads give you volume but come with a relationship gap you have to close manually inside the community. And the self-liquidating offer requires upfront product creation and enough ad budget to gather meaningful data before you can optimize.

The honest summary is that all five methods work, but none of them work overnight and none of them work without consistent execution. The most common failure mode is starting a method, not seeing results in the first two weeks, and switching to a different method before the first one had a fair chance to produce data. Pick the method that fits your actual resources and timeline, execute it with real consistency, and give it enough runway to tell you something useful before you change course.

Find Your X

Not everyone has the same starting point, and the right method depends on where you actually are right now. If you already have a YouTube channel with steady views, the long-form keyword strategy is your obvious fast lane. If you have a small following on TikTok or Instagram, doubling down on short-form pain-point content before spending money on ads makes more sense. If you have a budget but no audience at all, the self-liquidating offer gives you a structured way to build both a buyer list and a community at the same time. The goal is to match the method to your actual situation, not to where you hope to be eventually.

If you are not sure which of these paths fits your specific situation, the Finder at finder.platformproof.com asks you five questions about your skills, budget, and starting point and points you toward the most realistic first move. It takes about two minutes and gives you a concrete starting place instead of a list of options you have to sort through on your own.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Skool and why is everyone talking about it right now?

Skool is an online community platform that combines group discussion, direct email to members, course hosting, and digital product delivery in one place. It is drawing attention because Facebook groups have become extremely crowded and algorithmically unpredictable, while Skool is still relatively new with far less competition on most topics. The built-in affiliate program, which pays recurring commissions when members you brought in eventually start their own communities, gives creators an additional financial reason to grow their free memberships aggressively.

How much does it cost to run solo ads for a Skool community?

On platforms like Udimi, prices typically range from around 35 cents to over a dollar per click depending on the seller and the niche. A small test run of 100 to 200 clicks might cost anywhere from $50 to $150. The real question is not what the clicks cost in isolation but what percentage of them convert into engaged community members who actually show up and participate. Alston ranks this method last despite its relatively low entry cost because low conversion rates and freebie-seeking behavior can make the real cost per engaged member much higher than the headline click price suggests.

What exactly is a self-liquidating offer and how does it work?

A self-liquidating offer is a low-priced product, usually between $7 and $27, that you sell via paid ads. The goal is for the revenue from product sales to cover or closely match your ad spend, so you are acquiring buyers without a meaningful out-of-pocket cost. You then follow up with those buyers via email to invite them into your paid Skool community or a higher-priced offer. Alston mentions you can start with $5 per day, though a higher daily budget gets you useful data faster and lets you cut underperforming ad creatives sooner rather than letting them drain budget slowly.

Do I need a big social media following to grow a Skool community?

No, but having one accelerates things significantly. If you already have a large following on any platform, you can announce your community and see hundreds of new members within a few days. If you are starting from zero, you will need a method that does not depend on existing reach. YouTube SEO and paid advertising (solo ads, Facebook ads, or a self-liquidating offer) all work without a pre-existing audience. YouTube is particularly useful for zero-follower starts because the platform connects search queries to videos based on content relevance, not subscriber count, so a new channel can still attract targeted viewers if the content matches what people are already searching for.

Can you run Facebook ads directly to a Skool community without a landing page?

Yes, and Alston does this himself. You create an ad offering something free, point the link directly to your Skool community join page, and when someone applies to join you approve them and they receive the free item inside the community. The advantage is a shorter path from ad click to community member. The trade-off is that cold ad traffic arrives without any existing trust or relationship with you, so you need to be intentional about your onboarding process, asking questions, surfacing the gamification features, and giving people clear reasons to stay active beyond the day they joined.

What kind of TikTok or short-form content actually drives community signups?

Content that names a specific pain your target audience is experiencing works far better than content about your community or your offer. Instead of describing what your community does, you describe what your audience is dealing with. In Alston’s example, instead of “I have a free Skool community for men who want to lose weight,” you say something like “if you have trouble walking from the parking lot to the front door without stopping to catch your breath, you are probably dealing with more than just being tired.” That framing gets the right person to self-identify and want to know more. From there, a bio link or pinned comment can direct them to your community.

How does the Skool affiliate program actually work?

When someone joins your Skool community, their account is tagged with your affiliate ID. If that person later decides to start their own Skool community and begins paying for the platform, you earn a recurring commission for as long as they remain a paying Skool member. You do not need to pitch them on starting a community or mention the affiliate program at all. Getting them into your free community is sufficient for the tag to apply. This is a meaningful part of why community builders are working so hard to maximize their free member count right now. Every member is a potential long-term income stream, not just a number on a dashboard.

How long does it realistically take to grow a Skool community from scratch?

That depends almost entirely on which method you choose and how consistently you execute it. A self-liquidating offer with a meaningful ad budget can start producing buyers and community members within days of launch. YouTube content takes longer to index and gain search traction but builds compounding traffic over time. Short-form content with no existing following is a slow start that requires months of consistent posting before you see real volume. There is no universal timeline, but Alston is direct about one thing: if you expect overnight results from organic methods when starting from zero, you will likely quit before you reach the point where growth starts to feel real. Match the method to your patience and your budget, not just your ambition.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “5 Ways To Grow Your Skool Community No One Is Talking About | Make Money With Skool,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/R-Wdu3HWuNY
Udimi solo ads marketplace referenced in video
Skool community platform, skool.com

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.