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Transcription
We are going to compare school and discord. Now as someone that has both and has used both, I am in the best situation possible to make recommendations. We are going to talk about the pros and the cons. We are going to give, I’m going to give you a quick background for each of them. Uh, we’re going to, we’re going to, Compare the features, and then I’m going to, of course, make a recommendation based on my experience using each and both software.
Now, if you want to get started with school for free for 14 days, go ahead and click the link down below. When you click the link and get started using my link, I will send you a free workbook on how to monetize your school community. I am an affiliate for school, and if you get started, I’ll get credit.
Um, it’s always good Let people know that you’re an affiliate, but if you get started using my link, um, with the 14 free 14 day free trial, you’ll be able to get that free workbook. So let’s go ahead and talk a little bit about what school is and what discord is. So school, if we take a look, this is an online course and community.
I like to think of it is like a combination of Facebook and kind of like Kajabi. Okay. What school we take a look. This is one of my free communities. Where you have this wall here where people can interact and engage with each other. Um, and then you have a classroom where you can make courses. Now one drawback that I’ll mention early on is that, is that a school doesn’t have a native video, um, section.
This is a video from Vimeo. You have to either use a Vimeo or YouTube link or, or Wistia in order to embed videos. One thing that I would love for them to do. I’ll talk a bit more in the con section is for them to have an embed where I can upload my videos directly here. You can’t do that yet. That’s one drawback, but you can see here, you can offer all sorts of courses, uh, schools available for just about any niche.
Um, it also has a calendar function so you can let people know. When you’re available. And this is actually a really cool feature as well. Uh, these are all linked, but you can’t actually do live or, um, you can’t do video recordings like a zoom right in here. Natively. You have to go outsource there. You can see all of your members.
You also have leaderboards where you can gamify or incentivize people to continue to come back and post. As you can see here with mime, I offer additional courses as people move up, uh, because they want to learn more about making money. And then in the final, we have this kind of like landing page here where people can learn about the community and decide to join or not over here.
You can see the number of members, both online and then admins. But this is a rough overview of what zoom is. I like to think it’s kind of a, um, a combination of a Facebook group, um, and, and kind of like a online course building platform. Um, So this is discord. As you know, discord has a bunch of these little sections here that people can go into and communicate based on topic.
This is a discord community that I had ran for a long time, but you can see here people can interact and engage. Um, to be honest with you, I kind of feel like. School has a cleaner look, uh, a less confusing look. As you can see here, I’ve got all of these different subtopics, uh, where people can easily access their, their niche or whatever they’re interested in.
You can see here, I also, um, set it up so that it integrated with my YouTube channel that anytime I upload video, it would actually post it here as well. So, um, There’s a bunch of features. Um, you can use discord for both free and paid. You have to use something called launch pass in order to do that. Uh, I mean, you can, you can actually use, uh, another feature.
I found that launch pass usually works the best for school. As you can see here, Um, we’ll talk more about pricing a little bit, but I wanted to make sure that you saw that and, uh, we can go for it. But this is basically what, what discord is. It’s a platform where you can upload videos. In my experience, it’s kind of like school where you can’t upload videos natively.
Or at least I wasn’t able to find that way to do it when I was running it, but you can see here you can use it to interact and communicate and send direct messages and spark engagement. So that is a brief overview of what school and discord is. All right. So now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the feature comparisons.
If we look at this and I, I personally feel like, um, school, and this is kind of a, like a foreshadowing here. School is more designed for people that I think that are a little bit older, that may have taken an online course before, because it has a very clean look. People that are comfortable and familiar with Facebook.
In my experience, people that try and use Discord, It’s a little bit more cumbersome for them. Um, it’s one of those things where it there’s a little bit of a learning curve. You can see here that we’ve got some stuff here, but you can see, um, I feel like also one of the drawbacks with discord is the conversations don’t necessarily flow cleanly and easily.
And from my experience, if someone wants to have a conversation within school, um, let me see if I can find one. Like all of the conversation regarding this topic is contained within the topic, which I think is, um, a little bit easier to digest. Uh, if we looked at school here, sometimes there’s like, um, arrows going every which way, and I think it can be a little bit overwhelming.
As you can see here, I have a number of different. Communities. Let’s see if I can look into this one. Um, I’m in a number of different discords here. Um, I don’t see one that’s, that’s really active. You can see like if I look in this, um, let’s look at this one. Like if people were trying to have a conversation, it can kind of get all over the place and it can get kind of confusing and overwhelming.
Um, let’s go back here. Uh, content organization and accessibility. Uh, I, I do like that if you want to upload something or you want to reveal something, it’s contained in the classroom. For Discord, if you want to, you, you can actually organize stuff based on the topic, as you can see here with this, uh, Discord.
For school, What you’d have to do, let’s say you wanted to have a post about, and this channel is about making money online. If you wanted to create a post about affiliate marketing, for example, you would go write something and then you would actually select the category. Now, as of the time of this video, there’s not sub sections or sub walls dedicated to each topic, but people can scroll through and get an idea of what the topic or section is about.
And, um, for organization, I kind of like discord a little bit better because you can, if you only want to talk about social media, you can jump into that portion of the, of the, of the, uh, discord, but with school, you’re going to wind up kind of like scrolling through to find something, or you’re going to have to do a search up here.
You can also search as well. So that’s something else to consider when you are. Making your decision for the school in the school community. Uh, let’s see. We’ll go back here. A content organization, user experience and interface. I think this really depends on who you are and what you’re used to. If you’ve taken online classes before.
This is clean and easy and simple. If you are used to Facebook, this is really clean and easy and simple. Um, if you, if you’ve been in a discord before this, you know, makes sense. This is simple. This is easy to use. Um, and I, I really think it comes down to personal preference personally. I like. The simplicity of this.
When you look at this and you, when you get into a discord that has a lot of communication going back and forth, it can be overwhelming. I’m just trying to find one that could be like that. Um, we’ll look under announcements maybe, or let’s do social media. Let’s see. Let’s see if we can find a conversation that’s kind of going back and forth all over the place.
I don’t actually see one. Um, This is an example of a, of a conversation. It can get overwhelming trying to figure out where it started and where it ended. And that’s one of the drawbacks or complaints that I would have if I were looking at discord. Um, it’s not clean. It’s not simple. Um, with the school community, very simple to use.
Okay. It will take you all of probably five minutes. If you are brand new to school to get your feet wet and understand exactly what’s going on. If you’re, if you manage the community, you can obviously make pin post. And in my opinion, like I said, it’s, it’s much cleaner. Um, it’s simple and you don’t want to, uh, overlook how valuable simple can be for someone that is just getting started.
And also think about how simple it is. for your potential customers. Okay. Uh, pricing and accessibility really, really, really important. After the 14 day trial, you pay 99 per month per community. So if you’ve got a free community and a paid community like I do, you’re going to pay 99 per month for each community.
Okay. Um, you can have unlimited communities, but just realize you’re going to be paying. And I understand why it’s new. They don’t have any ads or anything like that. With discord you can start a discord 100 percent for free and you can grow it for free if you want people to pay Um, I use a software called launch pass and it was just 29 per month and you can see all of the features Now the reason why I liked launch pass launch pass If they didn’t pay, they would automatically be removed.
As you can see, automated, um, they’d automatically be removed from the server. I didn’t have to manually do it. Now you could probably do this with a PayPal, um, or Stripe or whatever payment processor you use, just, you know, you’d have to realize that. You’d probably have to do it more manual. When I use launch pass, it was only 29 per month.
Uh, they pay a 3. 5 transaction fee. I don’t believe there’s a fee for the school community. It’s just that, uh, one time. So the cool thing is, is that you can have a free community. You can have paid communities. You can turn your free communities into a paid community. So like tomorrow. If I wanted to start charging 9 per month, everyone that joins after tomorrow would start paying 9 per month.
These people will stay on the free plan forever. Um, but just know that people after that, and you can manually talk, toggle prices. Uh, for example, for my paid community, I have, um, let’s see, we’ll go over to settings. So for my paid community. Uh, where is it here? Subscriptions. You can see I have, um, a free plan, 39 per month and 29 per month.
Starting next month, I’m actually going to raise the price. So the three members that came in under the 39 per month will stay on 39 per month forever. Uh, same with the 29 until they unsubscribe. When they come back, they won’t be able to pay the discount. They’ll have to pay that full amount. But that is the pricing.
So now that we know all of that and I’ve interweaved my, um, what I like and what I don’t like, let’s go ahead and officially talk about the pros and cons. So what I really like is how clean it is. Okay. And quite honestly, I like how new it is. Because it’s new, there’s not as much competition in the, in the market.
And another benefit of school is that your community can rank and it can rank on Google. It can rank within school itself. So if I just typed in a side hustle like this, Actually, let me type in Discover communities and I type in side hustle. You can see where my community ranks. It ranks 601 It’s dropped a little bit.
I’m not thrilled about it It’s ranked the 601st community In all of school and if someone is coming to school because they want to learn how to like make money online We’ll say make money online You can see that there’s a you can see the rankings for each one of these now the ranking I believe Is based on engagement?
Within the community. So you can see here that there’s a paid community, 129 per month. It is ranking 25, 25th, and it has 1. 7 thousand members. Now there’s no guarantee that this person making one 29 times 1. 7, they could have started off with the free community and then eventually raise the price, or they could have started off at 29 per month and raise the price.
So don’t be, don’t be confused by that. Anyway. Um, So yeah, you can also make communities private where they’re not discoverable in the search engine. Uh, you can raise the prices, you can lower the prices. Like I said, the couple things that I don’t like about school right now is, um, and, and let me give you a couple ideas of where I think school will go very soon.
I don’t like that you can’t natively embed videos. Um, you know, you have to use YouTube or Wistia or Vimeo. I don’t like that. You can’t go live inside of here. You’ve gotta have a Zoom. So you have to have a bunch of different integrations. More integrations mean more money. Um, I do like that they have a, what’s called gamification.
It gets people to come back and comment and integrate and ask questions. Um, and, and that can help you build a stronger community and it can help you make more money. Uh, I do both like and dislike. This is the sales page for the community. I, I both like it and dislike it simply because, you know, it keeps things short.
You can’t have a bunch of fluff here, but also it’s too short to, to communicate, at least in my opinion, communicate exactly what you can do and how you can help. But. Uh, so those are my, my, my pros and cons. Um, I also like that you can email people. So once they join your community, you can send them a message every three days.
And to do that, let’s say I wanted to write something, let them know that I’ve got. A new piece of content. I can simply check this box and send an email to all members, but as you can see, it says once every 72 hours, which is good so that you’re not constantly bombarding these people. I believe that in the near future, school will be more like Facebook, where they start to have ads on the side.
That’s my opinion. Um, uh, it may, may not ever come to fruition, but you can see all of this like white space here, which would be great for ads. I mean, kind of like Facebook, but, um, so yeah, so, you know, those are the pros and the cons. I like that. You can pin up to three messages or three posts. Sometimes when you hit hide, though, You’ll lose the post and it’ll be impossible to find.
So if you have three of them, make sure that you unpin one and keep this where it says pinned. Um, I like that the, it can potentially rank on Google. Very important. Um, so yeah, I think, I think that is it with, uh, what I like with discord. I like that it’s free. You don’t have to, Oh, the, with school, I don’t like that.
You got to pay. 99 per month per, per community. I understand why they do it. It helps to keep the number of communities down. If you think about Facebook, there’s like 3 billion communities because you can just spin up a community for, um, a challenge or a session and then just close it down. And then you’ve got a bunch of defunct or dead communities.
So discord I like that it’s it’s I think I do like the organization I like that if I’m interested in one of these different channels, I can just click on it So if we go back to my community I’ve got it break broken down for different niches and you can see it’s like kind of easier to get to I don’t like, sometimes the communication, um, if you get in a real hot discord, a discord that has a lot of interaction, you’ll quickly lose, um, where you are.
You’ll lose the posting, you’ll get lost. And, you know, it can be kind of frustrating. I’ve been, uh, I’ve been in a few different discords where they have a video and they’re trying to teach something. It gets a little overwhelming because you’re trying to scroll back up to the top. And if there’s a lot of stuff here, you can see even with my, my discord that you wind up just kind of scrolling, trying to get back up to the top and then mixed in here are different conversations.
And you can wind up spending a lot of time going through the discord, trying to Find the top and get everything set up. Um, I also think that Discord can be a little distracting. We got all of these different servers over here. That can be a little distracting. If we look at school, not as distracting. And so, Yeah, I think those are the the biggest pros and cons.
I think both of them have their place. I think, I think Discord’s really good if you’re playing video games. I used to be in a server where we were playing video games and so that was Kind of cool. Um, we could communicate with, with each other. What I would recommend if, if I were just getting started today, I would strongly consider having a school community simply because I think it’s, it’s unsaturated it, it’s untapped right now.
You can rank your individual post. In Google, you can rank your school community near the top. Um, it’s clean, it’s simple. And if you enroll other people into your school community and they start a community, you could essentially earn affiliate commissions on autopilot. So my personal recommendation is to start a school community.
I think it’s a simple, it’s easy, it’s straightforward. I, as I mentioned a few times, I do not like that you’ve got to pay 99 per month per community. Uh, but you just have to, uh, offset that by getting more clients. So, uh, if this video helped make sure that you like comment, follow, subscribe, share, do all of that good stuff and follow along with me as I go on my journey of building a school community that generates 10k per month.
Thanks for watching and we’ll see you soon.