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Transcript
In this video, we are going to compare two very popular online community platforms, Patreon and Skool. And so what we’re going to do is I’m going to give you a brief overview of each one. I’m going to tell you what I like and what I don’t like, and I’m going to recommend one. Now, you’re actually going to probably be surprised on my recommendation because this is a this YouTube channel is called building a Skool,
and so you probably automatically think that I’m just going to say Skool is perfect for every solution. And in this video, hopefully I disproved that theory, but let’s go ahead and talk about it. What is Patreon? Patreon is an online community. That you can use to bring your community together. You can use both Patrion and Skool.
Maybe you’re a content creator. You’re a marketer. You can bring them off of various platforms like Tik TOK, YouTube, wherever, where you don’t have control. And you can use a place like Patron to offer a little bit more control. You can basically do the same thing with Skool or patron, which is really cool people that want to monetize their community or make more money from their community.
Or they want a place to call their own, can use one of these platforms to grow a community, to build a community, which is something that is really cool. If you are looking for an additional revenue stream. And one thing that I really like, I would say about Patreon is that you can have different membership levels.
It’s something that we’ll talk about a little bit later, but if just looking at this is the back office of Patreon. This is the dashboard. It’s really clean, really simple. You can see this is my Patreon account. I don’t have anything posted. You can see that it has different insights. You can configure settings.
You can pay, get paid, obviously. Look at your audience. There’s a lot of features that are user friendly that would help you grow, would help you make more money if that’s your goal. To help you better connect with your audience, which is something that we all want to do. The better you can connect with your audience, the more money you essentially can make in a variety of ways.
Whether that’s directly with them paying you, whether that’s with like affiliate marketing or having a brand deal or sponsorship for some sort. But this is a brief overview of what Patreon is. A lot of content creators use Patreon whether they’re small, they’ve got a tiny following or they’ve got millions of followers.
A lot of people are aware of Patreon. It’s been around for a long time and a lot of people use it. Now, what is Skool? As you can see, I have 471 people in my Skool community. It is another online platform. I would say this platform is specifically for people that are coaches and course creators or people that are looking to monetize their audience.
Now, if we look at this is the back, this is the front page of the community. This is the first page people will see once they join a community. Very clean, very simple, very user friendly. You can see that anybody can post within the community. You also have a classroom where people can go to for courses or workbooks or different training that you’re offering.
There’s also a calendar feature, which is really cool so people can see what’s going on throughout the week. You can see the members, you can do what’s called gamification. And that’s what the purpose of this leaderboard is. And then you have the about section, which is like the landing page. One really cool thing about Skool is that you can actually make this you can have video and images within the landing page.
And so you don’t have to use a landing page builder, like click funnels or something like that. Very quick overview of both Skool and Patrion. I’m assuming that if you are here, What the difference are, about each of them. And so I don’t want to spend a bunch of time on it, but let’s go ahead and talk about the pros and cons of patron.
One of the biggest pros is that it’s been around forever. Everybody knows that. I really like the fact that you can create content within the platform. That’s something that’s really important to me. I’ll talk about Skool and just a moment and hopefully, what’s changing, but one thing I really like, you can do video within the platform.
You can either upload it from a different place or Use a link from youtube or vimeo as you can see or you can like drag and drop which is cool Which I really like I like that. It’s native. I like that. There isn’t a third party that you’ve got to go to I like that. All of the integrations are in one place Okay, and I also really like that.
You can have different membership levels So you can offer different levels of access depending on how much someone is willing to pay you Now, at one point I was a part of a Patreon community where he had 15, 25 and 50. And that 50 access was obviously much more intense or a higher level, higher integration than the 15.
He offered additional videos. He offered additional like hidden content. It was it was a podcast. And so he had more behind the scenes, exclusive stuff that wasn’t available anywhere else. Eventually, though, what people would do is they’d wind up joining the community and then they would get access to the videos and then make it available to everyone on Twitter and different places.
But one thing that I really is that it’s because it’s been around for a while, it has a pretty stable user base and you can actually create these different membership levels. I think that’s probably the biggest thing. And it’s free to start and that’s another pro is that it’s free to start.
If we look into create. You can actually live stream within here, which is really cool. You do have to connect it with some of the other platforms, but people can come to Patreon for a one stop shop, which is really important to me. Okay. It’s simple. It’s easy to use. You can build a community where people can chat with you.
When I was a part of the community, he had a discord. And so if you wanted to chat with other people that were in the Patreon community, you’d have to go over to discord. But now it looks like everything is in one spot, which is really cool. So if we look at this I like it. I like it overall. Okay. I also like that.
It’s free to start. So that is the pros. Cons is, I don’t know how well it’s searchable. For example let’s say I wanted to go to Patreon and I wanted to find someone based on a niche. Maybe I was interested in a fishing Patreon. So let me just let me see if I can log out here. Let me see. Or maybe I’ll have to open it up in a different tab, but Let’s say I wanted to find a fishing Patreon and I don’t know the, like a person that’s interested in fishing.
I can’t easily do that. So when I type in find a creator, if I just type in like fishing hit enter. Okay. So there is a few different Patreon accounts that you can find. So really cool. One thing that I would be concerned about is And one benefit of Skool is that your post on Skool can actually rank in Google.
And so I don’t know if that’s going to be the case. Depending on your level of access or the level that you have set up, you might be able to write a blog post that ranks using Patreon. As you can see, it’s free to start. There’s a bunch of powerful. Core features. I wonder what the payment cost is.
Let’s see, because that’s always a big thing. Sure, it’s free to start, but what percent are they taking from you when you’re trying to make money? I think Patreon is available to the widest group of people. So again, if you are a musician, as it says over here, if you’re an artist of some sort, Patreon is great for you.
There’s a ton of features. There’s a ton of ways to connect with the audience. Now let’s go ahead and talk about Skool. Some of the benefits, some of the drawbacks. I really that Skool is simple. It’s clean. It’s easy to use. It’s straightforward. Okay. If you go to the community tab, you can find posts.
One thing that I’m not a huge fan of is basically anybody can post. And so from time to time, you’ll have people that are just spamming and scamming in these different communities. And the bigger your community gets, the higher the chances that can happen. I really do the cleanliness and the straightforwardness of the classrooms.
If I had to make a suggestion, I would say. Skool is more geared towards coaches and course creators because I think it really benefits from having this classroom. One drawback with Skool though is that the videos that you have on here, they aren’t natively hosted on Skool yet. According to the founder of Skool, that is supposed to be something that comes a little bit later on, but right now it’s just not there.
And you gotta have a third party, whether it’s a YouTube channel, that you have unlisted videos or what I do is I have Vimeo, and so I upload my videos to Vimeo, and then I’ve gotta put a link, embed a link here. That’s just a minor drawback. You understand it. This platform is relatively new within the last three years.
And so because it’s within the last three years, that’s probably something that they want to build in later once they have the funds, because hosting videos basically means buying huge amounts of servers or renting out servers from someone else, like a web hosting company and that can get expensive. What I really like is the gamification that you can do.
The gamification will help people get engaged and stay engaged. Okay, it’ll help people with communicating with each other because the way the gamification works is that at each level it can unlock something new. And the only way people can reach these additional levels is by getting likes on their posts or their comments.
And so If you have got something at level nine, maybe it’s like a one on one coaching You can offer to your community It incentivizes people that want to do that one on one coaching it incentivizes them to move up And if you get them to talk and communicate with each other you can move up in the Skool Overall leaderboards each public community is ranked between one and however many Communities are out there.
And so if you can get people talking to each other If we look at discover community, you can see like this one’s ranked number one because there’s the most communication There’s the most people talking to each other and it doesn’t go by the number of members You can see this one has 14, 000 members.
This one has 5, 000 This one only has 334 members, but there’s a lot of talking and communicating going back and forth. And it’s outranking members communities that are like four or five, 10 times their size. So one cool thing is if you can get people talking to each other communicating with each other, you can move up the rank and eventually rank on the first page.
Also, if we just typed in woodworking, which I love to do, you can see how many communities Of woodworkers there are and this one’s ranked number 91, but first overall compared to these other ones which is really cool because it’s less saturation if you’re comparing this to like facebook when there are thousands of groups some are defunct some are You know in various stages, but you can see that’s one of the things that I really like about Skool I also like the fact that You can rank your Skool post if your community is public You can rank your Skool posts on Google.
For example, if we go to if I just type in Skool. com and that’s why I say like the Skool community was built with for like marketers, coaches, and course creators. So if we just do change this position to number one, so if you are trying to rank on Google, what you can do is you could look at any one of these keywords.
Let me see if we can find one here. Let’s sort by volume as well. Yeah. Let’s see, we want to do, let’s do, we want to sort by position. We’ll say top five, apply, and then volume we’ll say greater than 60, 000. Click apply and let’s see if we get some results. So no let’s try 10, 000.
Okay, sSkoolol ranks number one for Skool. But what you could do is go through and try and find different keywords. One thing that I tried for my Skool is I tried ranking for I think it was like target affiliate program, target affiliates program. And the way that I was going about this is looking for low competition keywords based on my niche, writing a blog post on it.
And then seeing if I could rank and using the power of the Skool SEO search engine optimization to see if I could rank. Those are some of the benefits the drawback one of the biggest drawbacks I think is the 99 per month per community that gets pricey, especially if you’re just getting started, you’re getting started on a budget.
99 per month per community is expensive. I personally have three communities. I’ve got a free community, I’ve got a paid community, and then I’ve got a community for people that have purchased something from me. One cool thing with what Skool is that if someone joins your community and then creates their own community, you’ll actually earn affiliate commissions.
So one of the big pushes and one of the big reasons why you see a lot of people trying to get you into their Skool community is so that they can have affiliate commissions. And quite honestly, that’s one of the reasons why I started my community. If they see the value in Skool and they start their own community, I’ll get paid 40 percent reoccurring for the lifetime of that community for each person.
So it’s very possible. I earn or generate passive income from people that join my community because they want to be there. And then they in turn start their own community. A con it’s 99 per month per community. Something to consider. Now let’s talk about which one I recommend. It really depends.
If you are an online coach or course creator, Or you do one on one coaching, I think Skool’s for you. If you are a creative person that is looking to just monetize your community and you don’t really have a course or you’re not interested in building a course, but you’ve got people that follow you and want to connect with you and you don’t mind creating more content.
I think patrons are really good choice. If someone was a, like a painter or candlestick maker, they say, what should I do? I would say what’s your goal? The painter might be just to get more ideas. And maybe connect with their target audience at a deeper level through Patreon. If you’re putting together a course on how to start painting, or if you’re putting together a course on how to, make candles, I like the Skool community.
I think the Skool community would be better. But it really all depends on what your end goal is, and I think it depends on your niche. If you don’t have a alternative way to monetize your niche, Patreon might be the best way to go. But if you’ve got, if you can do affiliate marketing, you can host a course or do coaching or do mentorship of any sort.
I think that Skool is the way to go. Now what I would invite you to do is click the link down below to join a Skool. You get a two week free trial. If you get started using my affiliate link. Also, when you get started using my affiliate link, I will see that you have used my link and I’ll actually invite you to work with me personally to get your Skool community up and running.
If this video helped you out, be sure to follow, subscribe, share, do all of that good stuff. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video.