7 Skool Community Building Secrets That Keep Members Engaged

Building a thriving online community requires more than just setting up a platform and hoping members will engage. In my video, I share the key strategies I’ve learned through trial and error that will help you create a Skool community that people actively want to participate in and never want to leave.

These principles apply whether you’re just starting out or looking to revitalize an existing community.

I break down the essential elements of successful community building based on what I’ve seen work in my own community and in other thriving online spaces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7OHuLGTJAs

Do You Actually Want to Be a Community Leader?

The first question you need to ask yourself is whether you genuinely want to take on the role of a community leader. This is fundamentally different from running an online course or doing one-on-one coaching, and it requires a specific type of commitment that isn’t right for everyone.

In my video, I explain that communities require consistent effort and motivation, especially in the beginning stages. They do get easier as they take on a life of their own and members become more active, but initially you need to be prepared for significant hands-on involvement. You’ll need to show up regularly for group coaching sessions, facilitate conversations, and keep the energy flowing.

I compare building a community to hosting a party, drawing on my personal experience running a party and events company in London years ago. When you have more people who don’t know each other, you’ll face more challenges in engineering the success of that community. Your job is to make sure people don’t fall by the wayside, lose engagement, or simply disappear. Connection is everything in community building.

Engineer Your Audience Like a Party Host

When I organized parties in London, we didn’t just open the doors to anyone. We created bespoke locations with fantastic decorations, but more importantly, we carefully engineered the crowds we brought in. We wanted people we knew would be fun, would get along with each other, and would contribute to the vibe we were creating.

You can bring some strangers into the mix, but you always want to ensure you have a core audience of people who you know will make the atmosphere really good. They’re the ones who will dance, have fun, and actively enjoy what you’re offering. In my video, I explain how this same principle applies to your Skool community—start with a few carefully selected people and grow from there.

Just as I organized the flow of parties with different types of music in different rooms and various activities to create an adult fun playground, you need to organize the flow of your community. We included photo booths and other engaging activities that changed with each party, keeping things fresh and exciting. This variety prevented boredom and gave people reasons to keep coming back. Your community needs that same element of variety and engagement to prevent members from losing motivation.

As the community host, it’s your job to get everybody talking and fire things up initially. Once the party is going and everyone is socializing, you can relax and let the community do the work for you. I emphasize that you need to be comfortable being the leader, especially in the beginning, though you can become more hands-off later on.

If you’re an introvert like me, don’t worry—you can absolutely do this. I actually prefer working in the background, engineering conversations and getting groups going rather than being the guru at the top. In fact, I explain in my video that being too much of a guru can actually be a negative.

Don’t Overwhelm Members With Courses

One of the biggest mistakes I see community builders make is overwhelming people with too much content. While having some courses is valuable, you can easily overload members with information, which I admit I’ve personally done in my own community.

I mention in my video that I have a free community where I provide training to help people grow their communities. If you’d like access, I link to it in the video description. However, I recognize that I probably have too much content there, even though I’ve already removed a lot and condensed everything down to one program.

For a free community especially, excessive content becomes problematic. People will show up for a free course, but the question is whether they actually want to be in the community itself. Most people who join, regardless of what you offer, won’t be that active—typically only the top 10 to 20 percent will engage regularly.

If people are just coming to consume information and leave, they probably have no intention of ever engaging with other members. In a free community, you want the community itself and perhaps live calls to be where the true engagement and magic happens. The classroom content should just provide foundational information to help members gain momentum and prepare them for the next step, which could be a paid product or service you offer.

The transformation part can come with paid products later on. Your free community should focus more on the social feel, motivation, and getting people’s foot in the door so they believe this approach can work for them. Too many options lead to paralysis by analysis, and in today’s world where we’re overloaded with information from AI and social media, people actually want less, not more.

I explain that I might be value dumping on people myself, which is something I’m planning to address by paring back to just the core information members need to get started on their journey. Don’t make the mistake of overwhelming your members with content when what they really need is connection and direction.

Build Your Community Slowly and Selectively

How quickly you should grow depends on how quickly you can build genuine connection among members. Coming back to the party analogy, when you introduce people and get them connected—like saying “Hey, meet Bob and Sarah, you two should talk because you’re working on the same things”—you’re creating the foundation for lasting engagement.

The more people know at a party, the more relaxed and enjoyable it feels to them. No one likes arriving at a party alone, not knowing anyone, and feeling awkward. They’d eventually just leave. As the host, you need to take on that burden initially by welcoming people, showing them around, introducing them to others, and getting them comfortable. This is what effective onboarding looks like in a community setting.

In my video, I explain that when you start slowly, each person becomes special and you can properly plug them into the community, helping them find other people they connect with. This makes them more likely to come back, and crucially, they’re not just coming back for you—they’re coming back for the relationships they’ve built.

You want to quickly get people actively engaged in conversations with other members and potentially speaking on calls. I recommend having some type of onboarding process or regular calls to facilitate this connection, and importantly, don’t rush to let everybody in.

I personally only let about one in three applicants into my community. I want to make sure they’re a good match because I already know most people won’t be highly engaged, so I want to maximize the opportunity with those who do join. I look at how engaged they are in other communities—are they in a hundred communities without actively commenting or communicating? That’s a real red flag.

These days on Skool, it’s not just about members evaluating your community. As community builders, we look at potential members and ask: Are you a good member? Are you someone we want at our party? If you never engage, never participate, you’re in dozens of communities, and you’re not doing the thing the community is designed to help with, you’re probably not a good fit.

Don’t Hog the Mic

This is not karaoke, I emphasize in my video. We’ve all been to karaoke parties where a few people dominate the microphone, singing every single song. If you’re someone who needs a couple of beverages before singing, you keep thinking “I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it,” but the mic hogs never give you a chance. Eventually you give up and just let them do their thing while you sit in the background.

If you hog the mic in your community, you’ll create the same dynamic with your members. But you also need to be careful about letting other members hog the mic too much as well. While you can’t exactly tell people to shut up, you do want to set certain rules and boundaries that allow time and space for others to feel comfortable emerging and contributing.

This relates back to onboarding and getting people comfortable in the space. Joining a community is initially overwhelming—you’re taking the step to enter, you might be overwhelmed with coursework or figuring out what action to take. If you try to get involved but it seems scary, and the host or certain members are sucking all the air out of the room by answering every question, there’s no space for others to participate.

In my video, I explain that you need to let your community breathe. Let people speak on calls. When members ask questions in posts, let answers go unanswered for a day or so to see if other people will respond. If no one does, then you can step in, but give the community some space first. Don’t be the person who hogs the mic—we all hate mic hogs.

Unite Around a Common Goal or Passion

Every successful community needs something that unites members together. Not all communities are community-first—some are program or goal-first, while others are purely about networking. There are different structures for different types of communities, but you really need something that brings everyone together because people tend to remain strangers without it.

I give several examples in my video: if you do a sport and everyone is interested in that sport, it unites you. If you want to grow your business with Skool or YouTube, that unites you. If you want to grow a beautiful garden, that brings you together. If you’re learning painting as a beginner, you all have that in common. Even if you want to network as older people who feel isolated and discuss the challenges of aging, that common experience creates connection.

This common goal or passion is what keeps people coming back. It’s why we join clubs and hobbies in real life—we enjoy them, so we keep doing them. Community online is no different. You still have to enjoy it and want to keep coming back.

Even if you’re not trying to make money from your community, having a single focus or niche creates stronger bonds. And as a bonus, if you are planning to monetize, having a niche authority position makes it much easier to sell products and services because everyone is united around that common goal.

Make It About Us, Not You

The final principle I share in my video is to make your community more about “us” versus “you.” You don’t want to create a one-person pyramid where you’re talking at the top all the time while everyone else just listens. You want to ensure it’s about the collective community.

In the beginning, you’ll probably need to push things forward, engineer conversations, and facilitate engagement. Work on becoming better at making introductions and asking open-ended questions. Rather than running a support community where you simply answer questions with final answers, try to keep conversations going by answering questions and then asking another question in return.

This approach ensures that every post generates more comments, more questions, and more conversations, allowing the community to expand organically. Really try to shift everything toward members so that it’s less about you and more about us—because after all, it is a community.

If you’d like more training on growing your community and business, I provide extensive resources in my niche authority community, which you can find linked in the video description at this link. The strategies I share come from my own experience building and managing communities, and while I can’t guarantee specific results since success depends on your individual effort and strategy, these principles have proven effective both for me and for other successful community builders I’ve observed.