5 ways to deliver premium content to your Slack community
So your Slack community is off to a great start. There’s daily active conversation, you have a scheduled coffee hour every Wednesday morning, your expert AMA’s are scheduled for the next few months. Now what? Maybe you want to grow this community into a full fledged business, or build a stronger following. Either way, there’s a number of ways to keep the early engagement growing and continue signing up new members.
One of the most prevalent reasons for starting a premium Slack group is the ability to bundle your content with your community, delivering both behind a paywall. Most tools are only strong at community, or content delivery. Luckily with Slack you don’t need to make a sacrifice. You can have your cake and eat it too 😋.
The community side of the equation is self-evident (the Slack group) but what about the content? The best ways to keep your members coming back for more is to deliver content to your group in a consistent, organized way.
One of the best parts of running your membership community on Slack is that you can pair robust community tools with intuitive, easy content distribution. There are a number of different ways to offer content to your Slack users, depending on what’s most valuable to you.
Here are 5 of our favorites:
Slack!
Slack’s native drag and drop functionality: This one is the most obvious but also one of the most powerful ways to share your content. If your content is videos, pdfs or other images (charts, recipes, etc.) simply dragging the images or videos into the group is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to get content directly into your users hands. Another benefit of this method is that if you’re using a free group but paid channels to deliver the premium content it’s easy to only share the relevant material to the premium channels.
Dropbox & Google Drive
If your content (videos, ebooks, etc.) is bigger than it makes sense to drag and drop into Slack you can use a link to a private Dropbox or Google Drive where you house your files. You can email new users the link to your private repositories, use a bot to send it directly in Slack or simply pin it to a channel. The advantage of this method is that you can keep your work organized in any way you like and there’s a much higher limit on the size of the files. It also makes it much easier to for your members to find files days and months after they’ve been shared.
Notion.so
Notion is an awesome wiki-building tool that can be used to deliver your content in real time, as you’re creating it. You can link different chapters of an e-book you’re working on to different channels, or create link dumps to show your users what you’re reading. Notion allows for some creativity in how to present and deliver your work to your users, and it plays with Slack extremely well. Imagine your core audience helping fund your new book, or course by getting early access and the ability to collaborate and provide feedback as you write!
LaunchPass + Zapier
Combining LaunchPass with Zapier makes it really easy to get your users into an email list (Google Sheet, or even into your CRM/email management system of choice, like MailChimp.) Email newsletters are one of the most powerful ways you can continue to get your message out. You can run campaigns for both users in your group already and have a signup on your site for users who haven’t quite joined yet. Your users won’t necessarily be checking in on the Slack group every day, so sending them a newsletter with the most engaging links from the weeks discussion, a recap of your most recent AMA or sending content directly to their inbox every week is a really great way to keep your members in the loop, and coming back!
Unlisted Medium Posts
Medium is an awesome content publishing platform. With it’s huge, and active community of readers, and it’s awesome interface for writing content. What if you could use Slack as a paywall for your premium Medium content? Well you can! New members can could sign up for premium access to a Slack channel using LaunchPass and you can share unlisted Medium posts in that channel as premium content.
To publish content as unlisted, just click the “Publish” dropdown, and click visibility, and then select “unlisted”, as seen in the image below. You’ll then get a private URL that won’t be listed anywhere on Medium, or search engines.
Ready to start combining community and premium content? Check out LaunchPass! Need help getting one of these services set up? Email me at support@launchpass.com and say hi! 👋
