How To Start a Skool Community

Start A Skool Community Guide 2025

Steps to Create A Skool Community

So, you’re a creator and want to find an effective way to share your knowledge through course content and membership interactions.

Skool is by far the best way for you to efficiently monetize and build a community platform, with the ability to bring you a monthly passive income through membership subscriptions.

In this guide, we’ll go through the most refined way for you to start your Skool community as successfully as possible.

In this guide, we will use easy-to-understand instructions so that you won’t waste any time having to figure out anything by yourself.

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The Skool Community Platform is Combining Everything at One Place!

What makes Skool stand out is that you can manage your whole audience in one place.

This means that you can both interact with your students in something that feels like a refined private Facebook group under the “Community” tab, schedule calls, Q&A’s, and meet-ups under the “Calendar” tab, upload and structure your course material under the “Classroom” tab and also incentivize your students to engage in the community through the “Gamification” functions.

Students can also interact with both you and each other through a private message function, and also get notifications in the notifications center, just like any other social media platform.

Let’s Get Started With Your Own Online Skool Community!

The first step is easy, simply sign up to Skool.com with your preferred email address.

After that, go to your profile, and add an image of yourself and some information about yourself. Then simply press “save”.

After that, you’ll want to set up your own community. It could be a great idea to first go to the “Discover communities” section and search for your topic in order to see if there is anything similar that already exists. This can help you stand out in your niche but also give you some inspiration for what you can do yourself.

When you click on “Create a Community”, you’ll get redirected to a subscription page.

You’ll automatically start with a free 14-day trial before you have to start paying the $99/month subscription fee. In order to get started with the free 14-day trial, you still have to put in your credit card information.

So remember to cancel the free trial before it’s up in case you come to realize creating a Skool community wasn’t for you.

Keep in mind, that Skool decided to take a flat monthly subscription fee rather than taking a bigger cut of your monthly revenue you’ll make from your paying members. So just by getting a few paying members, you’ll cover this monthly fee pretty quickly.

Then, fill in the name of your community, your credit card information, and press “Start Free Trial”!

Once a member of Skool, you can also take part in the Skool Games, which incentivices community builders by hosting performance-based competitions.

Customize Your Skool Online Community

Now, it’s time to customize your community by adding some content. This is important before you start marketing your community, as you’d like to make as good of a first impression as possible once you reach out to potential members.

On the “Community” page, you’ll want to click on “Settings” and then go to “General”. This is where we’ll go through all the necessary steps in order for you to properly launch your community.

Start by creating a cover image and an icon. Use the recommended size of 1048×576 px for the cover image and 128×128 px for the icon. An easy way to create an engaging cover image is to head over to Canva and use their free editor in order to create one.

Add a short summarized description that clearly explains what the group is about, what problems it could help solve, and how it can benefit its members.

You can also pick a Color Scheme and the initials of your group, which will be displayed until you pick an icon.

You also need to decide if you want your group to be public or not. The most common option is to keep a group private. Don’t forget to press the “Update Settings” icon!

Optional: If you’d like to gather some information on your potential members before approving them into the community, you can enable “Membership questions” under the “plugin” tab.

This is mostly suggested for free groups. In order to do this, press the “edit” button to the right of “Membership questions” and toggle it from off to on by pressing “Add question”.

Adding a Custom URL and External Links

You have the option of changing the URL for your Skool community by going to “Settings” and then “Custom URL”.

You are also able to add a couple of external links that will be shown under the cover image once someone has enrolled into your community. These links can preferably go to an external website, a YouTube channel, a private coaching offer, or whatever you’d like.

Keep in mind, however, that keeping people inside of the community is your main goal so you wouldn’t want to distract members too much by referring them outside the platform.

Adding Content

Now, we want to add some content to our community. Mainly we’d like to create some welcoming posts so that the community seem to be alive once someone joins.

But we can also add courses, which could be both videos or simple text.

Go to “Classroom” and select “New course”.

Fill in the name of the course, the description, and a cover image. For your first course, it would be best to give all your members access to it, but you can also decide to limit courses to people that have reached a certain engagement score or through members paying a fixed course price.

Don’t forget to toggle your course to “published” once it’s ready to go live in your classroom.

Within a course, you can add both folders and pages. A page is the video and/or text content within a folder. The folders can be used in order to organize the course content.

You don’t need to use folders in your course, so in case you want the course to consist of only pages, simply remove the first folder that is automatically created.

When you want to create a page, give it a name, add a video link, and the written content.

Important regarding videos!
As of now, there is no direct option of uploading videos to Skool. A video needs to be uploaded either through YouTube, Vimeo, Loom or Wistia. After you’ve uploaded a video to one of these platforms, take the video url and paste it into the video link section.

YouTube: Use unlicensed YouTube videos in order to share videos, restricted to the community members. Keep in mind that unlisted YouTube videos can still be shared by people that has the link. Private YouTube videos are not possible to use as a video in a course module.

Vimeo: Although you need to pay for this option, Vimeo allows you to privately share videos just for your community members without giving them the option of sharing the video url to others. This is a preferred option in case you are worried about content getting shared outside of your community.

Wistia: Gives the same option as Vimeo, but with a much higher price tag.

Loom: Allows you to hide the url of the video to prevent members from sharing it outside of your community.

Repeat the process for however many courses, sets and modules you’d like to have inside of your Classroom.

Posts

Under the “Community” tab is where the day-to-day action in your community happens. Here, both you and members can share updates, questions, and any type of information they’d like. Having an active and engaged community is key to keeping the community alive.

When you start out, there is only one option for a category, and that is “general discusssion”. To add more categories/topics, navigate to “Settings”, and then “Categories” and add as many categories as you’d like. In order to make a post within the community tab, a category needs to be selected.

You can also create a category that can only be used by the administrator of the community.

Your First Post

Create your first post and welcome people who just joined your group. Some useful information to add to this post could be a short summary of how to navigate around the community, introduce themselves by creating a comment to the introduction post or explaining the course content.

Once you’ve created a welcome post, you have the option of pinning it to the top of the feed by clicking on the three small dots and choosing “Pin to feed”.

Every time you make a new post, your community members will get a notification. You can also choose to send a post as an email, but only once every 72 hours.

Send New Members a Welcome Message

You can also send new members a customized welcome message that will arrive to their private inbox. Simply go to the “Plugins” section under “Settings”, press “Auto DM new members” and press “edit”.

Write your message, the #NAME# and #GROUPNAME# text will automatically be replaced by the member’s name and the name of your community.

Customize the Skool About Page

Your About page will work as the landing page for your community and is the first thing that someone will see before they join your community.

The About page is a very important step in the conversion progress in order to persuade people in joining your community.

Use the about page in order to show people what they’ll get if they decide to join your community, and what they might miss out on in case they decide not to.

An example of a well-converting about page.

The best way to showcase this is to create a video with you explaining the core concept of the community, preferably by creating a screenshare with you navigating the community and course material. If you can simultaneously record yourself while doing this, that would further add to the authenticity of your community.

You can also add testimonials to your about page displaying current or previous members experience with the community.

Keep the description of your about page concise and straight to the point, pinpointing the possible problems the community is helping its members with and what they can expect from joining your community.

The Skool Gamification

Head over to the “Leaderboard” section to get familiar with how Skool incentivises members to interact and engage in the community.

Here, members can earn points and gain levels based on their interactions.

You can reward members who reaches certain levels by giving them access to certain “Classroom” content, but it could also be a good idea to give them customized rewards as well, such as a free coaching call.

Points

You earn points when other members like your posts or comments. 1 like = 1 point. This encourages users to produce quality content and interact with other members in their community.

Levels

As you gain points, you level up. Your level is shown at the bottom right of your avatar. The number of points required to get to the next level is shown under your avatar on your profile page.

Level 1 – 0 points
Level 2 – 5 points
Level 3 – 20 points
Level 4 – 65 points
Level 5 – 155 points
Level 6 – 515 points
Level 7 – 2,015 points
Level 8 – 8,015 points
Level 9 – 33,015 points

Rename the different tiered levels under “Settings” and “Gamification”.

Keep in mind that the gamification part of Skool is for entertainment purposes only and is not an obligation.

Skool Community Pricing

As a default, a Skool community is free to join, but you also have the option to add a monthly subscription fee of up to $999/month. As a creator, you can read more on how much Skool costs in this guide.

Depending on the content and value of your community, a monthly subscription of around $19-49/month could be a good starting point.

You are free to change the pricing of your community at any time, but keep in mind that it’s the moment a person joins that sets their current price stage.

If someone joins at $19/month and you raise the price to $49/month, this person will continue paying $19/month until they exit the group. The same goes for if someone joins the group while it’s free.

You can always use the “invite” link if there is someone you’d want to invite to the group for free, even though you are charging a monthly fee.

Here are 8 popular strategies people use in order to generate an income on Skool.

Setting up a Paid Subscription for a Skool Community

Go to the community settings and click “Pricing”. Here, you press “Add price”, and then connect your bank account by following the instructions. This will redirect you to a secure Stripe Page. This is also where you’ll find your invoices.

After this, navigate back to “Pricing” and then choose a monthly subscription price for your community.

Once you have paying members, go to the “Payouts” section to see when and how much your next payout will be. You’ll get paid once weekly.

Don’t worry if your first payout is a bit delayed, this is normal.

Invite People to Your Skool Community

Once your community is ready, go to your community settings and find the link to your community. Sharing your group link will take people to your group’s About page where they can purchase or request membership.

You can also use email-invites, import a .CSV file, or invite members by connecting Skool to over 500 tools using Zapier. These invite methods will grant instant access without purchasing or requesting membership.

Don’t forget to use Facebook and Instagram Ads to drive traffic to your Skool community!

Your Community in the “Discover Communities”

You need at least one more member besides yourself, have a couple of posts, an about section, a description and you need to wait at least 24 hours in order for your community to show up in “Discover Communities.

The Skool App!

Don’t forget to use and encourage members to use the smartphone app as this will both make it easier for you to interact with the community, and increase the engagement rate of your community!

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