Building a Kajabi Community from Scratch (Full Set Up Tutorial)

The Kajabi community feature just got a massive update in 2025. So today I thought it would be helpful to walk you through how to create your own Kajabi community from scratch. So what is a community on Kajabi? Well, a Kajabi community is essentially a membership. You can decide if you want it to be free or if you want it to be paid. It's totally up to you how much you want it to be. You can have premium memberships, again, free ones, or lower ticket options. Regardless, it is a place to create a community, uh, where members can come in, they can hang out. They can have access to course content. You can have polls, you can do challenges, you can do a lot of really cool stuff inside of your community to keep your members engaged and learning from you. Now what's cool is that inside of Kajabi, if you already have an online course, you can add a community to your online course and then your course-goers can now be a part of this community, which they can invest in more or yeah, just have it be free and then they can jump right in. Basically, there are a lot of different ways that you can leverage a Kajabi community. The way that I recommend it is to have it be its own kind of product where it can be a paid membership. I think that it's an amazing way to generate recurring revenue in your business when you're sharing your knowledge online. Now, you might be wondering how much does a Kajabi community cost? Well, the cost totally depends on your plan. Kajabi has many different plans starting from their Kickstarter plan, which is basically $90 a month, to the Basic, to the Growth, to the Pro plan. Every single one of these comes with with a community. If you're on the Kickstarter plan, you get both one product, which could be your online course, plus one community. So basically you can have one whole product, like an online course, and then a separate community, or connect them together. I think if that's what you're rolling with, to maximize revenue, having a paid community would be great, and then having your online course be its own offer would be great as well, because then you can really maximize, uh, the amount of offers that you have and the amount of money you're making in your business for just $90 a month, which is pretty incredible. Now, if you've been thinking about trying out Kajabi and you're not a member already, I'd highly recommend testing it out with a free trial, especially as we go through this video, 'cause then you can do this with me and help you build your own community alongside with me. Normally, if you go through Kajabi, you get a 14-day free trial, but if you use my special affiliate link, you get a 30-day free trial. So that's double the amount of time to play with the platform and to build your business and start making money. Now, I do get a little kickback for referring you over to Kajabi, but as a big thank you for using my link, I'm also gonna give you a course I created called Kajabi Kickstart. Chart that helps you set up and launch your online business in that first 30 days from someone who's built a 6-figure business in Kajabi. Uh, so you can bypass all the different features that Kajabi gives you and just focus on the most important meat and potatoes things to really get your business set up and running. And on top of that, you're also gonna get a private one-on-one coaching call with me. On this call, we can break down any strategy for your business, or if you have technical questions for Kajabi, maybe you're moving over, from other tools, and if you can move them into Kajabi, I'll help you do that personally. I can't promise I will offer these calls forever because my time is limited. But if you do want to take advantage of a 30-day free trial, my Kajabi Kickstart course, and a coaching call with me completely free, there's a link down in the description, or you can always go to profityourknowledge.com/kajabi. So to get started building your Kajabi community, we're going to go over to the Products tab right here, and then we're going to go to All Products. You can click Community, but Another way to build it is by clicking on new product right here, and we'll have all the different types of products that you can build. We're obviously going to choose a community, click get started, and we're going to come up with a name for this community. We will say James's Community. Continue. From here, you can decide if you want to do free or paid. Uh, we're going to make this a subscription-based model where people pay every single month. Uh, you can do every week as well. We're just going to do every month. And we'll just call it $47 per month, billed every one, we'll say month. If you did want to have like a yearly subscription, you can also do every year. You would have to create a separate offer, which I'm not going to go deep into right now, but it is something that you can do. And then you can have two options. You can pay for month or pay per month, or you can pay for a year and save a bit of money. Okay, so you have total control over all of that and the different currencies, etc. Payment type. You can set up Stripe or you can do PayPal, a bunch of other cool stuff, Apple Pay, Google Pay, you just gotta connect 'em. And then we're gonna hit save and finish. Okay, from here we have James' awesome community and we are going to go over to community here. Real quick, if you did wanna create a yearly subscription, you can click here and go over to offers and that's where you would create a new offer that would be your yearly subscription. So I'd recommend that they save a month or two if they paid for an entire year upfront. Just an easy way to think about it. So whatever your monthly investment is, take off 1 or 2 months for a yearly. Uh, you can go over to access groups right here if you have different groups from within your community, and then also settings. So you can change up the name, the description, and, uh, you can create a little cover image inside of Canva. I always recommend to just follow the dimensions that they give you and just go to custom design on Canva. And you can set that up. So let's dive into our community. So this is what a fresh community looks like right now. We're gonna go to add a cover photo. The first thing to do, uh, it gives you the recommended size. Again, what I'd recommend is to go over to canva.com and we're gonna take these dimensions, go over to create a design, and we want custom size. Now real quick, I'm going to create some cool design. Um, bear with me one sec. Okay, so we're just gonna roll with this one, Born to Hustle, got our little computer thing, and I'm going to download it. We'll hit download. We'll hit save. So right when people come in, they're gonna see this cover photo. Obviously, do something customized to you and your group. So real quick, let's take a look at the different things that you can do in here. First off, you have over on the right hand, you have meetups. So you can host live events in your community think workshops, study sessions, or guest speakers. You could do these every week, you could do them biweekly or monthly. I'd recommend at least doing it once a month, but whatever it is for your audience that you think is really gonna keep them engaged and, you know, keeping wanting to come back to your community. I think that's the biggest challenge for people is how do we come up with ideas to keep people coming back and make sure that there's fresh content, all that kind of stuff. So we'll click Add Meetup. So let's say that we did a monthly, Q&A, and then a virtual link or physical address. You can use a live if you want to. How do you want to host your meetup? Live is accessible to all members, and it's always on. If you don't want to use live accessible by all members of your community, you can create a private room. So we can actually create a private room in here, and it will automatically create your meeting. So if we click on that, you can get a look as to what your private meeting will look like. Request permissions. Okay. Bum bum. Turn it on. Camera. So it's gonna have you run a test. We can skip the test. Join meeting. And this is what it's gonna look like. I didn't turn on my camera, but yeah, you get up to 200 people and this is all run inside of Kajabi, which is super, super cool. So you don't have to really even pay for a Zoom subscription. I'd probably still do it just because it's easy for people, but you can start recording. And the really, really cool thing is that if your community is tied to an online course, you know, for your community, let's say, you can add custom content in there. When you do live sessions like this with your up to 200 members, it will take the recording and plug it into your online course automatically so you don't have to do it, which is really, really cool. So people can watch the replays and you don't need to pull from the Zoom recording, go into Kajabi, create a whole different lesson, and then plug in the video. It's automatically done for you, which is incredible. Alright, so those are some options that you can do. That's what I would recommend. You can decide when you want this event to start, when you want it to end, how often you want it to repeat. Let's say it was a monthly thing, so just every 30 days. Yes, repeat, write a description. It's just monthly Q&A. Maybe the topic changes every month, which is totally fine. Uh, again, you can change the name, all that kind of stuff. Q&A. Okay, so obviously too, you can change up the COVID photo for this. I would just create some custom design with your branding and that kind of stuff that says like monthly Q&A workshop so people can get their questions answered. That's how you can add meetups and it'll be inside your group and you just got to keep people posted as to when the next meetup is coming up. Next we have challenges. So you can motivate your community with relevant activities, course homework, or create an onboarding checklist. This is great. I think it's awesome to have an onboarding checklist for people when they first join your group to really make them feel welcome, get familiar with the group, introduce themselves, and just, you know, yeah, feel welcomed. So we'll click add challenge and take a look at what this looks like. So this is a one-time challenge. You can, starting from whatever day, my community members will have how many days to complete this challenge. The challenge will be under a series of, and you can create a new series. So let's say you were creating content or helping people create content with their branding strategy or whatever. You can have a new LinkedIn growth challenge or a lead magnet challenge where people are gonna be creating a lead magnet. Or if you're doing sewing, you can do like sewing your first blanket challenge in this week. That's like, that's what we're gonna focus on. If it were me running a community, I would have a monthly meetup like that Q&A, and then I would do small challenges each week to really challenge people and keep the community engaged. So it's always something fresh that they're working on inside of your community. You can also create a recurring challenge where, you know, every week or whatever it is, people are gonna have to complete this challenge every month. Whatever it is you want to do. It's fully customizable, which I think is really awesome. So let's just leave it at one-time challenge. We'll hit next. And then from here, move your body, sweat, meditation. These are all templates for your different challenges and they kind of customize them with just a bunch of different niches, if you will, like make a friend. Maybe you're doing some form of friendship coaching or dating. Is friendship coaching a thing? I don't know. Um, you know, let's say a vision board. Go through, advance. You can add prizes to these as well. So we'll just stick with this, just kind of play with it. Uh, pick a random photo just for the sake of finishing this up. All right, vision board. People can join. This is what it's going to look like for them with the image. So we'll hit save, and this is what it's going to look like inside, uh, archive. A new series, a new challenge, productivity tips. Okay, play with these different challenges and then, um, yeah, you can delete them after you're done with them or keep track of them and see how many people posted, whatever it is that you want to do. So another big thing in your community is just making regular posts. I think it is important for you to be active in your community if you're going to be hosting one. So ask questions, check in with people. If you're doing like a weekly challenge, just something simple, and you can even do a couple of different challenges where let's say it's a lead magnet challenge on how to build a lead magnet. You're obviously getting new members in the community all the time, most likely, or often. So you can just recycle that one challenge and it could be like 4 different challenges every month that you do. And it could be creating something new like a content strategy or building a product or conversation starters. I don't know what it would be for you if it's dating or something like that. But you can write a post. This works very similar like social media, obviously. You can post in different groups like Q&A. You can create different little subgroups, if you will. You have different options with bullets, links, all that kind of stuff down here. And yeah, you can just make your different posts, check in with people, and make sure encouraging other people to start posting in the group as well. Over to the left, we have our challenges, your meetups. You also have a leaderboard, which is pretty cool. So Kajabi is having this cool thing where you can start to do like gamification inside of your communities, which I think is such a great idea. It just adds a lot more, um, fun and engagement with your community and your content. You can have scheduled posts. Was it— if we click on add meetup, you can see over here it says gamification, customization, challenges, meetup circles. So if we click on gamification, incentivize engagement by rewarding your members with exciting rewards, give members points, for completing tasks and creating titles to celebrate their engagement. So you can create your own point system in here and, uh, how many points people get for doing a certain thing. Like if they completed a challenge, they did that. If they reacted to the challenge, you know, you can give them 1 point. Uh, RSVP'd to an event, they get 25 points. So the more engagement that they have, uh, the more points that they're going to get. And then the person at the end of every month with the most points can win a reward Or they can win a coaching session with you, uh, or a piece of customized feedback, like a Loom video. Like there's a lot of— maybe a free course you give away. So many different options that you can do for this. So another cool feature is that we have circles. Circles are little groups of different people. Let's say we have like beginners and then we have more advanced people. Those could be two different circles that you can have, uh, and you can do some more customization without going way too deep into the weeds on it. in terms of having different people and kind of like categories inside of your community, which is cool. Announcements. This is where you can create a new announcement. Everybody gets announced with this idea, uh, or this thing that, hey, we have an event coming up. You can also set up email notifications, like if you're doing those monthly Q&As, a ton of different email controls that you have in terms of the different categories from inside of your group, so like circles, challenge, the meetup, one day, one hour, when it starts, the meetup is created, scheduled, canceled, anything like that, people will automatically be notified on this stuff unless you decide not to do that. Your live room, okay, all this stuff is inside of here. You can send a weekly digest as well with multiple different notifications as well under this. So if enabled, a personalized weekly digest will be sent to your members starting at 9 AM Pacific time on Thursdays. Uh, it takes a few hours to reach all members. Members only receive content from access groups they are in. So that's like if it's beginners or, um, newbies, that kind of stuff, like the access groups. And, uh, they can unsubscribe at any time. So that's just kind of staying updated with like, hey, this kind of stuff happened, here's some highlights from the group. It'll automatically send you that stuff. You can also do email customization. You can upload your logo. I'd recommend to do this. Your accent color points people back to the group. Uh, that's really, really cool personally. And I've been in communities where they send a weekly digest of this stuff happened. This person's in the lead with the most points and it points them back to the community. Just keeps people coming back, which I think is really, really important. You can put in all your information, uh, display hyperlinks that bring people back, help center, contact support, privacy. This is all for like Kajabi stuff, but you can change these links. Okay, display the link for downloading the community app. There is an app that you can download for communities, which is really cool as well, and it just helps people access on the go. Okay, so this is just a quick level, a quick overview. There's obviously a lot that you can do, especially adding members. I think the biggest things to consider are your meetups, how often you're doing some sort of monthly Q&A or something like that. So people get some access to you, uh, come up with some challenges. Ideally, keep it scalable. If you can think of a few different categories of challenges for your offer, if you're in dating, it could be like approaching people, um, you know, creating dates or like what to do on dates. Like these can be different challenges, stuff like that, um, that you can have throughout your community every single month and just have things going on. That create this thriving community. And Kajabi gives you all the features. It's up to you just to be creative and keep your members engaged with the different features that Kajabi offers. I hope this video is helpful. Again, this is really just kind of an overall high-level overview of getting your Kajabi community set up. But if you do have more specific questions about building a Kajabi community, or can it do this, anything like that, let me know in a comment below and I'd be happy to respond or create another video going deeper into one aspect. Again, if you wanna try out Kajabi yourself, there's a link down in the description to use my link where you get your 30-day free trial, a course from me, and a private one-on-one coaching session. But if you are thinking about doing it, I'd recommend doing it now just 'cause I don't know how long I'm gonna be able to keep offering these free coaching sessions. At the end of the day, best of luck in building your community. And if you wanna watch another video, check out this video right here, and, uh, you can keep watching my content. See you in the next one.