Is your community a ghost town?

Oct 09

Is your community a ghost town?

Cybertowns, Doodling, Heavy construction, Noobs Add comments

I recently started a community, on a specific niche. Anyway, I wanted to share with you the methods for bringing in members, rather than visitors to your communities.

Find relevant fora, signup and locate an appropriate section to inform its members about your community. Don’t spam, inform politely. Tell them briefly what your community is about, and offer a means for anyone interested to contact you, email or IM.
Use the google blog search, to find blogs on your niche. Post comments, if not insightful, make them at least engaging. Not a plain “Well said” etc.
Social bookmarking. Bookmark a short well written copy that describes your community, and tag it relevantly. Members from social bookmarking sites do become members if they find something they like.
Social networking sites work nice for this as well. There are groups for anything, find relevant ones on facebook for example, and inform its members about your community.

All of the above are simply common sense, but the point here is to try and engage people, not to simply drop a link.

Also, monitor all the places you posted for a few weeks, to answer any questions and indirectly bump your threads.