Multiplying like rabbits

Oct 15

Multiplying like rabbits

Cybertowns, Doodling, Fire and Forget, Heavy construction, Inorganic agriculture, Mind over Pixels, RGBhat, Social abuse, Web 2.0 Cutesy Bullshit Add comments

Communities are the ultimate blackhat

Let me say that again:

Communities are the ultimate blackhat

What does blackhat mean?

Mainly automation, and content generation, all while exploiting a bug or two.

What do communities give you?

Content generation, niche spread, news discussion, and automation.

The only thing that is missing from a community to become a blackhat tool, are the exploits. Having a community on a niche, means that you automatically have, buyers, sellers, news topic discussion, content, and the member’s sites to link to you, all in the same niche.

Where am I going with this?

Do you need more visitors? Tell your members, or better yet train them, to social bookmark the content that is uploaded on the community.
Do you need incoming links? Tell your members, or better yet train them, to ask for links, to put the link in their sigs on the fora they frequent, or if they have sites, link to the community.
Do you need buyers? Use the mailing list!
Do you need content? Have a contest!
Do you need more members? Tell them to invite their friends.

If you take the time, to build and grow even a small community on a niche, you are alone no more. You can simply ask for something, or at least provide an incentive, monetary or simply e-peen, and the members will make it happen. This does not mean that you should lay on your ass and wait for results, but if you are creative, and focus the community’s attention to what you want, you will wake up the next day and find it right there.

You can work to generate one great piece of linkbait for example, or you can work harder, to create a tool and a platform for creative people to generate linkbait all day for years.

You think linkbait is hard? Ok, stick with content then. A content driven community dishes out more content than what you could ever generate yourself, without outsourcing the load.

I am amazed by the results of my newest project. 30 members, just 30, have already uploaded content, sparked up the forum, created 2 groups in hi5 and facebook, created 2 groups in my site, created a banner that they have on their sig in fora, linked to the site from their blogs, blogged about the community, started a buzz in various relevant fora, and invited 3 members.

Before you say that 30 members is nothing, bear in mind that the community is nichy niche. It is about a particular thing, on a small country, in a non english language. The maximum members available in the whole country are around 3000. So I am at a 1% coverage.

You can do the same. Work on gathering the critical mass for a community to thrive, and you are in for more mouths than you can feed.

Think bunnies. Think orgies.