Glowleaf

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.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: forum, online community, social crowd

The good thing about the internet, is that anyone can write their opinion, and express their view on a subject matter.

The bad thing about the internet, is that anyone can write their opinion, and express their view on a subject matter.

Once you have been a webmaster for a few years, you soon realize that writing content is the most tedious task. If the website’s subject is a hobby of yours, you will come up with occasional bursts of insight and create a good piece of content every now and then. To keep up though with the other 2428 sites in your niche, you need to come up with a way of generating content.

There are two ways to do this, either outsourcing on content writers, or providing users with a platform of sharing their own creations. Think of it: pure, original, keyword rich, on-the-subject content generated every day, every hour, every minute without you raising your finger.

The reality is a little bit different though. Only 5% of what people write will be of any use and value, and only 5% of the people will actually contribute something. The rest will be simply, pure and utter crap.

To make things worse, there come the moderation burdens. People will behave badly, and on the internet its so much easier to show your bad side. Then there is spam to look out for, people self promoting, plain assholes who take up your time, and idiots who cannot find the submit button.

In the end, it is worth it though. Creating a community is hard work, and it takes a long time to pay off, but it grows exponentially after it reaches a critical mass. A vibrant community also makes you feel proud. There will be shitheads who will ruin your day, but you will discover marvelous individuals who really know what they are talking about.  You can even make friends.

On a practical note, I will not regurgitate the articles out there, telling you how to create a community. Go to webmasterworld.com and find the great threads on how to kick start your community.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: forum, online communities, user contributed