Online community developing
I have been blogging a few times about my belief that online communities are very valuable – they make your website traffic less dependent on search engines, they help you meet great people worldwide – more on developing and owning a forum. I also mention that it is not that easy to attract and keep people on your website. I think that you need two things to start with – a good website (preferably, with a unique concept – something that I lack at the moment) and experience to run online communities, this valuable knowledge.
I have researched quite a lot of online resources and experts on this very topic – how to start, run and promote successful forums. At this time I am in the process of implementing my plan that I post below. I use phpBB forum software and I test the below plan with my photo contest website. I should say that I have designed this plan based on the fact that the photo forum is online for a few months. It is not a plan to start a community from scratch; it is a plan to give a push to a slowly developing one.
1. Latest posts displayed at the pages throughout the website
2. Hire 1-2 moderators from the members – some members are very active with the photo contests, but not with the forum. Design a moderator manual.
3. Benchmark top communities for features mine is missing. It should be either your industry leaders or the ones focused on providing help to forum owners.
4. Install some important missing mods (there are literally hundreds of phpBB mods, but I have made a list of some urgently required): similar threads; refer a friend; community newsletter; user started threads. That’s it for the moment. I have some mods installed by this time – attachment mod and a few others.
5. Get it listed in the forum directories
6. Re-think forum concept and add new sub-forums
7. Use more types of content for the forum: downloads, reviews, tutorials, news, images, surveys, polls, articles, interviews
8. Bring website content to the forum
9. ‘New here’ sticky to help new members
10. Contests (Amazon gift certificates as prizes)
11. Recognize top posters: top posters list, member of the month
12. Active e-mail communication with the active forum members – ideas, feedback, etc
13. Forum ranking system
This is my 13 step program. I wonder if it helps to boost my forums. And how much time it takes. We will see.
Summary: My goal is to implement all above steps and then observe the progress within a certain period of time. If the forum gains enough members and activity then I will accept my program as successful and in part universal and fulfill it on other websites.
If the results are much worse than expected than I will analyze the situation – what is going wrong, make an extra research and develop an extra plan.
I will go in this way until I find the secret of running successful forums. If there is one…
[eminimall]
[tags]networking, online communities, forums, web forums, traffic, links bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing[/tags]
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