Managing online communities is a wonderful process, well I like it. Everyday I work with numerous people on the web, but anyways lets talk about managing communities through weblogs, and forums. The thing is once you get a nice feed going around 100-200 subscribers you have leverage to work with, depending on the subscribers any ways. So hopefully you can viral out more subscribers with these 100 and turn them into 300 which can be done, but with time and patience speaking you can keep your current subscribers. Anyways Read the tips below on what to do when you have built a community based driven website and how to expand it.

1. Build the Community with then The Community, When I say build the community with then the community what I’m referring to is basically just build the community with then the community. For example you have a community driven website that only has around lets say 250 visitors per day from search engines, and only 100 rss subscribers. Use these people to leverage your website offer free give aways, create more communications with then the people, Ask questions through out your post, Answer comments, and things to that nature try to do stuff that will generate community interest and then eventually it will expand.
2. News Sources, This is a great one you can create media big time with offering news sources stay up to date on whats happening in your community such as exciting stuff, or stuff people will create controversy over, or I should say stuff that will create controversy. When you leash good news you keep people hooked, but make sure you do something to keep them coming back while you are promoting news sources.
3. Interaction, Always interact with your people in your communities get to know them better. Make sure you know every ones nick names, and real names. People feel more appreciated when you remember such things like this. And of course in marketing its always important to remember peoples names and build connections with them.
4. Let people promote something they would be proud of, When I say this let your community show things they would be proud of such as a website, design work, or anything similar. Every once and awhile have some type of contest for something where they can speak there self, or promote there self specially if you have a website that gets high traffic they will appreciate this a lot and promote you like crazy probably.
5. Test your Communities, Test your communities see what works best, and what don’t work. Some things you might do might make people mad, but then other things might create good viral trends for you, and remember if you make any one mad don’t worry about it if you was not making people mad somewhere then something wrong, you wan to create controversy somewhere well try to in a postitive way anyways.
6. Pretty Magazine, Give your site a magazine look well not necessarily a magazine look, but something that is very well organized a community site that has images, you know just something creative that brings people in and together.
7. Visible Feeds, Make sure you have a visible rss feed on your website for your blog. Promote that feed like crazy!
8. Easy To Contact, In the beginning stages of your community make sure that your easy to get a hold of like e-mail or similar try to keep all communications with then the forums, or blogs, but if at all possible make sure your easy to connect with just encase someone wants to ask you a direct question you can build friend ship and communicate with certain people that can bring other people to you. Once you get more established you can limit these things out.
9. Control, Mainly what its about when building a online community is somewhat control, you must know how to effectively market your self with out people even thinking about it, so in others getting people to talk about you, and you will have to figure this out your self, but take me up on some of the tips and I can say it will work :).

Related Resources Below

Community Tips for 2007
Social Media 5 factors and Tips for Marketers
 Community and Social Media Marketing Tips - Paul Gillin
Unofficial SEO Blog - Social Media Optimization San Jose 2007Â

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 8:55 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.