How About the BEST WAY to build your community?

[php4ever]

I saw the post on the worst way to build your community, how about the best way? I came to this forum for the first time today and this is my first post because I was referred by another developer?

I'll sound off first with my two favorite ideas of a good way to build your community.

a) Offer RSS feeds and syndicated articles to other sites.
b) Publish, Publish, Publish, and incase you missed it, Publish. Publish everything you can from free articles to research material. I always find it interesting when someone speaks to rookies and newbies in terms they can understand. I find I attract more clients that way as well.

My two cents.

Jared. :mrgreen:

[bigcurt]

Get something that gets peoples attention...via skin, download section things like that...be UNIQUE.

[dexterz]

I agreed with big. Offer something unique and people will come. Incorporate other things that won't make your site visitors feel boring.

<< Signatures to be setup in your user profile >>

[curiousdan]

Well, basically you go to other forums like this one or any forum and make friends or post something about your forum and then people will visit it. Creating commnuities is the hardest. Like cutting rock with a hand. Its like very hard almost impossible to do as well as DANIWEB. She should be the one you should be asking not being mean?

[curiousdan]

That is the hardest part gaining a reputation

[Scribbller]

Well to me the secret is to provide on the dot help and good discussions and most importantly provide as much exclusive content as you can. Exclusive content is the major key it solved the major problem of what to discuss. When the content is yours people will discuss it on your community. Reputation and a friendly community will automatically build around it.

[php4ever]

Its been stated that "Appearance is Golden, But Content is King"
CONTENT, Lots and lots of content. I didn't join DaniWeb because of the subject matter (programming and web related) , these kinds of forums are a dime a dozen. I joined DaniWeb because it has CONTENT that caters to my interest.

About Reputation:
Although Scribbller's statement about reputation may have been true prior to the web, reputation is forgiven to a greater extent for internet companies and communities.

Reputation can by synthetic and certainly manufactured. The key in anything relating to marketing is PERCEPTION. PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING which complaments reputation.

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tip #1; PERCEPTION, People side with the "perceived" or expected winner, people gravitate to the "perceived" beauty, champ or success. Even if the definition of those things change, "perception" will determine how its acted on.

tip #2; Forums like DaniWeb are beatuiful because they have rich content. You as a forum owner can take content and make it <php?{content}?> in any of your sites web pages outside of your fourm. You now draw attention to the forum.
=======================================================

Reputation is important, but I wouldn't focus on it as my primary marketing plan. Grow your forum community with Unique Content and Paint Pictures of Perception.

A SIDE NOTE: To gain more members, prevent the complete reading of articles and downloads and even responses to articles to ONLY registered members. I've been in dozens of forums that allow guest posts and guest downloads. Not entirely wise.

Jared.

[php4ever]

Sorry:

My partners read my above response and gave me a lot of crap about it so I though I'd include a small story about reputation and how important it is.

I don't mean to put down other advice in this forum and I'm sorry if I came across that way. Here is how I tackled a REPUTATION ISSUE.

=======================================================
Years ago when in college I was in the AMWAY business. One thing I hated
more than anything was the bad perception people had with the name AMWAY.
If you tried to sell a product or recruit a new distributor you had to do it with
deceptive tactics that didn't sit well with me.

We came up with this idea:
AMWAY had a real good product called LOC (Liquid Organic Cleaner) which could be used to clean metals and fine porcelain. Talking with my friends in the jewelry business I discovered they used very expensive Sionic Cleaning Solutions in the Sionic Cleaners.

We racked our brains and came up with the idea to re-bottle the LOC in 2oz bottles with a simple black and white label for instructions. No Name! We printed the self sticking labels at Kinkos and were in business.

Next: We gave them to all the jewelers and jewelry related businesses in the area for free. "If you like it you call us, if not you call us, we'll pick up the bottle."

Long story short, our tactic worked so well that we eventually sold to retirement homes, (some hospitals) hotels, restaurants, and many other businesses this way. People were truly surprised to discover that it was AMWAY.

How interesting we thought a bad rap. Reputation and perception being engineered the way we wanted.
=======================================================

There;
I said my two cents worth about the importance of Reputation.

Jared.

[dexterz]

I was one of Amway/Quixtar pro-sumers untill I smelled something not good going on the company.

To php4ver: Our site used to be accesible to members only, but then we received tons of e-mail complaining about the membership "Why do I have to register just to read an articles?". So, we made some changes by allowing non-members to be able to read articles, submit articles, download files and submitt files, while other functions such as writing a review and posting to the forum is accesible by members only. After the changes have made. We noticed our site daily traffic have jump to 90% averaging 6,000 unique visitors a day which is not bad at all. We figured it out, 30% of the 6,000 visitors have actually registered the site. Just do what works best in your community portal.

Dexter

[php4ever]

dexterz;
I agree with you in your case.
I'm impressed. That kind of change is what most could hope for. I'm glad such a strategy worked for you.

For myself, I tend to agree with an open membership policy with the exception of posting replies and downloading and certainly no uploading.

What I did in one instance is use a forum (PhpBB in that case) and created a PHP script to allow downloads on the main website. I was able to still track download stats which is really what we were after.

Sorry about your AMWAY experience;
I agree as it seems people where another wholesale product in that organization.

Jared.

[myindya]

Create mutiple (duplicate) accounts and make 10post minimum using diffrent username, it helps to show off your forum is active, do this until new members start posting on your forums, reply to your new members postings promptly -using your duplicate username, not siteadmin (even it doesnt make sense!!)this makes them happy and it will encourage them to be regular user, PM new members with a welcome note, i send a message

"hi and welcome to My____ forum
please make a post in the New Members Intro forum and also, please feel free to join in anything that takes your fancy x
http://yourURL.com/index???

For technical problems contact me(not able to login, post or reply et al).

thanks"

Give away surprise gifts to members, run contest frequently...

Send email to all non active members to join the fun and request them to introduce or post in your forums ( i send mail every week and it works for me - few nonactive members started posting 1 or 2 postings)

I am also new in creating community and this is what i learnt so far to make successful to my new forum and still squeezing my brain to find out further ways :cry:

[php4ever]

Heres a very important way, mod-rewrite! Most of the popular forum packages today offer some sort of hack for search-engine friendly URLs.

Honestly you cant live without them anymore.

Jared.

[myindya]

thanks for that info php4ever,

hmm is there any hack for phpbb? i have to check up that..

[php4ever]

MYINDA; Yes there is and I'm sure you should avoid it for now since olympus is soon to be released, so they say. I get my phpbb mod from the phpbb+ website.

Jared.

[HeldCaptive]

Well, let me ask you all this..

You all say "Content, content, content!" Then how do you start a off-topic community? How do you start a community of normal talking? :o

[betts01]

Well, let me ask you all this..

You all say "Content, content, content!" Then how do you start a off-topic community? How do you start a community of normal talking? :o

I think most communities need to at least start with a theme. People who are interested in that theme will migrate to your site. But, I've found that when everyone has discussed everything new ad nauseum, it's good to topics that are of general interest to the members of your forum. Since I moderate a musician's website, we have an area to discuss him, but we also have an area for other music, assuming most of the people who join have an interest in music in general. We also have a hobbies/pastimes section where people can find others with the same interests, and we have a games sections, which a lot of the posters seem to find fun.

[Dani]

Well, let me ask you all this..

You all say "Content, content, content!" Then how do you start a off-topic community? How do you start a community of normal talking? :o

Content doesn't necessarily have to be rigid articles, tutorials, and information. Content is any text on a page that is worth reading ... whether that be because it's informative or for its entertainment value. If you want to start an off-topic forum, start by posting jokes, riddles, anecdotes, polls, questions that stimulate discussion, etc.

[betts01]

Well, let me ask you all this..

You all say "Content, content, content!" Then how do you start a off-topic community? How do you start a community of normal talking? :o

I think the normal talking is hard. It's not that difficult to get people to post a quick reply, but that doesn't really generate conversation. We've started what we call "party" threads that are designed for people who just want to chat with each other. They work reasonably well, especially if people who are on the forum but not posting are invited in.