Community Building 101

Building a thriving online community is a challenging task. It takes plenty of time and effort, and if done incorrectly eat steal your soul. You’ll likely spend quite a bit of time pushing it on other forums and blogs, and even more time moderating and setting it up - be prepared for some long hours. The rewards of running a successful community are certainly worth the effort however.

I’ve prepared a few items to help you build a more successful community.

Find Your Niche

While this seems rather obvious, it deserves more thought than most people give it. You want to choose a niche that isn’t overly saturated, but that has the potential to reach a high volume of users. Once you’ve found a niche, do your due diligence; check stats for keywords to estimate available traffic, visit other sites in the niche and analyze what they have done well and what they’ve done poorly… and not just the successful sites either, you’ll find plenty of great but poorly executed sites out there to take a cue from.

Name it

Again with the obvious. Why? Because a name is about more than the topic. While “OldFartsPlayingPokerOnline.com” is certainly descriptive of a poker forum for people too old to see their cards, it’s not particularly useful in creating buzz. Maybe “TooOldToFold.com” would be a better choice.

You want a descriptive or distinctive name (of course if you can find a name that is both that’s the way to go). The name should be short, easy to remember. A descriptive name is good, but a buzz worthy and distinctive name is better. SitePoint is a great example of a distinctive and descriptive name. It’s short, simple, and tells what the site is about.

While picking out domains names, it’s a good idea to do it while visiting a registrar. Falling in love with a great name and finding it taken is never fun. NameCheap, GoDaddy, and Dotster are all good places to register, though GoDaddy will try and sell you everything from hosting to t-shirts during checkout.

Get Hosted

You’ll need hosting for your forum. Most any host will do but some are certainly better than others. I’ve been happy with HostGator, ASmallOrange, VPSlink, and MediaTemple. I’ve rarely heard anything good about GoDaddy or 1and1 hosting, and I had a horrid experience with eleven2.com.

Forum Package

There are plenty of great options for forums. I’m a big fan of MyTopix and Vanilla, buy just about anything with regular patches and a good community will do. Keep in mind that going Open-Source is not necessarily cheaper. I’ve found the Open-Source forums to be a bit more expensive to have skinned and coded than their commercial brethren. Some of the more popular forum packages are MyTopix, VBulletin, SMF, and IPB.

Get a Design

There are plenty of popular forums out there running with the default skin, but why hobble yourself before the race has even started? Find a reputable designer (preferably one who specializes in forum skins) and get cracking. A design goes a long way towards telling the first time visitor who the site is and what its about. Make them look at what you’ve got in 3 seconds or you’ll lose them. SitePoint, DigitalPoint, and TalkFreelance are all good places to start your hunt for a designer.

Create the Forums

Choose a smart and targeted set of initial forums. Your first instinct may be to have a forum for everything under the sun, but fight it. You want to find a balance of well targeted sections with just enough to keep people poking about. If your site is about LEGO, is there really a need for a forum about MegaBlock? Maybe, but certainly not Lincoln Logs, K-NEX, and Erector Set.

Keep on topic, one general discussion area is a good thing. Members always need to be a bit spammy now and again, give them somewhere to do it without disrupting the flow.

Build Traffic

So you’ve followed my sage advice, and have a kick ass forum full of… tumble weeds… Time to get some users.

One popular yet iffy way to go is to hire a forum population service such as WiredFlame or ForumShock - ForumShock is spoken of highly by Lee Dodd so it can’t be all bad. The good is you are guaranteed to have posts and users, the bad is that the post quality of these services is unpredictable at best.

The tried and true methods of signature whoring, link exchanges and in-post links are my favorites.

Advertise your site on other forums (assuming they allow member announcements and so forth) , hit up your friends and get them to add your site to their signature on forums, emails, msn, the works. If they are really good friends you might even get them to blog about you a bit. Trade posts with other new forum owners. This is a good way to get decent quality posts without spending a dime. AdminFusion has a steady flow of exchanges.

Once you’ve a nice base of regulars it might be time to spend some money to build your user base. Find forums and blogs in the same niche, and advertise with them (costs allowing of course). You can often contact the site owner to purchase ads space even if it isn’t advertised. If they use Adsense you can use the site targeting tool to send ads right at their site. Directories such as BestOfTheWeb can be a good source of uniques as well. Some directories cost so do your research to weed out the undesirables.

The Wrap Up

That pretty much covers the basics of starting your forum. Next week I’ll be writing a bit about monetization and affiliation for forum earnings so subscribe to the feed and check it out.