Tips on building an online community. How to attract a community.
March 29, 2008
More and more people now days are attempting to build their own website, and expect it to pull together in just a few minutes. Unfortunately for them this is not at all the case. Building a community and attracting visitors to your website requires allot of work. Domains Seller websites give everyone the impression that when you build a website you automatically get thousands of hits like Facebook, or Youtube. All i have to say to them is Good Luck. Fortunately i have come up with a few tips of my own on building a community for your website.
1. The Community Knows- Listen to your visitors opinions if they give you feedback. Most people make a website expecting to have a very large obvious. Kind of like getting the community to surround him, when he should in-fact be surrounding the community. Take feedback from visitors very seriously. In-fact you should probably have an easy link to your email and or a contact form located on your website.
2. Make it easy for them to access you- Sign up for every social networking website that you can think of including, Facebook, Youtube, Myspace, and Twitter. These websites will become crucial in letting your visitors know that there is fresh content on your website. Also create more than one email account. One that it for the community to email you like bradley@bradwelltv.com, and other ones to receive all of the newsletters from the websites you have signed up for. Make sure you update everything often. That may even mean a few times a day. Just don’t forget that there is a difference between advertising and spamming.
3-Attract the right people- If your running a sports website, you obviously don’t want to get the biggest geek that has ever lived onto your website. You want people that are interested in what you are talking about. Post comments on other Blogs, preferably ones that are related to the subject your are looking for. They usually have a Field where you can put a link to your website. Just remember not to spam on these websites. Your visitors wont respect you if they see that you are Spamming in any sort of way.
4- Stay Committed- If you want a community, you are going to have to work for it. Building a web community takes time just like anything else including school, chores etc. Make sure that you are doing what you want to do, and makes sure that you enjoy it. No one wants to be around someone who dislikes his own work. Staying committed could possibly mean updating when you are on holidays. It could mean updating from a mobile device. It could mean skipping dinner with someone else. OK that you probably shouldn’t do, but you get the point.
5- Stay on topic- Make sure that you are focused on one topic so that the people that visit your website want to stay on your website. For example: If someone has a blog and they have a post about modeling then the next post they talk about spots. They are probably only going to get people looking at the two different subjects separately. What i mean by this is that most likely they will only see the one post, and then leave, as the visitor would have no interest in sports. This doesn’t happen 100% of the time, but is a realistic scenario.
I hope these tips will help you in whatever type of on-line community you may be creating, and i hope that your community will go places. Hey your first way to build a community- Comment on the Post.
Thanks
Bradley Bradwell
Questions?
Email- bradley@bradwelltv.com
Bradwell 
March 29, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Very useful tips, thanks. Moreover, it is essential to find a good niche where you can provide people with something you have passion for and, at the same time, what is really valuable to them.
Good luck!