Online Communities | Articles

Common email newsletter mistakes

Yesterday I wrote about the value of email newsletters and how you should use them to strengthen your community and encourage return visits. Today I want to talk about common email newsletter mistakes - mistakes which are all too common and can actually be more damaging to your site than not having a newsletter campaign [...]

Recommended web development blogs

On top of administering this blog and my websites, I frequently visit a number of other web development / business related blogs and thought I would share a couple of them with you here.
Recommended blog # 1 - TylerCruz.com
I found this blog many months ago and enjoyed reading Tyler’s posts on how his life has [...]

The value of email newsletters

Way back at the beginning of the month, I wrote a post about the importance of engaging with your members. In the article I stressed the importance of welcoming new users to your community and ensuring all email enquiries are responded to quickly and accurately.
In this article I want to talk about yet another way [...]

LinkAlizer case study

I recently read about LinkAlizer at BlogCityTales and it seemed like a good way of finding new websites to exchange links with. Therefore, I thought I would sign up and see how things went.
If you have a high number of relevant, quality websites linking to yours it will boost your search engine popularity. As Community [...]

Avoiding traffic greed

I touched upon the issue of ‘traffic greed’ in an earlier post and thought I would elaborate a little further on this term today.
What is traffic greed?
Traffic greed occurs when you are eager to attract traffic to your website at any cost. You want visitors and you want them now. You want people on your [...]

The importance of rules

As online communities become established, it is not uncommon for people to begin to argue and disagree. After all, if we all had the same opinions on everything the world would be a dull place, right? Public disagreements in a community are fine, and indeed they should be discouraged to a certain extent as they [...]

A common mistake with forums

I mentioned in an earlier post the importance of taking the time and effort to create content on a new forum yourself. If visitors arrive to see an empty forum, they will not feel inclined to join. Therefore it is down to you to stimulate interaction and encourage visitors to become members and stick around.
A [...]

Starting a forum from scratch

I was browsing the SitePoint forums the other day when I came across someone who was about to launch a brand new online community.
The hardest part of developing an online community is just getting it started and established in the first place. The person in question had started the website but only as a way [...]

StumbleUpon case study results

Well it has now been a week since I setup an advertising account for Just Chat over at StumbleUpon. My initial intention was to allow the traffic to flow for a week, and then see how effective the traffic was by comparing it to a benchmark figure for the number of ‘Bounces’ the Just Chat [...]

Read your contracts

You hear it time and time again - do not sign anything unless you have read it first! In this digital age it is all too easy to forget this and scroll past terms and conditions and click the ‘I Accept’ box. I will be the first to admit complacency in this regard and decided [...]

How to recruit forum moderators

As your forum becomes more popular, it is important to ensure it is well moderated. At first, this can easily be done just by yourself. However, as your community grows you will find it increasingly difficult to effectively moderate your forum alone.
As you come across other forums you will notice that many have a number [...]

Has your hosting hit the wall?

For those that do not know, I am currently in training to run the Flora London Marathon on 22 April this year. I am certainly no athlete, and definitely no runner - the training for the run is exhausting, and I have just got back from a 25km (15 mile) run. At the moment, I [...]

The most important link exchange factor

What factors do you take into account when considering what sites to set up a link exchange with? I take into account the standard factors such as:

What is the site’s current PageRank?
Is the site relevant to my audience?
Do I actually like the site?
What kind of traffic is their site getting?

Of course, all of these are [...]

Are you paying your taxes?

It seems that here in the UK, the Inland Revenue is really starting to take a strong interest in people who are making money online but have not declared themselves as self employed, and are therefore not paying any tax on their income.
Warnings have started to appear on eBay reminding people that if they are [...]

Expanding too quickly can mean failure

There is no point building a skyscraper to house five people. It is far better to start off small and build new floors as and when they are needed. Forums are no different.
I am sure many of you have come across forums that have so many categories you just do not know where to start! [...]

Should you allow lurkers to view forum posts?

In most forum software you can decide whether visitors to your website who are not members are allowed to view or read posts. I have often come across forums where I am not even able to view topics, let alone posts unless I register. I have also come across forums that let me see topics [...]

Want more money? Ask!

Many community websites are monetised nowadays, whether through Google Adsense, Affiliate Links or paid posts / paid links etc - the list is virtually endless!
How happy are you with the rates you are being paid? Are you sending an advertiser a lot of traffic and think you should be getting paid more? Well ask for [...]

StumbleUpon case study

Well as promised, I have now setup a trial with StumbleUpon to see the effects of their advertising program on traffic at Just Chat. As detailed in a previous post on the subject, I am not interested in people visiting the site and simply leaving once they get to the index page - there is [...]

Death and taxes

There are three things that are certain in this world - death, taxes and the fact you CAN build a successful online community if you work hard
I have been reading a few blogs of late which talk about tax. Unfortunately if you are making money online, the government will no doubt want a [...]

ForumRank

ForumRank is a website I came across a few days ago. They are basically a forum ranking directory - you submit your forum, their site sends a crawler to your forum and then ranks your forum based on their own algorithm.
They do not go into much detail about what factors are considered in their algorithm, [...]

The importance of trust

As I have touched upon in a previous post, it is essential that visitors to your website feel that they can trust you. This doesn’t have to be to the extent that they email you asking for you to look after their children on a Saturday night, but there should be a basic foundation of [...]

StumbleUpon take two

I finally managed to get an activation email from StumbleUpon by using my Yahoo! email address. I have no idea why the one sent to my business email address was not being received - I checked all the spam filters but am still clueless.
Anyway, I have decided to give StumbleUpon’s advertising program a try for [...]

Are load times costing you traffic?

It is so very easy in this broadband age we are currently enjoying to forget that not everyone has a fast connection. I have been playing around building websites since around 1999. At this time, a 56kbps connection was about the best a home user could expect - consequently those responsible for designing websites paid [...]

Interviews

Do you run a community website? Would you like to be interviewed on this blog and receive additional exposure for yourself and your site? If so, please drop me an email at martin (<at>) communityspark.com so we can get the ball rolling!
We can conduct the interview completely via email or a messenger application. I believe [...]

Stumbled over

I came across the website StumbleUpon a few weeks ago and thought I would give their advertising program a try. Basically, StumbleUpon is a browser add-on which allows you to easily find new websites which may be of interest to you.

Screenshot of the browser plug-in
You simply click on a category that interests you, [...]

Should you ‘fake’ your forum?

As I mentioned in yesterday’s article, one of the things a new visitor to your website will look at is the number of members and posts, and how recent those posts were. Some websites I have come across have attempted to edit these figures to portray a more active community. Some may see this as [...]

The importance of creating content

You are at work and called to a meeting. You turn up, but nobody is there. You leave. The following day you are called to the same meeting. Again, nobody is there. How long before you stop going to the meeting altogether? It’s exactly the same for visitors to a website - if they arrive [...]

Think before redesigning your website

So you have your website running, you are building up a decent community, your users are generally happy but you feel it is time for a site redesign. Sounds like a natural progression for your site, right? Well … perhaps.
Time and time again I have seen sites herald in a new design which is plainly [...]

The importance of backing up!

My apologies for the lack of posts on Thursday and Friday - I had the power to my home cut off completely the whole time. It meant I could not work, could not watch TV, could not enjoy the luxury of hot water and heating, and could not even go online!
This did give me time [...]

Don’t forget the little things

On Monday I wrote about the importance of being unique through the design of your site / forum / blog. There are however, some even simpler steps you can take to make your community a little different to all the others out there.
Let’s take the forum software phpBB firstly as an example. I won’t discuss [...]

Should you employ paid forum posters?

The biggest challenge in trying to get a forum established is getting people to join up and post. To have a successful community, you need members and activity but with minimal members and activity it is extremely hard to get people to sign up in the first place.
At this stage you may be considering using [...]

The importance of being unique

Yesterday I mentioned that it is always a good idea to keep an eye on the competition for inspiration for your website. I also stated that inspiration is all you should be interested in getting from your competition - if you copy what they do you will not have anything to differentiate yourself from the [...]

Watch the competition

It can be really easy to get carried away on new developments for your community website, and often it is tempting to include more and more features for your community. Often features are introduced and are rarely used by the community which can be an unnecessary expense and waste of time for the administrator who [...]

Engaging with members

It is extremely important when building a community website to ensure you engage with your members. This means welcoming them to your community, answering any questions they have promptly and correctly and making them feel valued.
You should always ensure your users feel valued within the forum environment. Welcoming new members is particularly important - but [...]

Welcome!

After eight years of fooling around online, I have decided to jump on the blogging bandwagon.
Back in 2000, I established www.justchat.co.uk which has since developed into one of the UK’s most popular online communities.
Some people consider online communities to be one of the easiest websites to setup and develop as most of the content is [...]