Online Communities | Articles

Fight like a champion for your forum members

It costs businesses far more to attract a new customer than it does to retain a current one. Of course, this makes perfect sense - once you have a customer, you simply need to keep them happy and meet their needs in order to retain them. Without a customer, you have no sales and have [...]

Here is a method that is helping forums succeed

If you want your online community to be successful, you need to engage with your members and encourage interaction. During your community’s early development, this can be difficult to do - with a low member base you may find there is a lack of interaction. If this continues, you will not attract new members, and [...]

Now you can work less and achieve more

Some of the more observant amongst you would have noticed that the number of articles published on this blog dropped over the past couple of weeks. Don’t worry - I haven’t lost interest in Community Spark, I have simply been enjoying some time off.
A break can help you focus and remain motivated

The reason for the [...]

The little known way to please all your visitors

Everyone knows that for your website to be successful, you need to please your visitors. Your site needs to be easy to use, and must meet the needs and wants of your visitors if you are to retain them. If you make your site too basic though, you risk alienating your regular, long term members.
Keep [...]

Forums don’t have to be popular to be good

When developing your forum it is easy to have only one target - to get as many members as you can. A successful forums needs to have a huge number of members, right? Not necessarily.
What makes a good forum?
It is easy to surf the Web and come across a forum with a huge number of [...]

Who else wants more advertising revenue?

A lot of people develop a website to make money. I would wager that most of you reading this blog are aiming to make money from your website - maybe not now, maybe not in the forseeable future, but maybe eventually.
Expressing a desire to make money from your website is nothing to be ashamed of [...]

Be proactive now or you’ll hate yourself later

As a developer of an online community, it is essential that you are always proactive and thinking about the future. If you don’t watch the competition and think about whether your members will be happy tomorrow, you are only inviting stagnation, decline and the ultimate death of your community.
Always plan for the future
It doesn’t matter [...]

The secret to understanding member feedback

Regular readers of this blog will know that I always talk about the importance of making your community website feedback friendly. If people are afraid to offer suggestions and feedback, your site is missing out on its most effective method of evolution: becoming exactly what its members want it to be.
Inviting and receiving feedback is [...]

5 ways to show your members you love them

If you are developing an online community, it is vital that you convert as many visitors into members as possible. It is no good going to all the effort of converting visitors if you are unable to get them to stick around and contribute, though!
In this article I will describe the five best ways of [...]

Are you frustrating your visitors?

A visitor arrives at your website – great, huh? Well, yes – but if you are frustrating your visitors, they might as well never have arrived in the first place.
Web users are lazy
I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: Web users are lazy. If you don’t believe me, think of your own [...]

Warning: Big advertisers hate forums

As soon as your forum is generating huge amounts of content and traffic every single day, advertising networks will be desperate for your business, right? Sorry, it doesn’t work that way - many advertisers hate your website, regardless of how good it really is.
Advertising networks frown upon user generated content
It doesn’t really matter how popular [...]