Online Communities | Articles

5 ways to attract members to a social networking site

One of the best ways to attract members for your online community is through the quality of your content. If you have high quality, unique, relevant and up-to-date content then you are far more likely to attract members. The same goes for blogs - if you are writing quality articles, you will naturally attract visitors. [...]

Do you consider your target audience when exchanging links?

Link exchanges still prove to be a popular way to gain direct traffic, create relationships with other webmasters, improve search engine rankings and create awareness of your site. There is one important factor you should always ensure you consider before exchanging links with another site though: is the site suitable and relevant to your audience?
Untargeted [...]

Should you ever change your domain name?

I was recently contacted by Smiley, a regular Community Spark reader, who asked me the following question:
I’ve bought www.friendlychatrooms.co.uk since I can’t get my hands on friendlychat.co.uk without the hyphen. Would it be more beneficial (search engine wise) to simply forward friendlychatrooms.co.uk to friendly-chat.co.uk or would it be more beneficial to change the site’s [...]

Do you make these promotional email mistakes?

Marketing and promotion is important for every website - after all, if nobody knows about you, how can you expect people to find your site? One way to inform people about your website is through the use of individual, personalised emails - for example, if I find someone asking questions about building a forum I [...]

The lazy but effective way to promote your site

We don’t need to promote our sites by rushing out to buy megaphones like the guy in the photo above - whilst this could be a great way of attracting attention, you would still need to get out of bed! In this article I will tell you how to effectively promote your site without ever [...]

Attract forum traffic through article writing

You run a forum site, your site has a forum - but does it have anything else? Bulking up your website by adding new sections and publishing articles can create a more engaging user experience, help you attract new traffic and ultimately help your forum become successful.
The more you add, the more you attract

One of [...]

Think before soliciting a link exchange

If you are link building, you need to set yourself apart from all the other link exchange requests that popular sites receive. It is also extremely important that you undertake some basic research on every potential link exchange partner.
What you need to research
It is essential that you take the time to understand the site you [...]

Ensure your community has a brand

Brands are important - they are what separates one service or product from another. Your website should be no different; it should have a brand and a positive brand association to go with it.
The importance of branding
There are billions of websites online and this number is constantly growing. I have already written about the importance [...]

Using other forums as promotional tools

It is hard getting a new community established. You rely on your members to establish a community, but new members will not join a community unless you have members to start off with!
In this article I will write about how you can promote your new community and gain knowledge and learn new things at the [...]

The importance of a good domain name

People are often very simple creatures - they struggle to remember things that may be a little confusing or contain ambiguity. This is why it is essential that before you even start your community site, you spend a good amount of time choosing a suitable domain name.
Keep it simple
Always keep your domain name as simple [...]

Link building IV - Creating awareness

This is the concluding article in a series that started on 22 May 2007, with ‘Link building I - Gaining direct traffic‘, and was followed with ‘Link building II - Creating relationships‘ on 24 May 2007 and ‘Link building III - Improving search rankings‘ on 28 May 2007.
In this article I will write about how [...]

Link building III - Improving search rankings

This article is a continuation of the article series that started on 22 May 2007, with ‘Link building I - Gaining direct traffic‘, and was followed with ‘Link building II - Creating relationships‘ on 24 May 2007.
In this article I will write about how to improve your search engine rankings through the link building process.
Identify [...]

Link building II - Creating relationships

This article is a continuation of the article series that started on 22 May 2007, with ‘Link building I - Gaining direct traffic‘.
In this article I will write about how the link building process can help create and nurture relationships with other web developers and the benefits these relationship can bring.
Link building is not used [...]

Link building I - Gaining direct traffic

Starting a community site is a real challenge - without people you have no community, but people don’t want to join a community when there are no other members!
Getting an online community started from scratch is a huge challenge, but I believe there is no more rewarding site than a successful online community.
In this link [...]

Top 5 Newsletter Design Tips

Further to my articles on the value of email newsletters and common email newsletter mistakes, Javier Marti from Trendirama.com wrote a comment requesting an example of an effective newsletter design.
Whilst I cannot preach the gospel when it comes to good newsletter design, I can use examples of the newsletters I send to newsletter subscribers at [...]

Google’s PageRank updates

As you may be aware, Google is currently updating the PageRank it awards to websites it includes in its search database. Google uses PageRank to determine your site’s popularity and credibility. The higher your PageRank, the more authoritative Google considers your site to be.
I use the PageRank checker over at PRchecker to keep an eye [...]

Don’t obsess about search engines

I see many webmasters fretting about how their site will be viewed by search engines. Indeed, I think that many site owners spend more time worrying about the opinions that search engines hold about their site over what real visitors will think!
I believe that if you focus on creating original and exceptional content, search engine [...]

Forum competitions are a bad idea

Many people think that running forum competitions are a good way of building an online community. I disagree. I have seen many competitions that offer prizes to the member that makes the most posts each month - the forum is then deluged with useless posts such as ‘I agree’ or a couple of smilies, and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]