How to Attract New Members to a Web Community

So you've created a slick design, written riveting content and published your Web community. Now you might ask, "How do I attract new members to my Web community?" The answer is simple: link, get involved and focus. Once you get the ball rolling, your Web community or forum will begin overflowing with visitors and threads.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Internet access
• Computer

1. Start simple. Make your forum easy to join and easy to look at. Make sure it doesn't look like a ghost town. Start with only a couple different board topics where the discussion can be focused, rather than dividing the posts over many different boards.
2. Meet and greet. Check your forum everyday for new visitors. When new users join or make their first post, make sure to greet them and make them feel welcome and excited to get involved in the community. Consider setting up an "introduce yourself" forum where new visitors can make their first post without treading on the toes of others.
3. Create good content. You can't base a Web community around nothing. Either write content that is interesting and will get conversation flowing, or hire someone to write it for you. There are a couple of sites out there that provide free content. See the resources for links.
4. Contribute. As the host, you should be an active presence on your board. Make several posts a day, reply to everyone and try to get conversation rolling. Make sure there are always fresh topics on your board.
5. Get some back links. These are links from other websites to yours. Find some other websites that are related to your Web community and approach them to see if they would like to make a link exchange. Also, try joining Web rings or associations to get your community listed for free.
6. Keep at it. It may take awhile for your Web community to gain popularity, but always be actively promoting and recruiting. Tell all your close friends about it, include links in your signatures for emails and forum postings and your blog. The first few members are the hardest to get, but after that they will grow exponentially.

Tips & Warnings

• One strategy you might want to try: create a couple of different aliases, fictional users with their own personalities and prejudices and have them argue amongst themselves. It's a bit dishonest, but it’s a great way to get people talking and posting.
• Optimize for search engines. Make sure search engine bots and indexing spiders pick up your site and index it correctly. Mention certain keywords in your articles often and keep the content fresh and plentiful.
• Avoid going to other forums and inviting the members to join your Web community. Even though your Web community may be relevant and interesting, others may still view it as spam. Instead, involve yourself in other communities and perhaps provide a link to your community in your profile or signature and people will gravitate to your site naturally.
• Avoid making your Web community difficult to sign up for. Long registration forms, confirmation emails, protected forums and the like will frustrate a potential new member and they will give up.