How to Build an Online Community

There’s no doubt about it: building an online community is essential. Nearly everyone has some kind of social interaction that takes place online; from the latest innovations in social media to old-school forums, blogs and bulletin boards, the internet has revolutionized the way we meet and interact. This can be a powerful thing for anyone looking to grow their business or to make money on the internet, but how can you use it to your advantage – and why should you be trying to?

Five Things a Community Can Do For You

1. If all of your marketing focus is on search engine optimization, you’re giving up all of your own influence on how well your business does – becoming entirely dependent on the decisions of the search engine development teams. An online community keeps things moving, keeps things fresh, keeps people interested and keeps you at the top of the rankings without having to get a degree in SEO to do it.
2. To build up a good online community takes time, effort and resources. Essentially, nobody will want to interact with your business, brand, or blog unless you have something helpful and engaging to offer them – and the more interesting content there is, the better your business will be. Online communities add equity and increase value, both directly and indirectly.
3. Everyone loves to share their opinions, and having a well-developed online community will make you stand out from your competition. Customers new and old will know that they can discuss your products and services with other people just like them before they commit, and you might even be able to turn your brand into something more like a trend – and once it’s cool to come to you, you know you’re onto a winner.
4. It will make it possible for you to do your own kind of market research. With an online community, your entire customer base is at your fingertips – so if you don’t know whether they’d rather you did X or Y next, you can ask them! They’ll let you know, and you’ll get a reputation for being someone who listens to your customers and gives them what they want.
5. It will help you shift your focus from tools (“how can I use Google Adwords to get more traffic?”) to goals (“I want to have 1,000 hits a day in six months’ time”). This might seem like a small distinction, but if you try to use it to your advantage, the benefits can be enormous – you won’t be so bogged down by the small stuff, and you’ll be better able to further your venture in a way that feels natural to you that you know you’ll enjoy.

SEOMoz has created an excellent infographic that will help you understand these ideas and how best to start using them. Incidentally, infographics are a good way to help boost your community and ‘go viral’ – they’re easy to read, easy to share, easy to understand and nice to look at.

A Few Ways to Use This to Your Benefit

• Remember the difference between audience and community. An audience is one-way; they read or watch or otherwise consume your content, they’re passive, they don’t interact or socialize. A community, on the other hand, is anything but passive – they discuss, they join in, they contribute, and perhaps most importantly of all they do all this with each other as well as just with you. A blog with a large audience will get comments that respond to what’s in the post and ask questions to the author; one with a good community will use that same comment facility to engage with each other and discuss your posting among themselves.
• Make sure your content is amazing. Good communities don’t just spring up at random in unexpected places; they’re brought there by someone who is giving them something to talk about. The best way to do this is to provide quality content in a consistent fashion that gets people interested.
• Do everything you can to ensure that it is simple, convenient and tempting for your readers to spread the word about the community you’re building. You need buttons and widgets that make it easy to share, headlines that catch people’s attention, and add credibility to your content by citing sources to show your readers that you have put a lot of thought into your article and make them realize that your article is better than all the others that are probably available on the same topic.
• The best way to encourage community it to participate in it and to lead by example. Put a note at the end of your posts that encourages people to reply with their own experiences of your topic. Respond to every comment or question you receive in a friendly, open manner – and if possible, encourage them to develop a conversation with you and with others in the threads. Engage with your users about the things they care about the most, and let them get to know you as a human being as well as a business person.
• Encourage guest posting or guest contributions from others in your niche, and offer to do the same for them. This is sort of a perfect storm of techniques – you’ll bring your readers to them, they’ll bring their readers to you, and in the end everybody is happy and everybody benefits. Ideally you’ll be working with fellow community-builders who are in the same industry as you and aren’t your direct competition, and who have a similar number of readership as you. That way, everybody wins and nobody feels like they’re at a disadvantage.

For some excellent examples of content-driven online communities, you might want to look at LifeHacker’s extremely successful weekly open comment threads, the busy forum built up by Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, a small perfume house known for its excellent customer service, or the veritable social media empire independent musician Amanda Palmer uses to interact with and get to know her hoards of dedicated fans.

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