05/28/09 by Rosie Sherry | Blog | No Comments »
A common strategy to grow a sustainable and profitable online community is to recruit a relatively large a mount of members. The business model would then to be upsell to the members with an expectation that only a small amount will take up the offers. This small percentage would be enough to make the online community sustainable and profitable.
However, there can be different models, here is one idea:
True Fans community
This type of online community is where the majority of your community members love what you are doing and have a very high and probable chance of paying for something that you create. So instead of having 1% of members generating income, 99% do.
A True Fan community means that the quantity of members are significantly smaller, but that’s ok because the majority are contributing to your cause.
It doesn’t mean a True Fans community can’t grow into a much larger community, but it does mean that much more focus should be given to each fan. This is possible in smaller groups, but gets much more difficult (or impossible) in larger online communities.
See: 1,000 True Fans for a very interesting read on the idea of True Fans.
Photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/humanoide/138782217/
05/23/09 by Rosie Sherry | Blog | No Comments »
You have an online community or want to start one. You want to promote it. Where do you start?
Here are (just) some ideas:
- Build up whuffie before you start a community
- Tell your mates about it
- Ask your close network if they know anyone who may be interested
- Start a blog
- Give others a reason to write about your online community
- Join the conversation on Twitter
- Love and be extra good to the first 10/100/1000 members
- Get members spreading the word (without realising it)
- Don’t use bribery as a form of promotion
- Keep the community visibly active
- Do the grunt work, persistently and consistently
- Make friends within the community
- Write an article or whitepaper for someone else
- Write an eBook
- Write good and postive things about your industry and people
- Avoid negative behaviour
- Don’t steal members from competing online communities
- Create a presence elsewhere
- Ensure all the best and latest stuff is found first within your online community
- Come up with your own unique ideas
- Ask for feedback
- Be honest
- Be helpful
- Consider web advertising once a vibrant community has been formed
05/20/09 by Rosie Sherry | Blog | No Comments »
The web has gone social and so has link building. Forget the “can we swap links” or “I’m pretty cool, please put me on your blogroll”. That’s the old way. It may have worked a few years ago, but is now most likely a waste of your precious time.
Have things really changed that much?
Frankly yes. I’m looking back five years and the truth is:
- most people didn’t have a personal website, blog or web presence
- most people didn’t use the likes of tagging and social bookmarking
- getting to the top of search engines was largely attempted by incoming links and the right kind of content on your web site
- social networking did not exist as it does now
There are now so many people online. The majority I would say have some kind of web presence. It might be as simple as being on FaceBook or Twitter, through to the the more involved of having a website or being strongly involved within an online community.
Link building still exists in a much different form and it may not be entirely about search rankings – it’s more now a form of online social existence. Think about it, how can links be measured when they are being posted where search engines cannot reach?
The clever way to do link building and attract people to your online community is to get people to do it for you – without them realising it!
Consider this a guide, it’s not comprehensive, but it should hopefully get you thinking in a different way.
Raising awareness
The hardest part of starting any online community is the beginning. It sure can be hard work. All the technology is in place, but where are the people? They haven’t come flocking. Why? Because in the real world this doesn’t usually happen. People are busy, what’s in it for them?
Some basic tips to raise awareness:
- Write something useful – an article, a guide, an opinion, something people would find difficult to find elsewhere
- Get others to write about you – perhaps a blogger or a magazine could feature something about your online community
- Focus on the people you do have – make them feel special. Help them out. Go the extra mile. Give them a superb reason to tell their friends about you.
- Don’t talk about how great your online community is – let other people do that for you.
Social bookmarking
If you are the only one book marking your own site it’s not really going to have much of a positive effect. The results happen when other people are doing the bookmarking for you. Not only do you get the valuable links, but if they have a following there’s a better chance other people may pick up on the information.
Example bookmarking sites: delicious and StumbleUpon
Social Networking
Not all links posted within a social network or online community are equal. Some people are trusted more and may have a bigger network of ‘friends’. If a link is posted by someone with 10 ‘friends’ compared to someone with 1000 ‘friends’, who would you prefer to post the link? Search engines may not see a difference in the link value, but people do.
Closed social networks should also not be underestimated. Much of FaceBook and LinkedIn are closed (ie. not searchable by the likes of Google), but the opportunity to drive traffic and increase awareness is immense.
Create a presence elsewhere
For your own sanity and for the sake of being efficient, pick and choose networks where you have a chance of making an impact.
For example, if you run a professional online community then somewhere like LinkedIn or Facebook is a good bet to interact or create a group. However, you would be wasting your time to create a presence on Bebo (which is where teenagers hang out).
Remember that by having an online community you want people joining and having the conversations in your space, not on others. So whatever kind of presence you are creating remember that the focus is to attract them to your online community.
schux build, maintain and nurture online communities.
Photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/luc/1824234195/
05/12/09 by Rosie Sherry | Blog | No Comments »
There’s no shortage of online communities out there. With the likes of
Ning or
SocialGO it seems like everyone is having a go. However, if you have a real look at the majority of online communities that have been created they are like ghost towns.
So what should you check for when joining an online community?
Here are some ideas:
- Who started the community? Do you believe in the person or organisation? Do their values align with yours?
- The focus of the community should naturally be of interest to you. Do you think you will get value from it? What is in it for you?
- How long has the community been around? Do you believe it will be around in the longer term?
- What kind of activity is going on? Is it currently active? When was the last post of any kind?
- Is it actively moderated? Any sign of spam or inconsiderate users?
05/08/09 by Rosie Sherry | Blog | No Comments »
Around 2 years ago we started the Software Testing Club. It started as a low key experiment and is now a thriving and leading online community for software testers.
There are some really nice and collaborative exercises happening over there at the moment. Such as the Software Testing Book and the Software Testing Mentors group.
Testing has long been stigmatised with being a boring or second choice career path. The lack of a professional community has not helped the perception. This is why I wrote an article (which conveniently was featured) for a the new TEST Magazine.
Download a PDF copy of A call to arms.
05/07/09 by Rosie Sherry | Blog | No Comments »
Ever been involved in a project that spent loads up front to only find it flop soon after launch?
It happens all too often with online communities. People and organisations spend so much time and money with perfection to only find that their users want something completely different.
Consider starting a simple online community, get a few key and enthusiastic people involved at the beginning and allow them to help you evolve the community in a way that makes all of you happy.
You spend less. Your founding community members feel more involved. Results in an all around winning formula.
05/07/09 by Rosie Sherry | Blog | No Comments »
How to increase your Twitter followers
Just so you know, I’m not recommending this as a solution 
Now that Twitter has gone mainstream there are people left, right and center finding ways to use it. Finding people to follow. Looking for ways for people to follow them. A common trend now is monitoring keywords. So, people interested in SEO might monitor people who are tweeting about ‘search engine optimisation’ or ‘SEO’.
Tracking keywords on Twitter is fast becoming the norm. I personally track a handful of keywords for myself (e.g. rosiesherry). What people are now doing is finding people based on keywords and following them as a result.
So, this is generally ok if there is a genuine interest, but gets slightly annoying when innocent tweets including words such as ‘weight loss’, ‘diet’, ‘loans’ (etc) leads to a flurry of new spammy followers.
It might make you seem more popular, but as someone who has been on Twitter for 2+ years it makes me feel sad that Twitter has now gone mainstream.
