Building Your Community On Your Site

Pablo's cubism period began at three
photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Having an active community behind you can increase sales, build your brand, and serve as your very own volunteer promotional army to help get your word out. But how do you go about creating one? How do you jump start that feeling of community on your site so that you’re able to leverage it?

Your users are what makes your community cool and worth following, so always make sure you are promoting your users rather than promoting yourself on your site. Give them something that they can get behind and be passionate about in their lives. People want something that strikes them and brings out their passion, so always provide a product or service that will enable them to get behind it, as recently suggested on Small Biz Trends.

Create some sort of board that announces the main contributors to your site. They are the people that ultimately help your site and community grow, and they are the ones constantly giving feedback, posting comments and passing on the word about your site. So give back to them by showing off their constant contributions to the site.

In the end, always make sure that you are protecting your site. There should be some sort of order that is held in your community and as the site owner it will be your responsibility to keep that order among the community members.