Top 5 Ways to Create Community Around Your Site

Posted by Scott deVries on Friday, January 16.

As we move into a new year, we should all be looking closely how our websites have been performing over the last year. Looking at statistics and figures about our site traffic should give us a good picture of what has worked in the past and what we can focus on in the future. Additionally, refreshing and reimagining your website is a great way to boost your customer base as well as your sales.

But what if we want to increase site traffic and develop more solid leads and customers from our sites? We need to create a solid group of website users that can spread the word about us. I've listed a couple of ways to create a user base from your website:

  1. Create a blog. It sounds like old news, but a blog will help you connect with your users and customers. Providing a blog with relevant and useful information is key to establishing and maintaining an ongoing user base for your site - as long as you put time and effort into keeping it updated. Commenting is a must! Your users must have a way to interact with you as well as each other.
  2. Sell things right on your site. Apart from making money from your items, a store allows people to recommend and review your products right online. By having an online store, you can support your big fans, as well as create new ones.
  3. Develop a forum. This is a bigger time commitment, and it's only helpful if you have a decent amount of users on your site. If you can create a forum that becomes the de facto place for your products (or even your industry), you've got customers and fans for a long time to come.
  4. Establish an ecosystem. Providing a place where your users can exchange information, tangible or intangible items, or ideas will be a big draw for new users, especially if you can kickstart it with a large amount of quality items.
  5. Release something of value for free. A surefire way of widening your website's influence, releasing free items will attract subscribers and users quickly. The harder part will be how you can convert those users into paying customers.
    6. Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.