Starting Your Online Community

Together with my Team, I see my role as helping to make sure that your community grows and thrives.

In this blog series, I’ll share with you a series of tips that will enable you to get more out of PeepSo and help you to turn your users into a real society.

That’s the goal: not just to build your membership but to build a community in which people participate and to which they return.

Let’s start by talking about your very first members.

Choose them carefully.

It’s tempting when you’re building a new community to try to bring in as many people as possible. That’s the wrong approach.

They’ll arrive, they’ll look around, they’ll see nothing happening… and they’ll leave.

Before you throw open the door to the masses, build a small community that other people will want to join. Invite the movers and shakers of your topic into the community. Ask them to contribute content and get them talking to you and to each other.

When other people can see that a party filled with interesting people has already started, they’ll want to join in. They’ll also see that joining the party means participating, not lurking.

Quora succeeded in a Q&A space that had beaten both Google and Yahoo because its early members were VIPs. Choose your first members with the same degree of selectivity and you should find your membership and your engagement build naturally.

That’s all for now. If you have any questions or comments do feel free to post them on our community page here. In the next post, I’ll be looking at the differences between the various kinds of communities publishers build and what those differences mean for you.