How to create an online community?

Here are some recognisable milestones that will help your business on its journey towards building a successful online community:

• Create a portal that will allow the publication of high quality and personalised content.

• Find prospects by bookmarking and increasing SEO with specific buzz words that customers are likely to search online.

• Convert visitors into registered users by developing a simple registration process that will ensure users supply personal information in order to personalise communication accordingly. This will not only benefit your online community in terms of managing different types of customer and encouraging discussion, but email campaigns and other marketing messages will benefit from extra data.

• Convert registered users into buyers and subscribers by offering the option to opt in to certain extra services and direct users to online shops with personalised and relevant offers based upon the data that each user has supplied.

• Build up a community by encouraging users to complete profiles and attend virtual events.

• Engage social media and create user magnets such as blogs, forums and wikis. Develop groups that users can join to interact with other users.

• Start promotion through RSS feeds and regular newsletters to registered users as well as visitors.
Once you have developed a vibrant community, you can start to build an ecosystem around it, bringing vendors and advertisers in so that you can begin to make money. Virtual events are a simple way to maintain momentum and engage with your online community as well as providing a further revenue channel.

Extracts of the article written by: Dirk Schlenzig