Build a community, then build a site
It seems like a backwards model - you should have a site first, then build a community around it - at least that's the common way of thinking. I've reversed that model for this particular site, mostly out of circumstance, but I really think that's the best way to go about it.For young sites, the problem you run into most frequently is "how to get visitors". Of course that leads directly to a conversation about SEO, but search engines don't like young sites very much these days, and it is rare for a young site to get much visibility in high traffic search terms. That's just the first question, however. Once you get visitors coming through and you get rankings, the question is - "how to get people to keep coming back?". Now that you've put all this time, money, and energy into marketing, you end up finally thinking about things like quality, frequently updated content, and community.
It's not an easy thing to do, but building a community first allows you to do a few things. First and foremost, you get the chance to age your site a little bit before you spend a lot of money on promotion. You also get the chance to gain a real understanding of what it is that your visitors are likely to be interested in. Community driven content is one way of keeping things frequently, and that can't be done unless you already have a dedicated user base who sees some benefit in building content for you. As far as quality is concerned - when you slip into promotional mode, having community feedback is key in maintaining your quality product when your time gets thinner. If your articles aren't interesting, they lack substance, or they are too keyword driven, those kinds of things get noticed by the community and they'll tell you that you are going down the wrong road. Better to have users who are already regulars tell you about your mistakes than to find out once you have already blown it.
The bottom up approach is definitely different, and it does have some very strong benefits, but how exactly do you go about doing it?
Reaching out
There are already people out there who need a place to go - you know your target audience best. The best thing to do is to reach out to them personally and ask for help. The early days of building a message board up can be slow, but keep the topics coming, keep reaching out to new people, and get people behind your long term plan.Community building basics are key too, and you can find books, web sites, and advice on the topic nearly everywhere. Empower your end users. Make them feel at home. Make them feel like they are part of something. Pay attention to their needs and respond to them. For this particular project, the basics were already taken care of as the site's core community were already together, they just needed a home. Even so, the early days were pretty slow, but before too long, the community took hold and became active seemingly overnight.
The Little Guy's Advantage
The startup site has a huge advantage over the big guys to start out with. There are no spammers to deal with. There are no trolls. Communities generally start out very friendly, and small communities have simple to address needs. Certainly you want to make changes with scalability in mind, but the fact is it is a whole heck of a lot easier to make updates to a site when their are only a handful of active users than when you have thousands to deal with. If your site goes down on Saturday night and doesn't come up again until Monday morning, a group of 30 users will be concerned about what's going on. A group of 10,000 users would have turned into an angry mob by the time it came back up.Dance with your date
As you grow, remember your core user group. You wouldn't have gotten anywhere without them, and you can never afford to alienate your base. The time may come one day when you even have to build them a separate site that is low traffic and low volume like the good old days. If it comes down to a choice between 1000 new users and 10 members of your core group, go with the 10 members that you started with. Those members will remember your dedication and they will stick with you through the hard times (and their will be hard times).How about some metrics
In the first year, StopMomStop has achieved close to 130 users, nearly 9,000 threads, and close to 100,000 posts. The volume is amazing, but the ratio's are even more amazing. Looking at DigitalPoint's first year, the volume was similar, but it was spread out over 3,000+ end users. Some might say that the webmaster market is larger than the "Mom" market, but think about this - everybody has a Mom, not everybody has a website. Looking at Digital Point at year 4, they have 50K active members and nearly 1,000,000 posts. Could we get their by year 4? I'm not sure about the members, but if we can move into a promotional mode and stick to a single successful promotional model long term, we'll do even better.Join The Building a Community Discussion
