[Disc of the Week] Suggestions for Promoting Your Community

[webmacster87]

This is the phpBB Weekly Discussion Question of the Week for 1/2-9/10. Each week on the podcast we pose an open-ended discussion question related to what we discussed on that episode and invite you to continue the conversation here on the forum. On our next episode, we'll highlight some of the more interesting responses from this topic.

On today's episode, we talked about strategies for how to promote your community (and mentioned things that you shouldn't do). For those of you who have your own phpBB community, or any other website for that matter, what are some strategies that you would recommend to promote a community? What have your experiences been with these strategies?

[lukeroge Luke]

To help promote you site, I would suggest to get some links from other popular sites, and attract people. Doing that will also help you get you google pagerank up, which will result in even more people!

[SamT]

By far, the best way to promote one's community is through a word of mouth system, or allowing you members to promote you. You can give them tools to do this, like a referral system or other benefits to spreading the word.

That being said, I can't help but to point out ways on how NOT to promote one's community. We all know the obvious, don't spam, because your and your community will be labeled appropriately and it will be a short time before you give up your ghost town forum.

What I see a lot of people do is spend more time on SEO than actual community development strategies. I don't mind, and can see value in SEO, but when a website owner thinks it more important that their URLs look pretty, then there is a problem here. While I understand SEO is not just URLs, many of these board owners do not. The best kind of SEO anyone can have is good content. Getting on Google is the first step to promoting your community, but only content will bring people there.