You want your Ning community to grow, and to do that you need to attract members. To attract members you need to market your community. You need to get it seen by as many people as possible and make it seem appealing to those who see it. But how do you do this?
First you need to get your site seen and visited. Start a Twitter account, link to your site and tweet people with common interests. Visit and comment on other sites with interesting and well-thought out responses — and a link back to your site, obviously. Call in favours with blogger friends to get them to link to your site. Do anything you can to spread your site all over the internet and get as many links back to your site as possible. You can't start a community without people visiting your site.
But it's not enough to get visits — you also need to get some of those visitors to sign up to your site. This means making your site an appealing place. If you want to get people to sign up, create a friendly and appealing atmosphere in the forums. No-one will become a member if they think they're going to be made to feel bad. If the creator of the site is also getting involved in discussions, that will immediately make the place seem more appealing and get members to join.
There are two totally opposite schemes of thought of how to manage your members input. The first is to allow absolutely everyone who wants to join to join. Make your community friendly, welcoming and open. The other is to make your community seem like an exclusive, members-only club and only allow a certain number of people to join over a given time period, in order to make people feel special. Either way could work, but it would probably be wise to choose which method to use depending on what your site is about — if it's more easygoing and amicable, choose the first method. If you want to create a swanky, more mysterious air, go for the second.
Once you've gotten a few members, try and find ways to encourage them to tell other people about the site. A site that is tweeted about, shared on Facebook and blogged about will gain far more interest than one that has a few ads. How do you do this? Well firstly you have to make your site good and interesting. Produce some good content, start interesting conversations in forums, share photos and do anything that is going to get people sharing things on your site with others.
When the momentum has started and people are regularly visiting and joining, you just need to keep it going. Don't get lazy; keep putting in hard word, keep producing good content and keep commenting on other sites with links back to yours. Marketing your community is all about putting in effort. If the effort stops, so will the rewards.
©2012 Increase RSS - How to get web traffic with RSS and SM. All Rights Reserved.
. Tags: ning, Ning community, ning members
