How Do You Grow Your Community Site

Hi,

Now, one of the hardest thing to start a community site is how do you kickstart to grow it ... especially one built with Dolphin with many features ie. Blog, Video, Forum, Poll, Events, Group, Classifieds etc.

For example, say I've installed Dolphin targeting local small medium businesses/enterprises, what are the best ways to kickstart the launch and growth of such community site?

The reason why I ask this is because if I were to stumble upon a community site with only a few members (obvious for starting community site), I'd most likely will not join it.

Would greatly appreciate if any Dolphin admin here can share and advice on growing your community site. Thank you in advance.

Best Regards, William

Advertising, look Google AdWords or such.

You could provide incentives to get people to join - promotional account or whatever.

The best thing to do, and its FREE, is to tell all your friends to join and have them recruit people for you, like their friends, and their friends , and so on... Its amazing what word of mouth can do.

The very early start?  Just get your close friends and associates to post their profiles, and tell them you need their help for an alpha or beta test - make sure you ask them to post their pictures.  If you can get 25 or so it will at least look a like a community, and they will be able to give you feedback on how to make it better.  After that, start branching out and announce it on any bulletin boards or email lists where you are a member, and where it is appropriate.  Also, don't neglect the telephone - you can just ask people to join.

After that, more traditional marketing can come into play and it is anyone's guess what will work best.  Paid ads are a possibility - for example ad words like Celtic recommended, but can be a bit pricey and have unpredictable costs.   One thing I like to do occasionally is use a "StumbleUpon" campaign.  It is just 5 cents per visit and you can target age ranges and geographically locations.  So for $50 bucks you can get 1000 unique visitors - and you can shut this traffic on and off whenever you want as if it was a water spigot.

Good luck

Rob

Was writing that when you posted Zarcon.  Great minds think alike.

Aint not doubt about it Caltrade :)

Thanks for the great inputs!

Guess word-of-mouth is indeed a good way to start. I could easily get my colleagues (it's a corporate project anyway) to sign up with pictures. Thanks Zarcon and Rob for the reminder for this excellent "traditional" method.

Not to forget Celtic for the "promotional" idea ... gotta think of some incentives - in this case, for participation AFTER joining. Else, even when my colleagues joined to have that "pictorial" effect, we still need real participation ie. especially in forum, group and classifieds to kickstart interactivity.

Wow, not exactly easy to grow a community site isn't it :)

Any further suggestion and advice will be greatly appreciated.