7 Aug, 2007 1 Comment
When I use the word “competition,” I’m referring to other communities in your niche. It’s worthwhile to state that since people can be members of multiple communities and typically are, competitors aren’t usually your inherent “enemies.” However, the more social a community is, the more users can become attached and loyal where the members of one community lose interest in other communities of the same niche. For instance, in an information based community like SitePoint, users tend to be members of other webmaster related forums like Digital Point and Webmaster-Talk because they are seeking technical discussion and information. But in social communities where users have a higher tendency to engage on a social level and befriend each other, members tend to get attached to that particular community.
Knowing who your competitors are is one of THE most important factors in planning your marketing and promotion strategies. The more established your competition is and the more they’ve been around, the more useful they will be to you and the more you can learn from them.
The most fundamental way of finding who your competitors are is to search Google for keywords and phrases that directly apply to your community. Who is ranking above you? Who is buying Adwords for those terms? Who is catering to the same people you are trying to attract? Of your competitors, the ones you want to look out especially for are those that:
6 Aug, 2007 Roleplayer Guild, CommunityRise
CommunityRise is a blog that will be devoted to providing forum administrators with tools and resources for:
and most importantly…
Building a bustling, active community from scratch is hard. Vapid, empty communities are a dime a dozen and account for the vast majority of all existing forums. You wander into a forum and it has 20 subforums each with 2 posts actually made by the Administrator in stickied threads outlining rules that never needed to be posted. Why? Because rules are useless when there’s nobody to follow them.
Sound familiar? It probably sounds even more familiar to those of you who have tried to start your own forum communities or are even trying right now. You enthusiastically picked out and tweaked the perfect theme, painstakingly set up all the subforums, and spent hours in advertising and forum promotion, but NOBODY WILL COME. That definitely sounds like my first time. Actually, my first PLENTY of times.
I’m Dan Neumann. I operate a number of popular communities around the web ranging from various niches to broader boards, but I will be using my recently established community, Roleplayer Guild, as a sort of case study and tool of