Did you know?

Online community building is a relatively new discipline developing from the need for an action plan to launch your new online forum. It falls under the remit of general Search Engine Marketing, but a lot of traditional marketing and networking principles also apply.

Community Building Articles

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Starting a new community can be as hard as maintaining an existing one. It involves classic examples of consumer behvaiour and social dynamics - people unwilling to post to empty forums - people forming social circles within your community - people taking advantage of your public forum.

Active, helpful communities don't just happen over night - many attempts to develop a community end in failure - it's a very difficult thing to do.

Setting up and populating your community is hard enough but maintaining it can be a full time job. So this is why we have developed a community building information section - to help others out. Why not come join our SEO community?

Community Building Articles

• Dealing with forum spammers
• Seeding an online community
• Types of forum members
• Types of forum spammers
• When to moderate your forum

What is a discussion forum?

A discussion forum, also know as a message board or a bulletin board, is a piece of software that webmasters can install on websites to allow users to post information to the site, which other users can then reply to.

Where does the community part come in?

Over time, established discussion forums develop communities - that is groups of people who visit the site on a regular basis and contribute to the forums. This can be a fantastic networking tool for everyone involved, as well as being an incredibly helpful information service for visitors to the site.

Why have a forum?

Lot's of subject areas are so in-depth that it is impossible to cover every conceivable angle in a range of static documents. On top of this, different people bring different perspectives to the same subject. It's because of this that discussion forums can be a very useful addition to a site.

If you know so much, then why isn't the STW forum busier?

I appreciate the irony of the situation! There are a few factors, mainly time and resources or lack thereof - developing a forum is a time consuming job and I just didn't have the time to develop it before. Plus knowing a lot about something and implementing that knowledge are two very different things!

I will be working on building up our SEO forums now though - why not come and help out? :)