6 Techniques to Build Your Online Community
Building an online community is a long, tough task that comes with amazing rewards. Once you have your own community, advertising becomes much less expensive, and organic leads roll in without any effort on your part. If you’re struggling to build your audience, use these six tips to help you lay the foundation for a community.
1. Stay Consistent With Your Content
Consistency is a huge part of building your online community. Releasing emails, blog posts or other types of content on a set schedule gives your audience something to look forward to. Ideally checking your website will become part of their routine.
While consistency is important, you don’t want to paint yourself into a corner. Don’t try and send daily emails if you struggle to communicate with your list bi-weekly. It’s worth your energy to instead build a foundation of content you can later repurpose as emails, infographics and other complementary forms of medium.
2. Make Your Website Easy To Share
Social shares are invaluable when building your community. If you want people to share your website, it needs to be easy. Make sure you have social media buttons strategically placed around your website.
It’s also worth your time to improve your headlines. When people share your posts, your headline is still what’s going to encourage people to click. Stay away from clickbait headlines and try and tell people what they have to gain from reading your article.
3. Reach More People Through Guest Posts
Despite what you may have heard, guest posts are still an excellent way to expand your reach. If you want your community to become popular, you need to engage with the top influencers that your target audience already follow. Appearing on the right email list or writing for the right forum can send a ton of targeted audience members your way. Find out who your audience enjoys reading and see if you can write for them.
4. Be Prepared To Put The Time In
Building a community is a long-term process. Look at any great project, and you’ll notice it took them multiple failures and multiple adjustments to get to where they are today. Because building an online community is such a long venture, doing your research especially important. Make sure you’re building something in a profitable niche and that you’re not going struggle to make sales once you finally have your audience. Position yourself to solve a problem, and you’ll find it much easier to gain momentum.
5. Develop An App
Having a members-only area for your community is an excellent way to build a closer group. Mobile app development companies can create custom apps based on what your audience needs. Creating an app that solves an issue in your target industry can be a great way to kickstart your growth. Mobile app development has multiple applications from practical tools to games for your community to enjoy.
6. Make It Easy For Your Audience To Use Their Voice
Your audience needs to feel heard, especially if you’re building a community in a controversial niche. Anytime you deal with religion or politics, you should make it easy for your audience to debate their viewpoints respectfully.
Even with more generic topics such as enthusiast hobbies, it’s vital that you allow your audience to discuss amongst themselves and bring their own insights to the community. Giving your audience a voice is part of the momentum that’s going to carry your community to the heights you want it to go.