Community building

Well, I said before I was planning to develop some forums, and I’ve started the process.

Whew, I forgot how hard it was to develop momentum with 1, let alone a few. :)

The first one I’ve set up is Web Hosting World - it was originally a web hosts review website, and I was going to set up webhosting forums within the site. But then I realised there wasn’t a chance I’d be able to keep the review section constantly updated, so the forums are now at the root. I actually have a tiny free hosting forum I plan to merge with it, and also maybe buying another small webhosting forum to merge with it, to bring the volume of content up. Great to see some established hosts have already visited the site and posted, and there’s already a fledgling sense of community with a couple of members.

The second currently being developed is Tech Watch - I actually bought two smaller forums and merged them together under an older domain I’d failed to develop previously. I thought I’d bought two communities, but they’d been driven by forum posting services, so it’s pretty much start from scratch, even though the forum already has over 3,500 posts. I think this forum especially has promise, but it will need a lot of pushing as tech forums are ten-a-penny. I’ll probably add some emerging tech discussions to broaden it out a little.

A much fresher forum is Property Watch - again, I was going to set up a site with content and the forums as a subfolder within, and again I realised there was no way I could keep the content updated as required. The site is built primarily because I’m currently a first-time buyer in the housing market, looking to buy a house over the next year or so. I’m collecting a lot of resources on the housing market and visiting a number of property developments, and the forums seem a good place to set up helpful info for others. The domain is another one I had doing nothing - a .org.uk isn’t ideal, but I’ll worry about developing the site and revist the domain branding issue again in future. It has barely any posts as it’s built from scratch, but I’m not too worried about that at this point.

Anyway, what will be interesting is to monitor their growth - the key to succeeding with foums as communities is to get a group of people posting regularly - that’s the community seed - and content is a good way to draw people in. But content alone isn’t enough.

I’ve read people state that forums are not a business, but I’ve always treated forums as like a business - not in terms of selling products, but in terms of treating members as valued customers, even if they aren’t actually paying for anything. It’s always seemed a common-sense approach, but as some people reading this may rightly point out, unless you have a valid business model to develop returns on that investment, then you could be throwing your time into a blackhole. And in a way they would be right. But as with most investments, you put into them precisely because you see greater returns in the long-run - and that’s what I’m in for.