We are scaling up here at 7Summits and so you will see more frequent and varied blog posts in the coming weeks and months. This is the first in a series of thoughts focused on community activation and moderation. We will tag each entry with “community”, allowing you to more easily surface this series for easy reference.

One of the top questions that we get asked is how to build traffic to a community. Sometimes a community gets launched and the sponsors are surprised that members do not show up more readily.This correlates directly to the level of traffic visiting your community to begin with. Membership opportunity dwindels when there is no one on the road to your community. Building traffic is important and merits some attention before you launch your community. Here are some key things to get after when activating your community:

• Develop an opt-in Beta program to build excitement for your community, seeding it with the best possible members and content so that when others come to visit or check it out, it is clearly obvious what the community is about is about.
• Identify related conversation hubs with social listening tools and activate your community at these hubs.
• Integrate existing digital marketing channels and programs / assets to drive program awareness and ultimately traffic such as websites, pay-per-click (ppc), email, etc. to promote the community.
• Focus on advocate identification and blogger outreach early to help build momentum.
• Write community relevant articles and publish them in relevant offline and online venues to help drive traffic.
• Implement a search engine strategy that focuses on optimization and seeding of community content. SEO should be part of this plan.
• Create off-domain social media satellites on mainstream and niche social networks and echo content and conversations of your on-domain community.
• Closely watch your web stats and the key words that surface your community even well past launch. You are likely to discover some new medium- and long-tail searches that are surfacing your content or community. Consider creating a page that emphasizes those meta-tags and seed it in both search and social for a great effect.

These techniques will help support a well-planned, measured activation of your community, bringing stronger traffic and leaving you feeling less unsure about growing your membership.

Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives on community activation as well.

Paul Stillmank
7Summits