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Building and maintaining an active online community can be challenging, but with innovative approaches, you can keep your members engaged and excited. Here are 10 uncommon ideas to generate activity within your online community: Host Live Collaborative Events: Real-Time Collaboration: Organize live events that encourage members to collaborate in real-time. This could include co-writing sessions, design challenges, or coding hackathons. Organize Reverse Q&A Sessions: Members as Experts: Flip the traditional Q&A format by having community members take on the role of experts. Let them share their knowledge on specific topics and answer questions f…

You're the community admin with a strong desire to be helpful, but could you actually be undermining your community's growth and performance? What are some of your best intentions that backfired? Do you seek constant agreement, or lurch from one member feedback to another? Do you overprotect your staff members, and keep them in the dark? Are you too involved in every matter as a micromanager, or are you not involved at all?

The look and style of your community, whilst it may be important, also should not be something that is overly worked on. Having a community with a basic look and feel is much of the time what most people are looking for being that they use the community for help and support a lot of the time. Do you offer a basic look for your community or are you someone who prefers to go all out when it comes to a theme?

As community leaders ourselves, most of us will have already decided whether we want to be hosted by a hosting company or self-host our community. When it comes to deciding on hosted and self-hosted options, you would have to consider what is needed for the forum software you are looking into using. What do you believe are some key factors to consider when choosing between hosted and self-hosted forum solutions?

Attracting new members to any community is not easy, you have to show those who may be interested in joining your community why it may benefit them and what they will get out of joining the community. There are many strategies you can use to attract new members from valuable content to even offering services or guides that many may be looking for. When it comes to strategies to attract new members to your community, which ones do you find work well for you?

Social media is great when it comes to marketing online communities and with so many out there that are popular, most will have their benefits. If you market on social media, which platform have you found you have had the best success on when it comes to marketing? Is there any one specific platform that seems to do better than others?

Do you create video content for social media platforms? What kind of video content do you create? Do yo create long form videos or short form videos? Do you also make money from your videos? Well, I am basically not a video content creator but I have tried my hands on video content for various platforms. I mostly use short videos for marketing and advertising products and services.

Do you try to establish your presence on every platform that matters? How many do you maintain? Do you have a dedicated team doing the same?

Newsflash: Half of US adults are getting their news, at least sometimes, from social media, according to a new study of American news consumption habits from the Pew Research Center. Which social media, to be exact? According to the research, which surveyed 8,842 US adults between Sept. 25 and Oct. 1, Facebook—which has steadily deprioritized news content—is king, with three in 10 respondents saying they regularly get news from the platform. YouTube was also a major source for news, with around a quarter (26%) of respondents stating they regularly get news from the site. Instagram was next with 16%, while 14% of respondents said they regularly get news from Tik…

Elon Musk's Twitter takeover has come with a lot of changes, but his rebranding of the platform to "X" may be the final nail in the coffin of the once-beloved tech titan. Though Musk announced that Twitter would be renamed "X" on Jul. 23, it wasn't until Jul. 31 that the change to "X" went live on Apple's App Store. That change had an immediate effect on how many people download the app, according to an analysis from media strategist Eric Seufert. Seufert looked at Twitter/ X's ranking on the Apple App Store's "Top Downloaded" chart from Jul. 27 to Aug. 15 and found that the app's average ranking fell significantly after the rebranding, from 35 to 54. …

Every community leader gets discouraged. There are so many challenges that we confront, from member issues to leadership to technical problems. What do you tell yourself to keep going?

Customer segmentation is an important aspect of a marketing plan. Customer segmentation helps in understanding who your customers are, how to reach your customers, how to build a brand, and boosting sales. There are different categories for customer segmentation. 1. Geographical Segmentation: This involves knowing the location of your customers. 2. Demographic Segmentation: This involves understanding customers' age, gender, income, and more. 3. Psychographic Segmentation: This will let you learn about customers' lifestyle and interests. 4. Behavioral Segmentation: This involves understanding customers' spending habits and brand preferences. 5. Me…

Marketing does not mean just to put your product in front of your customers, you also need to generate sales. To generate sales, it is important to have a deep understanding of your customers. One of the easiest ways to understand your customers is by categorizing them and use effective approach tailored to persuade your customers to make them purchase. 1. Investors: These individuals view products as investments, they buy products that offer long term benefits. To persuade them, focus on highlighting the durability of your product. 2. Savers: Savers are driven by finding the best deal and saving as much money as possible. You can convince these buyers by emphas…

Achieving activity within a forum whilst it is possible, can also be difficult, especially if you are looking to gain consistent activity within the community you lead. Having strategies in place to help you stay consistent that will encourage activity is always great to have in place but depending on the kind of community leader you are, these kinds of strategies could vary. What strategies do you use to encourage activity within your community?

When we start to build out a community, one of the things we hope to ensure is not only the longevity but also the sustainability of our community. This is something that whilst possible, is not always easy to accomplish and can be difficult for some if not taken into account. Thinking about a community you lead now, what methods are you currently using to ensure the longevity and sustainability of that community?

Is your community mostly of the right kind of people? People with behavioural, emotional and professional patterns you actually wanted to build a community for?

Marketing means putting your products and services in front of your potential customers. However, before you start pushing your products and services to your customers, you should know where your customers are. In other words, you need to know your customers’ location. When you know your customers’ location only then you will be able to create a successful marketing campaign. It is important to know the location of your customers so that you can effectively tailor your marketing campaigns to reach your customers. Geographical segmentation means identifying the location of your customers. Here are some tips on how to perform geographical segmentation: 1. Find out wher…

A sneak peek at some features in Invision 5 that you might have a strong opinion about. What do you think about each of these? Vertical Menu The classic menu from v4 was always horizontal across the top of the screen, similar to most other websites and forums. In IPS v4, admins have the option of switching to a Vertical Menu, similar to Opera, Reddit, Edge and other popular platforms. Search Box The Search Box on desktop actually opens up a search modal popup. What do you think? Do you like the additional options before you search, or do you think this is misleading design? Card view of Forum Inde…

Hi, I am Dilip, been running forums and blogs for around 15 years now. Somewhere around 2010, I started learning graphics to meet my needs for Logos, Banners, custom emojis, node icons, simple animated videos and more. Been offering graphics services since ~ 2015 I do a decent 2D and some 3D as well. You can check the Showcase thread on my forum for some recent works I made this video to promote my services this Holiday season Feel free to ping me if you have any graphics needs. Will do my best to give you the best possible image / video.

Do any of you kick off your forums with a contest? If so, what's it all about and what kind of prizes do you give out? Is it just a straightforward referral contest, or does it tie into the specific topic of your forum?

I recently came across a new forum, where the forum admin wanted to focus on health because of a personal interest in entering healthcare. She created over 50 boards in 7 categories for all things related to health: everything from medical equipment and hospital administration to fitness and exercise, mental health, community and public health, pharmaceuticals, alternative medicine, occupational health, and women's and men's and geriatric and pediatric health. It was everything! There was very little expertise or mastery shown in any of the boards, much less activity. Even if the forum admin personally pursued a career in healthcare, nobody would ever h…

Marketing means you promote your products, services, or business through a platform. Your marketing platform could be radio, television, internet, newspaper, etc. When marketing your products and services, or business in general, it is very important to choose the right platforms to reach your target audience effectively. For instance, if you want to market through radio, you need to use the proper radio station. If you want to market on the internet, you need to choose the appropriate online platform which could me social media, search engines, etc. This is where media segmentation comes in. Media segmentation means you identify the best media platform to market and adve…

No matter what line of profession or business you are in, having marketing skills help you to become successful. Let’s say you are a writer, if you are able to market yourself, you will earn better prospects. Let’s say you are a video creator, if you can market your videos to build audience, you become successful. Marketing is essential skill for all careers and profession, even so for making money online. Digital marketing offers great opportunities for income generation. Whether you want to build your career in marketing or market your products and services to earn better, the following tips will help you: Get certificates Enhance your skills by enrolling in v…

One of the things that I'm looking at is IPBoard (I guess they're called Invision community now?) is their feature of non-forum pages. I am familiar with CMS builders from vBulletin It looks like you can write Articles, FAQ, and Reviews. How many of you have non-forum pages, in addition to the forum?

Some of us may be in the beginning stages of our communities and others may be in the later stages of their communities, whether your community is brand new or a few years old, we all have a vision of where we would like to see our communities in say the next five years. Taking a look at your community as it is now and looking to the future, where do you see your community within the next five years? Do you hope to have achieved anything in particular?