Destiny

Community Hive is one place I tend to use when I am looking for new content to read. In my community, I have options in which I can show the latest content on the main forum homepage which helps my community see new content to interact with. Too many community members don't bother to look for new content and if you make it easy for them, it makes a huge difference.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make a solid passive income source but it is not for everyone. Having the affiliate links and creating the pages and sites to advertise and market these affiliate sales whilst easy, the marketing of those sites to get the sales is where many end up struggling and that is where they give up.

Social media communities are great when done in collaboration with your main community. Facebook groups and even subreddits are quite popular social media sites to have communities on. I guess the only issue with having communities on social media is the amount of time you have to dedicate to these.

As much as I have used social media to market my communities, it is not something I have seen any success from and have found focusing on content has given me better results. I don't believe it's that it does not work but more that I need to learn how to approach marketing on social media for it to be successful.

Video content for social media is not something I have done but it is something I have seen done by others and it seems to have good results. I would have to learn more about video creation for advertising purposes before I was able to do this.

Trying to stay active and post consistent updates on each social media platform I am a member of is one of my downfalls. I have never been able to stay as consistent as I have wanted to and always end up falling back into the trap of only using one or two platforms consistently as it can be quite time-consuming to update them all each time.

This is not surprising. I have no idea why Elon Musk felt he had to change the name of Twitter which has been its name and branding for many many years, choosing X was also not one of the smarter moves either, I have seen so many complaining about the name change and what it was changed to. Changing the name or even your branding is always risky, especially if it's been the same for many years so ut is not surprising it started to affect app store downloads.

Open source forum software I have used in the past. Whilst most have great options straight out of the box, I have always found that premium forum software has offered more of what I am looking for. Open source is great for those looking to start out a community and keep their spending low.

I have not seen a whole lot of integration of AI on communities I frequent but AI content taken from AI options such as ChatGPT is something I am noticing is becoming more popular over time. I have no issues with people using AI-generated content to help them with content on their community but changing it up a little is something I would like to see more of. It will be interesting to see what AI integrations we see in the future.

I tend to have backups handled by my hosting company as well as ensuring I make regular backups myself on my own server so that I have access to them as well. I believe my hosting company has cloud servers that they keep the backups on which I feel is a safer option than what I use, makes me feel happier knowing I would have a backup no matter the issue.

Grid View caught my eye back last year and I gave it a try in my community for a little while but found that most preferred the traditional way, so I went back to that. I see most forums offering the traditional list of boards and that seems to be the norm for most forums

Forums that are free-hosted are something I have looked into but never used. From my research on free-hosted forums, it would seem that a lot of them do not offer support to move to open-source software if you ever want to down the line and some of them even charge a fee to move if you wish to down the line. I find that most free-hosted forums are used by those who have a forum as a hobby.

Setting up a forum through WordPress was the easiest forum I was able to install and set up. I was curious to see just how forums worked through WordPress. If someone is looking to set up a forum that is easy and not costly, a WordPress forum would be perfect for them.

I have a few times moved from one platform vendor to the other and have been able to do so without any issues or blocks in place that made it difficult. I find some of the premium software tend to have an option for you to move from one platform to another which is often the most popular.

My goal as a community leader is to provide a place where those who have an interest in my niche can either gain help or support or even share their knowledge or expertise with others. Many people tend to enjoy offering their opinions and expertise and offering a community with the ability to do that is often popular.