Maria

Keeping your expenses down is one of the main thing you need to concentrate on if you want to ensure sustainability of your community. Even when you have monetized your community,it is really difficult to earn enough money for community management.

I don't know if I would be still running my community 5 years later. Sustainability is a great issue in the world of online communities. While the owners find difficulty to manage resources for running the community, users are also bored from using the same community and they go else where. Communities are failing to provide a platform that users will remain loyal for years just like they are doing on social platforms.

Understanding your user base and creating topics that your users will enjoy posting can improve engagement. Starting topics on trending topics can also improve engagement. I have noticed that if your community lacks new topics, there will be less engagements.

People have choices, they will use the community as long as they like, and if they don't like it, they will just leave it and go else where. Sometimes, people also leave the community without any particular reasons. Even though they like it, they will just leave it. Perhaps they are bored with using the same community. Frankly speaking, these days it is really difficult to build sense of belonging among users.

Persuasion is a great skill. If you can persuade people to buy, you can generate sale. Persuasion technique works on almost all fields. For instance, as a community owner, if you can persuade people to join your site and if you can persuade them to remain active, you will become successful with your community.

Customer segmentation can be applied on all areas not just in business world. let's say you want to create a community. You need to identify your customers, the people who are likely to use your community, you will have to identify their location so that you can use the right strategy to promote your community. If you know your customer and use methods to reach your proper customers, it is easier to become successful with your project.

If you want to become successful, online or offline, you need to have expertise on certain subject. It could be anything, writing, marketing, graphic designing, programming, etc. Even when you want to run a blog, a forum, or even a video channel, if you are an expert and if you share your expertise, it is easier to become successful.

I have not done this myself but I have seen a lot of people open their communities with a contest, these contest are referral contests as well as posting contest. This is certainly a good way to bring members and built activities in a short time if you have some money to spare.

I do not have big goals for my community, I am just trying to build a platform where users will enjoy hanging out and will also learn something new, or will share things that they are passionate about. In the age of big social media platforms and in the age when people are mostly interested in watching short videos or broadcasting short videos, it is really difficult to meet bigger goals.

There is a debate on whether AI generated content will rank on search engines or not. Even though a lot of people will say that AI generated content is not good for SEO, I have not seen any official word from search engines like Bing and Yahoo. These days I use Generative AI tools to get keyword ideas instead of using specific keyword tools

There are two types of community users, one, who are passionate about discussion and they will continue to use the community without needing for anything in return, and two, there are users who need some sort of compensation. sadly, it is difficult to find users who are truly passionate about community engagement. These days you are required to compensate users in some way

If you want to create a community but do not want to spend a any money while starting it and want to take sometime before spending money, hosted solutions can be an option. You can start free and then if you build confidence, you can go for premium version. Self hosted needs investment, at least for domain and hosting even when you want to use open source.

I go for simplicity. Communities are used by common people, so there is no need to go after esthetic. The most important thing you should consider is to offer a platform where people are comfortable sharing. If the basic look has it all, I am satisfied with the basic look

Even though I believe that using third party apps can improve your community and help you grow and reach your goal, using paid third party apps also increases your cost of community management. If it is completely your hobby project, and you have not enabled any kind of monetization, and paying from your pockets might cost a lot of money.

One of the common issues I see with a lot of community owners is they are eyeing for perfection. That's why they are too involved with people are posting. You own the community but you do not own your users, you need to let them say whatever they want to say. Another mistake I see is they are too concerned about getting feedback. You need to look how your community is performing through analytics tools instead of asking feedback personally.