JoelR

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 have the range of expertise for all of these. You specialize in a particular field or focus. Her approach to the community is the 90% / 10% approach, where she was attempting to cover as broad of health (the 90%) at a very superficial level (only 10% deep). The reality is that the 90% / 10% approach is completely unattainable for new and independent communities. You cannot compete with the 'billion-dollar' platforms like Reddit, Facebook, etc. They've swallowed up shallow, everyday conversations. Where independent communities can still win is by flipping the focus. Go for the 10% / 90% approach: Focus on the tightest, most specialized niche and demonstrate mastery, expertise, authority, timeliness, or some other value that is unmatched by anyone else. Instead of being shallow, go as deep as possible. Capture 90% of the knowledge and long-tail discussion for that one specific niche and be amazing at it.

One of the biggest factors that initially attracted me to IPS is not that they develop a forum. There are plenty of other organizations and companies that develop bulletin boards, forums, and discussions across multiple platforms. What attracted me is that IPS gave me the ability to build things outside of my forum, and that's always been part of my strategy. In my main community, over 90% of my site's traffic does not flow through my forums; it runs through my other content hubs (like Gallery and Downloads). The Forums app is incredibly powerful at retaining existing members and giving them a sense of community - it's literally the gathering place for returning members to mingle and chat - but for new members or single-purpose users, it's the rest of my community that attracts. Pages is incredibly powerful. I've always believed that it is, hands-down, the most powerful application in the IPS ecosystem but also the one that most clients never understand. On Invisioneer, we've used the database features of Pages to create multiple resource hubs: https://www.invisioneer.org/resources/. Except for Courses (which uses the actual IPS app for Courses), all of the others are developed using the database feature of Pages. If you are a new or an existing IPS client, I encourage you to gain as much familiarity with the Pages app as possible. Your mind will be blown at the kinds of things you can do to build content sections of articles, guides, directories, and more.

One thing I'd like to point out is building a dedicated marketplace is not the same as attracting more members. If you're building a marketplace, you might be focused on initiatives like: reaching and attracting sellers, onboarding their products, and offering tools to organize and filter and search. That's not the same as simply attracting more members, which you can pursue through things like referrals, promotion, etc. The sharper that you can define your initiative, the easier it will be for you to actually implement.

Those are very broad topics. For just Finance, I can think of multiple subtopics ... Personal finance, credit cards, mortgages, corporate finance, real estate, crypto, retirement planning, healthcare finance, etc. How do you build a community when youre so broad? What differentiates you from Reddit, which has threads on each of these topics (with many more users)?

I find a lot of new or legacy admins try to overly focus on activity: more members, more posts, more topics. Those are all great, but those goals are a consequence of underlying actions and they don't address the tactics needed to make that happen. What is their plan to generate X new topics every month? What is their plan to attract X new members? I find that focusing on goals with concrete, identifiable metrics is more valuable. This month, I want to create X new resources in the research paper section. Next month, I want to create Y new links in other section.

I disagree. You can make $1000 / mo by ... - Selling $0.01 ads to display to 100,000 people - Selling a $100 course to 10 people In the second case, you don't actually need a lot of traffic or a lot of users. You literally only need 10 people! But the value that you provide needs to be high value, specialized and worthwhile.

Nice! Just curious, what were a few of the things that you did to bring INP to a higher score ?

Yes I know it sounds contradictory that there will be both more zero click searches AND more long tail searches, but AI is going to force communities with expert advice to offer extremely deep long long tail discussions. What Facebook did to social conversation, AI will do to general knowledge.

Communities are special in that we intentionally try to foster a sense of belongings and togetherness. That usually also usually implies a standard to engage in civilized discourse. How do you encourage - or enforce - civilized discourse among members? When I think about the onboarding process of most communities, they're remarkably bad about letting you know about expectations. They either offer instant sign on where you totally bypass anything*, or you're presented with a wall of legalese terms . If you're lucky, you get a forcefully cheery email that explains where the Introduction board is. Why don't we have friendly, custom reminders before you post with some simple guidelines? How do we provide behavioral nudges, not punitive slapdowns, for members to be thoughtful before posting?

Some interesting thoughts that there will be more zero click searches, more long tail searches, and why discussion forums with our UGC driven expert discussion are uniquely positioned to win. https://searchengineland.com/future-seo-ai-powered-world-440023

What is Interaction to Next Paint (INP)? Google uses INP to assess your site’s overall responsiveness. If you click on a drop-down menu and there’s a delay with its opening, this latency shows poor responsiveness and relates to INP. If there are issues with INP, user experience suffers because the user may continue clicking on your site’s menu, waiting for a response. INP is the time it takes from the initial user interaction and when the next frame on the site is painted. https://searchengineland.com/optimizing-inp-interaction-to-next-paint-440017

I think if you're active in the IPS community, let clients know that you're available and open to private work, you will have people who want to reach out to you. The IPS client base is so large and there's always a demand for customization.

Time, expertise, trust, convenience, money, features. What else?

Several years ago, there was a big push by professional community managers into understanding and implementing gamification. Now, most professional community managers shun gamification as a major feature. My personal take is the elements of gamification (which are nothing more than behavioral psychology) are still valuable: - Encouraging users to compete or race against another - Rewarding users as they progress - Setting challenges or goals And there are multiple areas in the community to implement these steps. It's not just badges and titles, but being thoughtful with your language strings and notifications and emails.

I'm a big fan of purchasing 3rd party apps and a believer that modifications are a strategic advantage for independent communities. I can only speak for myself. I am definitely holding off on any new purchase or custom requests on v4. I also probably won't do anything for the first 6-9 months of v5 to allow the platform to mature (and I tend to be an early adopter).

What a great way to support your friend!

The concept of community everywhere is not that you need to necessarily participate on all platforms for your audience, but that you don't bother with an owned community and you build a community where your members are already gathering. For example, if you're a video game developer and if your users are already on Discord, you build your brand community on Discord.

A theme definitely has a certain strategy to it. I can totally understand communities of gaming, pop culture, entertainment, media, or similar having a very vivid theme. At the same time, I also think there's value in simplicity, and purposely letting the focus be on the content and not the visuals.

The way that you frame the question makes it sound as if monetization has to run counter to the user experience. I'd like to flip the question, and ask, how can you offer monetization to improve the user experience? If you can answer this question, then you will have a monetization strategy that aligns with your members and your strategy. What can you offer that empowers your members better? And sell that.

The classic and most well-known elements to build a sense of community have 4 elements: membership, influence, fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection.

This is going to depend on how mature the platform is. Paid forum services usually support a conversion from a competitor software, or you can always do a custom conversion.

No activity is then your equilibrium. I'm assuming you are not satisfied with your equilibrium (and nobody is, there's always too much of something or too little or something). The real question is, what are the systems you are building to generate sustained activity in your topic?

The purpose of Invisioneer is to help communities of all sizes and shapes succeed, but there's a special place in my heart for small, independent communities. Usually these are started and fueled by the passion of the community owner. One of the biggest strengths of forums is passion. One of the biggest weaknesses is passion. Passion from an independent community owner means that you will be able to research, share, discuss with a fiery enthusiasm that can truly distinguish your forum from other forums. Passion means you will push yourself, care for all of the details. Passion also means you can quickly burn out. You can only self sustain an intense burst for a very short time, so it's important to build a support structure for when passion can't keep you moving. What does this mean in practice for small, independent forums? - Back your passion with discipline: Although passion can be amazing to motivate you, it can't be the only way you keep yourself going. That's when discipline should kick-in. This means first giving yourself a little grace and forgiveness, and then recognize that forums are a long game where the small steps matter as much as the big leaps. This could mean keeping a diary of your forum journey, building a content calendar, or coming up with a simple posting schedule. - Leverage technology: some forums such as Invision Community allow you to schedule new topics. This allows you to pre-plan, brainstorm and write an entire weeks worth of conversations and insights, without trying to do all of that every single day. - Leverage people: Tap into trusted friends or superusers to help you sustain your initiative or objective. Be very clear, be very detailed, and let them execute on your strategy when you may not have the time or energy to do it yourself. Many small, independent forums start entirely with the passion and interest of the owner. That's great. The next step is to build the systems to support your strategy when passion alone won't do it.

Community Expert One is the email invitation and the other is what it looks like in the forums. (Ignore what Ehren is talking about. A user was asking about the layout of the staff page. The key thing is the new community experts follow button.)

Congrats! That's huge. What does it look like?