How to Build a Demo Community Website?

I had some experience on building social networks and communities, as I was working as an Editor and discussion forum Moderator for about 3 years. So I am going to tell you some ideas I have learned about how to start your own community. Specially self hosted communities like My Life Thinking community – for example.

Note that I will not talk in this post about activating communities that you can create them using community service providers like Ning.com – for example, and also I will not talk about how to create the self-hosted community itself  or which open source community application you should run, but I will only give you some ideas about how to activate your own community and bring life to it.

The first thing that will came into your mind after picking up the best community application and while planning and designing your community is how to make it active and how to bring life to it, and attract visitors to become members, you will hate the empty corners of your community.

Some people will think that having a community means to use the best community or social network application, but even the best application ever will be the same after installing it on your server, just an empty websites, from the dead kind.

But what you will do to bring life to your community?

Some communities owners prefers to use a wall design for the home page, so they show nothing from community activities or any data about members on their home page, only a short description for the community, and register link, and of course it contain a log-in form for members. Members only who can access to the community, so no body will be able to know how many members are registered in this community, unless they register themselves. This help community owners to hide the activities on the community because the lake of members they have, and show it when the community is active and hot.

Imagine your community and build a “Community Demo Website”!

The other perfect choice to Bring Life to Your Community is “Plant Trees”. Like building discussion forums by your self, build something like a community demo. Open discussion and reply to them with useful and informative replies, don’t forget to add some creative ideas, build the discussion the way you would like your community to be, make the discussion looks hot and active. I know this is not easy and probably you will need to have friends to help you, two or three other moderators and editors to work with you on activating the community. This will encourage participation from your community visitors. Remember that you only can set the stage, but the community will define itself.

Create a few groups related to your community activities, and add some topics to it. Your targeted visitors will participate in your community if they like the contents and the members.

Upload some nice videos and photos to the galleries, show your visitors all what they can do using your community options.

Is that all what I have to do?

You may ask your self is that all what you have to do to bring  life to your self-hosted community? The answer is no! Now it’s the time of gain traffic by promoting your website, and after having new members to your community it will be the time for moderating the community and keep it active, that means you have to repeat the above process for enough time, until the number of your community members grow to the point that you can relax and just keep watching!

Now .. It’s the time for me to ask you, did you like the ideas I wrote in this post? Is there anything that I missed it or didn’t talk about it, post a comment and add value to this post or give me some ideas, or a subject to write about it in my coming posts, I will appreciate that, and maybe I will link back to your blog and tell all my readers that you inspired me, this is not a promiss but it could happen !

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