I was just reminded of a dilemma a friend was having. For years he has had a very successful email discussion list. This list has thousands of members, vibrant and intelligent discussion, and has been a major success. All apart from he makes no income from it. Sound familiar? While we were in San Diego Nick and I gave him some advice, perhaps it could be a handy idea for you also.
It should come as no surprise to you that Nick and I recommended he start blogging. I know it might seem like we think blogs are the solution to everything but actually don’t really believe that, it is just in this case it really would be a great solution.
We recommended he start a blog that would be the public face of his community. This blog would be used to report any news, could be a central repository for all the admin trivia, can store real world meeting details etc. On one community I help moderate we tried a wiki for a while but found with no one person responsible for it the wiki fell into disrepair. Our blog on the other hand was far more succesful and less prone to vandalism.
Blogs can be communities in their own right but are also effective as a
web front end to an existing non-web community. While the email
discussion will flow and mutate, most email discussion lists if they
have an archive at all will be very basically structured. In some cases
there might be a search, if you are lucky but most are just dated
archives. Good blogging software comes with a simple search but also allow you to organise your information in categories or maybe tags plus they naturally get indexed well by major search engines. No more emailing the list for an old piece of info, if you keep on top of it your good stuff could be right at your finger tips.
A really good use for a community front end blog is to highlight really great discussions. All it needs is a little commentary and a quote (with a link to the discussion if you have the facility). This serves to attract attention where it is deserved for the community itself but also for the wider internet population. While not SEO as such blogs tend to naturally perform well in search engines. These highlight posts would attract links, other blogs might give you a mention, sending more new members and traffic.
Lots of content will be hidden from the web or even dissapear because of lack of archives. With you pulling out content to display publicly, without opening up the whole archive to spammer spiders, you can publish all your killer content without causing spam and admin headaches.
All this content can of course display ads. Income potential is greatly enhanced without too much offence to your members, unlike sticking ads in the email signatures etc. Your discussion list is kept clean and non commercial and your blog advertising doesn’t need to be intrusive.
I think the best part of all is many communities from the outside show no visible signs of being alive. There is a signup form and some about us information but no way of guaging if this is the community for you. With an actively managed blog it will be obvious you have a vibrant community that is worth joining. You get some income to support your hosting costs and the community gets an injection of new blood – everyone wins!
5 thoughts on “Blog as Community Front End”
These usability tips and the whole site are great.
I kind of thought that this didn’t make sense because your friend Darren Rowse does it all the time. I have been reading his blog for some time, but I hadn’t thought of doing that until recently when several people asked me about a certain subject. (It’s redundant to give background information on every post for newcomers so I had to think of another measure to use).
Anyway, thanks again. I don’t want to take up too much of your time…
… is a great way of highlighting your “evergreens”.
It’s nr 5 on Jacob Nielsen’s list of usability tips for blog designers…
There’s no way indeed search engines would penalize this good practice!
Whenever you hear that kind of advice, run. Run far. It’s just bollocks usually, and MAY apply to certain kinds of sites that are throwing up all kinds of other red flags but almost certainly doesn’t apply to what most people do with their blogs.
Just let me get this straight though: Are you saying that it may be spammy to link to older posts, from the body of a newer post?
Sounds like a good way to let users know about on topic, relevant content to me. Where’s the problem?
I have several blogs on blogger. I have linked several of my older posts on the right sidebar. They archive monthly and I don’t want to waste people’s time. Going through months of archives trying to find a particular post is time consuming and frustrating. Now I read somewhere that linking to older posts in that manner may be considered spam by the search engines. It may be more harmful than beneficial.
Is this true? If it’s not, could I link other entries at the end of my posts that are related topics, much like the way wordpress is set up?
Thanks for the info! It’s greatly appreciated.
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