Domain Development part 4	2.0/5.0 (4 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Barry Goggin May 07, 2008

Here I am going to cover community type development strategies. Perhaps one of the more trendy development paths, community websites have significant issues all their own.

Blogging

Blogging is a legitimate way to develop a domain and you can make money doing it. The catch is the time it takes to write posts and to manage comments.

Pros

• Creates a strong bond and trust between authors and readers
• Creates an aura of authority in a topic

Cons

• Significant time needed to write and respond
• Must be updated regularly to retain readership

Blogs can be very useful to develop domains that reflect new and emerging areas. If you have been trying some of the Predictive Domaining techniques then you will have some domains in these areas. Using a blog to establish yourself as an authority in an emerging area can attract reporters, website owners and even academics to your site.

The catch is the time you must spend writing and responding to readers. One trick I use is to schedule posts. Often i find i need to be in the mood to write and when i am, then i can put together multiple posts. Other times I go through a dry spell. For a blog to succeed, you need to have an even release of new material so I use the ability of WordPress to schedule a publish date and time for posts.

Basically once the post is written, I can then set the date and time I want the post to appear on the website. Of course I still need to field any comments so the claim by some that you could be off for a couple of weeks on a tropical beach while your software publishes your posts is not quite true. Bring a laptop to check on comments and it is true. And no, I am not on some tropical beach right now!

Blogs also create relationships with other blog authors and readers. That strong bond is something advertisers would love to leverage because in effect, there is a strong level of trust and so recommendations from such a blog carry more weight. With a strong readership, one to one relationships can be leveraged with advertisers.

You can also hire someone to blog for you or offer free blogging based on the theme of the domain name. WordPress MU allows you to host many blogs from one piece of software out of the box. (You do not need my e-book to use WordPress MU for blogs - only for websites). For example About.com and some newspapers use this third party blogger method with the former being paid and the latter being free usually. This is a good idea if you have the money to pay a blogger or can attract good bloggers for free to your topic.

Discussion Boards

Discussion boards have been around for a long time and can attract a large loyal following. One such board is WebmasterWorld.com where the idea for this blog started.

Pros

• Content is generated automatically by people posting
• Can develop a large and loyal following

Cons

• Have to deal with spam, off-topic and inflammatory posts
• Gaining significant and worthwhile postings can be difficult

The nicest part about a discussion board is that your visitors are your authors and so you do not need to be an expert in that area. What you gain in time and effort from not having to author content though is often lost through managing the posts to ensure spam, off-topic and inflammatory posts do not slip through.

You can delegate this to trusted members of the community or to paid moderators. The risk of using a trusted member is that cliques can develop based on that member’s biases thus alienating new memebrs. Allowing spam or flamers (those that post inflammatory posts) to get through can often kill a discussion board.

One of the most difficult parts of running a discussion board is to get it started. Who wants to go to a discussion board and find there are 1 or 2 posts? Why would they bother posting if noone else is? Visitors are looking for a vibrant community with plenty of posts especially new ones. Most of all they want to see replies to posts.

There are two main ways to start a discussion board. The first is to pull together a small group of enthusiasts so this usually requires that you are one yourself. You can of course try to hire some. The enthusiasts then post and have discussions among themselves forming the core of your discussion board. You then need to advertise to attract new members until you have sufficient membership that it is self sustaining.

The second way is to use fake members. While not quite ethical perhaps, it is quite common. You create multiple identities and spend time posting under those various identities, simulating a community. At the same time you advertise to attract new members until you have sufficient posts being generated by your new members. It does require that you are an expert in that topic however.

Social networking and other community based sites

Quite the fashion these days, social networking sites are a legitimate development path. These sites can also suffer from the start-up issues that discussion boards have as well as the maintenance issues. This group can also be quite fickle and need to be “entertained”. Various new features or widgets are needed to keep your members and attract new ones.

Commercialization of community based sites

Commercialization of community based sites has been difficult. Many of the major community sites have struggled to turn a profit despite attracting large volumes of visitors. Turning visitors into consumers has proved to be difficult and many visitors have resisted efforts to harvest behavioral data that might be useful to marketers.

Blogs

Paid blogging has raised some issues about the validity of opinions especially about commercial products. Some companies do seem to pay bloggers to endorse their products while others pay just for a review. Your blog needs to have a significant readership and a topic that is attractive to the advertiser.

The usual methods of commercialization such as contextual and affiliate advertising vary in their effectiveness depending on the type of visitors and the topic. some readers are turned off by advertising on blogs and question the motivation of the blogger.

Discussion boards

Traditionally difficult to commercialize, many boards use a subscription model giving access to paid members to premium discussions or tools while retaining portions of the board as free material to attract new visitors. Contextual advertising generally does not work well because the content is user generated which can create strange contexts!

Social networking

There is no tried and true method for commercialisation here. Again a subscription model may work but if the competition is offering their material for free, you will have a tough time even with premium offerings on your site. Experimentation without alienating users is the key.

Summary

Community based development strategies are often more labor intensive on an ongoing basis than other development strategies. Many sites stumble at the initial hurdle of getting a threshold number of members to be self sustaining. When they work, these can be very satisfying websites especially for an enthusiast of that topic.

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