By Jennifer Kyrnin
When you build community, you give your readers something to belong to. The
Internet is a very impersonal, and anything you can do to make your site more
personal for your readers will make them want to stay.
Things like bulletin boards inherently take a lot of clicks. Many forums create a
new page for each message or every thread of messages. If your readers are
interested in the thread, they will continue to click through.
What is community?
You can add community in many ways:
Chat Rooms
Chat rooms allow your audience the chance to talk, in real-time, with other
people with similar interests. Businesses use chat to help with technical
support and sales support. When I bought my car online, I chatted with
the company to find out what I would need to do and how I would get the car.
It felt more personal than email, and it was much more immediate.
Forums
Forums are less immediate than chat rooms, but they also seem inherently more
serious. Questions can be asked and answered by many people, giving a wider
perspective. Businesses use forums for support and to build user group
communities. The HTML Forum is used all the time
by people learning HTML, and looking for help with very tricky tasks. Many of the
questions are answered by our Forum Host, or by other readers, often before I
can even read the question.
Guestbooks
Guestbooks allow your readers to post their comments about your site, or other
topics. Businesses use guestbooks to solicit feedback about products. When a
close friend of mine died, a guestbook was set up to allow everyone who knew
him to record their memories and feelings about him. These were then saved and
given to his family so they could remember how well he was loved and would be
missed.
Newsletters
Mailing lists and newsletters are an excellent way to create community and
generate hits to your site. They give your readers information they might not
have known about, and if you include links to your site, more page views. I
currently receive something in the neighborhood of 10 mailing lists and
newsletters.
For more help with building community, I have a subject listing with many links
and articles - Community.
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