Our Picks

Dears,

I am ready to submit my short version of post with link on your website. I have purchased https://top10listsbymanco.com/ 

Can i continue with adding posts?

Version 4.4.4 is a maintenance update to fix issues reported since 4.4.3.

View the full article

When I wrote my last entry, The Dogly Mail had just reached the 100 member milestone but since then things have grown impressively.

The photo competition has proven very successful at encouraging new signups and we are now at around 1400 members picking up 15-20 new members a day. This is far better than I could have hoped for but there a few caveats…

Not all traffic and content is equal

In building website traffic I’ve realised that high member numbers are great and help to validate your ideas but member quality is far more important. I have been able to boost the member growth non-organically with a minimal Facebook ad spend in conjunction with the competition but we’re still trying to find those super contributors.

The members we have are not yet invested in the site themselves and the sense of community that is required to be sustainable long term is still in its infancy. We have also found that with the opt-in mailing list, around 50% of the registered members are signing up for the newsletter during registration.

This is encouraging to me based on the non-organic growth so hopefully, with more organic growth this will rise further.

What are we doing to get higher quality contributions?

We are collaborating with a vet on professional articles to give the site more credibility in the areas I am not an expert in and Andy is covering dog news where he has time. Hopefully, over the long term, this will help to improve the organic traffic to the website.

With the articles, we now have high-end long-form content covered although I would like to get a more varied team of writers on board to broaden the appeal of the subject matter. We also have more fun commenting, likes and meme social interaction covered in the photo competition section.

This leaves a gap in the middle for more serious user-contributed discussion and opinion and what ultimately will make or break the website. For this, we’re working on getting the blogs application ready for when we feel the traffic is sufficient to launch another area. When it’s ready we will slowly transition the ad spend towards the new blog section and forums to provide more balanced traffic coming to the site.

We will also be able to promote the new sections via the newsletter.

I am almost at the end of the school year so my time on the site should increase and I can get more involved with discussion topics to try and foster that sense of community.

What else have I learned?

Keeping people’s attention is not easy and once a member has left the site you need to work really hard to get them to revisit. It’s something I read a lot of on these forums so hopefully, Invision is working on this to help us keep people engaged.

As you can see we’re still in the try lots of things to see what works stage but the learning experience is part of the fun. We were running AdSense ads and getting a little back from the spend we were doing ourselves but I feel at this stage it is counter-productive.

We have decided to stop AdSense for the time being in order to concentrate on building traffic and the membership and will revisit the monetisation options once the site has grown. Not running the adverts has also given the site a substantial speed boost which will hopefully help us with organic rankings.

If you’re running your community as a hobby you may not wish to spend anything on advertising to start and may prefer to slowly add to your website content. With so much competition for traffic online though this would be a very slow strategy for us for what I still hope to be a commercially viable micro business.

On the current growth path, I hope to be profitable in 12-18 months and will keep you updated with the highs or lows along the way.

A successful community only needs three core elements to flourish and begin producing results.

Your community will require some care and effort to flourish, but with the right strategies in place, you'll ensure that the value your community produces continues to increase as time goes by.

Let's take a look at the three elements that make for a successful community.

Content
Content is the life-blood of any community. Content is what is posted by your members, and by your team. In the early days, you'll need to seed discussions and respond to customers posts regularly. It's important to demonstrate that you're actively involved with the community and encouraging others to post and extend discussions. Over time, user-generated content will begin to propel your community forwards.

A great way to bring in new users is to write valuable articles using Pages, or the Blog apps. Writing about issues relevant to your community can help position you as an expert and will be shared widely by your community.

You don't have to be an expert writer to create articles. There are free apps such as Grammarly to help polish your prose.

A great way to quickly generate new content is to quote other news sources and offer your own commentary.

For example, if your community is based around TV shows, right now you could easily create a new article for your site based on Game of Thrones by quoting a small part of two or three existing articles denouncing how the quality of writing on Game of Thrones has slipped and offer your contrasting thoughts.

Just remember to link back to the original article and check the source site to make sure they are happy for this to happen. HubSpot has a great article on how to quote without stealing.

Traffic
To really start building your community, you need a steady flow of visitors from outside sources. The content you create will drive traffic into your community, but it sometimes needs a helping hand.

Content from inside established communities can drive millions of impressions a month from search engines.

It's worth making sure you're making good use of the built-in SEO tools. We recently performed a thorough review of how Invision Community optimises for SEO including adding features such as lazy loading.

It is also a good idea to put your community link in your email signature, and share it widely via social media.

A good number of our successful community owners have created a Facebook page, and a Twitter account for their community and share their best content over those social channels.

Email is still a very powerful tool for creating an audience. We send out a monthly newsletter here at Invision Community, and articles we share with it are viewed at least four times as much as other articles.

Engagement
Once you have a steady stream of visitors consuming content on your site, you need to engage them to convert them from a casual visitor to a registered member, and then beyond.

The first step is to get your visitor to register. While we recommend you make many forums open for guest viewing, we do recommend that you ask for guests to register before posting.

We recently added a new feature called 'Post Before Registering' that allows guests to reply and sign-up in one simple activation flow.

Most members initially join for selfish reasons. Perhaps they have a broken iPhone and want to ask for help. Or perhaps they came to ask how to fix a code problem. Generally speaking, they do not join out of altruism and a strong desire to help others.

To convert a one-time poster to a regular contributor can take some work. Ensuring the default notifications include email when a new post is made will help encourage the poster to return. You can also tag the member in other discussions you feel may be interesting to them.

We recently added a few new engagement features that also showcases other interesting content in notification based emails.

Taking the time to welcome the member, and showing them how to access the best from your community can go a long way to making your site stand out.

Taking the time to focus on these three core elements will help your community grow and prosper. You may not see overnight results, but over time you will start to see a huge difference in visitors, registrations and returning members.

That wraps it up for this article. We'd love to know your thoughts on our suggestions and any strategies that you've used in the past that have worked well.

Have you ever found yourself muttering "there has to be an easier way" when managing your community?

If you have, it's likely that you are not the first person to think that. Invision Community has been refined over nearly two decades, and in that time we've received a lot of feedback from clients running very large and busy sites.

We love a short cut, especially when it makes our clients lives easier.

There's plenty of time-saving features throughout Invision Community, and here are five of the best.

Saved Actions
If you routinely perform the same actions to a topic, such as replying before closing it or moving the topic to a different forum, then saved actions will save you a lot of time.

Let's look at a practical example. You have a forum where your members can suggest new features for your product. You might choose to move some of these suggestions to another forum to shortlist them for inclusion in a future version, or to discuss further. You also may like to reply thanking the member for their idea, but it's not feasible at this time.

Here you would set up two saved actions, one that replies and moves the topic to a specific forum, and one that replies to the topic and closes it for further commenting.

You and your moderating team can select these saved actions quickly when reading a topic to perform multiple moderation steps in one go.

RSS Feeds
If your community regularly discusses topics that feature in the latest news, then you can quickly seed these discussions using the RSS feed import tool.

Not only can you import almost any public RSS feed into your community, but you also have control over how these topics are displayed, to whom they are attributed to and how the link back to the source article looks.

RSS feed import is an often overlooked but handy tool at starting productive discussions without the need to source and post them manually.

iCal Feeds
The iCal feed can be considered as the sister feature to the RSS Feed Import tool. It works in a very similar way in that it can accept almost any public iCal feed and import events into your community's calendar.

This is especially useful if you maintain an event stream outside of the community, but wish to share those events with your members in a native way, or perhaps you already have a calendar product used by your organisation.

Using the iCal feed tool to populate your community calendar with key dates relevant to your community can be achieved very quickly.

Auto-moderation
Moderating a busy community can be a time-consuming task. Trying to review new posts and topics to ensure they meet your community standards as they come in can be daunting.

Fortunately, Invision Community has an ace up its sleeve.

Auto-moderation allows you to use the power of your community to identify and remove content that does not meet your community standards. The administrator sets up a threshold so that when a specific number of reports for that content item is crossed, the content is hidden.

Auto-moderation has a lot of options to configure which we covered in this blog article recently.

Group promotion
Ensuring your members feel valued and rewarded for their contributions is key to member retention and keeping engagement high.

A simple way to reward long term regular contributors is to elevate their permissions. This can mean that they have access to otherwise hidden areas, or they get more allowances in terms of upload space and fewer restrictions.

To do this manually would take a significant amount of time. Thankfully, Invision Community has a feature called Group Promotion.

This tool allows the administrator to set up specific thresholds such as post count, or time since joining which then move the member into a new group when triggered.

This all happens automatically. Just set it up and let it run!

We spoke about Group Promotion recently, take a look here to learn more about this feature.

How many of you are already using these features, and which ones did we miss off our list? I'd love to know.