5 Steps to Building a Successful Online Enthusiast Community

January 28, 2008 – 1:48 pm

One of the oldest and most rewarding ways to make some extra cash online in the car enthusiast world is building an online forums community. With all of the tools available these days you can buy a couple off-the-shelf scripts and have your own enthusiast community up and running in a few hours. And with a little passion, hard work, dedication, and creativity, you can turn your online forums community into a money making machine. Since this site is heavily focused on the “Car Guy” I’ll be using examples for automotive communities but these same techniques can easily be applied to other enthusiast markets as well with great results.

I’ve been building and managing online communities for 10 years now, taking a few of them from zero visitors to over 100,000 unique visitors in less than 12 months. I’ve had great success with some and learned some tough lessons from others. But regardless of the outcome it’s always been fun and fulfilling trying to create something from nothing. The trick is to find a subject you’re passionate about and that you’d want to put some time and effort into. I’ve made over $300,000 building and managing various online communities over the past few years. If I can do it anyone can, and I’m sure some can certainly do better than I have in terms of monetizing with all of the new ad programs available these days.

One of the greatest tools for creating community is a good Forums script. This script will be installed on your server and will allow people to hold discussions and post questions and answers for everyone to read. It’s the ultimate community building tool. The most popular and powerful Forums script on the market today is vBulletin Forum Software. Not only is vBulletin the most widely used Forums script out there but it’s also the most widely customized Forums script and as a result, has the most plug-ins available. These plug-ins are typically created by other vBulletin Forum Software license holders and can be found in various vBulletin modification community sites, the biggest being vBulletin.org. These plug-ins can help all aspects of a forum site and can help you make your forums experience unique. Many are free to use and the really good ones will cost a small fee to use. One popular plug-in is called PhotoPost, which has a Great photo Gallery add-on, a Product Review add-on, and Classifieds add-on that will plug right into vBulletin and use its powerful user registration backend.

I’ve come up with 5 steps to creating a successful and thriving online community. If you follow these steps you’ll put yourself in a position to succeed but part of your success will also heavily depend on the niche you’re catering to and the potential advertising dollars circulating in the market you focus your community around. You should be able to make some money regardless.

1. VISION

Put a plan together and do some research on the market you plan on making your splash in. Make sure there is a market for it. For instance, choosing to build a community around a car that is no longer in production might be more risky than choosing a new car that is going into production in the near future. You’ll want to choose a market that you’re passionate about and one that will have a strong after market following as well. The more businesses out there selling parts and accessories for the car your site is focused on, the better - and the same can be said for the buzz surrounding the car as well.

Start laying out the type of content ideas you think people will want to read about in that market. Make some notes on some features that could make your community unique. Chances are someone else will be trying to start a Forum around the same car and you’ll want to plan to have some features and content that will set your site apart from the others. If there are already other sites out there focused on the car you’ve chosen see what it is they’re lacking.

Be prepared to generate most of the content for your site for the first 3-6 months. This is why you have to be passionate about the car you choose. It’s a lot of work and you’ll need some good motivation to keep building that content. Put together a list of possible articles you could write about in your Forums and prioritize them.

2. EXECUTION

Once the planning is done it’s time to start building the site. You’ll need to choose a host for your site and the software you’ll be using to run the site. This is usually where people start getting overwhelmed, especially if you consider yourself a little computer illiterate. It really is not rocket science. Like anything else you just have to do a little research.

First of all you’ll want to choose a good host that you can grow with. I’ve used plenty of free and low cost hosting services and I’ve found that you tend to get what you pay for. Look for hosting companies that offer 24 hour phone support as I’ve found that to be a necessity. Waiting for an email reply is a big waste of time. You’ll also want a host that can handle a database driven PHP site. You’ll likely be using PHP and MySQL for your backend code. I HIGHLY recommend Liquidweb.com for excellent service and bang for your buck.

In terms of software I’d recommend starting with vBulletin Forum Software. If you’re tight on money you can lease a yearly license from them for $85. But the best deal is to just buy an owned license for $160. If you’re planning on doing this for a few years it’ll pay for itself in no time. Again, you’ll find some other cheap and free Forums solutions out there but none can come close to vBulletin in terms of power and flexibility. vBulletin is written in PHP and uses MySQL databases.

Some of the other tools you’ll need to get and familiarize yourself with are: an FTP program; an HTML editor; a Graphics application; and various references on how to use those tools. I highly recommend picking up a few books to have as desk references. I’ve grown to love the Visual Quickstart Guides from Peachpit Press. They’re well written and easy to understand, especially for visual learners like myself.
Here are a few books to get started with:
Building Web Sites All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies
HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition
PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites

Once you’ve purchased and downloaded vBulletin, you’ve set up an account with your host, and you’ve learned the basics of your FTP program, you can start uploading the files to your site and configuring your vBulletin settings and options. You’ll want to refer to your vBulletin documentation to help you along with the process. Start playing with colors and find a combination you think will fit your audience well. Tip: the colors you like may not always be the best for readability. The best choice would be to stick with a white (or light color) background and dark text for the main content in the beginning. Spice it up with some interesting border and accent colors for section headings. Don’t spend too much time on the visual stuff though, test it out and post some test messages. Once you feel it’s ready to go start posting some informative content!

Once you’re familiar with the workings of vBulletin you can start looking into adding some plug-ins to give your visitors more reasons to come back to your site.

3. DRIVING TRAFFIC

One of the most difficult tasks is getting the word out about your new site. This is usually what makes or breaks an online community. The first thing you’ll want to do is announce the site to everyone you know, even if they’re likely not interested in the site’s content. Let them know what you’re trying to accomplish and ask them to forward your site’s URL to anyone they think might be interested. Your close friends and family typically would like to see you succeed and will help out if they can. Add your site’s URL to your email signature. If you’re not already, start participating in as many relevant online Forums and communities as you can where you can mention your site without looking like you’re a spammer.

You’ll probably hear the term Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. This is a very important topic. Do a Google search and read up on as much as you can to help you learn how to optimize your site for search engines, especially Google. I’ve found that most of my traffic has come from Google on almost every community site I’ve every built or managed. It’s not very difficult to do. Just using some basic techniques will help ensure your site will be found when people do searches for the keywords that your site’s content is built around.

Always remember that Content is King. Write as much content as you can so that all of your efforts to bring people in are not wasted. If someone comes to your site and finds that you have little or not content they will likely not come back. So be sure that you’ve put in a good deal of time and effort on the content side before you start working on driving traffic to your site. The best ways I’ve found to create content is to write some articles on how to install parts and accessories on my car. Take some good photos and post some step-by-step tutorials. Another good idea for content is to constantly post news and rumors about the vehicle platform your site is focused on. Organize gatherings in your area and take photos. Attend car shows and take photos. Post the factory specs for the car as a reference for your visitors. Create a list or database of after market parts available for the car and keep that list updated. It’s time consuming but your target audience will find the information useful and will likely tell others about it.

Come up with a grassroots marketing plan. Create some t-shirt and decal designs, even if the design is just comprised of the site name/URL. Print out some business cards and hand them out. A great service for t-shirts is Cafepress.com - they allow you to upload designs, add them to t-shirts (and other products) and sell them to your community on a per-order basis. You don’t have to buy anything in bulk or fulfill any orders and you can mark the products up as much as you want to increase your revenue. There is a small monthly fee of $6.95 for their service but it’s well worth it. I’ve used this service for years and it’s been a great tool for marketing and rewarding site members.

If you have a decent marketing budget you’ll want to consider advertising your site in various places. Google just so happens to have a solution for publishers as well. It’s called Google Adwords. You simply sign up for an account, choose keywords that you think your target audience will use to find content on your site, and set the price you want to pay for the clicks on your ads. It’s very effective.

4. FOSTERING COMMUNITY

It’s going to be crucial to be involved in your community as often as possible. If you’re not posting content you’ll want to make sure you’re answering any questions your visitors are asking in your Forums. Be sure to welcome each new member and show a genuine appreciation for their participation. Reward members who start contributing regularly. Highlight them on your homepage, send them decals, send them a t-shirt, etc. Your members will help define the personality of your site so be sure you’re doing everything you can to keep them there and keep them happy and engaged.

Make sure your forum doesn’t look empty. Nobody will take the time to register or post if it looks like there is nobody to interact with. Create a few fake user accounts and post questions here and there and answer them with different accounts. Send out newsletters asking members to weigh in on a controversial topic. This gives people incentives to come back. Invite your friends and family to post. If you’re having a tough time getting people to register set up a contest/give away to entice people to register.

Appoint community leaders and Moderators. You’ll find that members in your forum will be happy to help you manage the community. Give your leaders special User Titles so that they stand out from the crowd. Your community leaders should share the same vision for the site as you do. Make sure they’re friendly and welcoming to all new members.

Set the tone for user behavior early one. Be friendly and make sure your Moderators are friendly. Define a set of rules and standards and lead by example. One of the quickest ways to alienate people is to allow chaos and lawlessness. Try not to be super strict but don’t let everything go. It’s all about balance and your member will greatly appreciate this.

5. MONETIZING YOUR COMMUNITY

This is the part everyone wants to skip to. How can you make money from all of this? I’ve written an article dedicated to Monetizing Forum Communities that will go into more detail. But here are the basics:

In order to monetize your forum community you’ll need to place ads in various locations on your site and get your visitors to click on those ads. It’s going to be a balancing act, as you don’t want to overwhelm your visitors or take away from your site’s content but you also want to provide them with advertisements that they might benefit from clicking on. With all of the different ad programs available for publishers these days you’ll have plenty of strategies to test out.

In closing, be sure and have fun with it. This is something you should be doing for fun. The primary focus shouldn’t be to make tons of money but to make a positive impact in the market that you’re focusing on. If you do that the money will follow. Any time you create a resource that others find useful or informative you’ll have a good chance at monetizing it. You’ll learn tricks along the way that will help you make your community better and generate more revenue.