If you don’t grow, adapt, and change you will not be able to run a successful online community. That’s not to say you should forget about your core goals, values, and members, but you still need to keep up. Sometimes that includes simply apply security updates. Other times it might require a complete site rebuild.

Watch the market. What are other forums or blogs doing. Are you keeping up with the latest’s trends. Don’t just check out sites in your niche, check out sites in other niches as well. Do you want to be the first of your competitors to launch a new feature or the last? What is the software vendors up to? Are there some new beta copies you can test out? You need to keep up or you will be run over.

In your quest to keep up, just don’t forget about your audience and core values. Installing a new WordPress theme every month is surly going to frustrate you regular visitors. Try to adding features, don’t change or remove existing features unless there is a really good reason to do so. You don’t know what features your regular visitors will miss. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Try to give your community the tools and features they need. Remember you audience.

Another area to think about when you are looking to keep up is to diversify your communities. Do you run only one community? What are you goals? Are you looking to make money? If yes then run more than one community. Diversify your traffic over a network of communities that cover several niches. When one niche slows down others will pick up the slack. If you want to depend on your community to make a consistent income then don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

That is where I am at right now. I have sites that cover several niches, but most of my money making sites are local regional based sites. I need to start working on and promoting internet wide sites that cover a specific niche and not a geographical area.

I make money as sports photographer. but that only covers the northern California area. Sacramento News at FromTheCapitol.com does nicely for income. My community forums tends to pull in a decent amount of traffic and money.

Now I am branching out and covering non-geographic niches. My first two sites I am starting are Type 1 Online and Photography Wisdom. Type 1 Online is all about being a parent of a Type 1 Diabetic. Photography wisdom is all about teaching people about photography.

It will take time to build traffic and communities for these sites, but I need to do so. I need to Expand and diversify my traffic and income. I will keep you updated with the progress.

What do you do to stay ahead? Do you run multiple communities?

One important aspect of running an online community is safety.  Keeping your software up to date is one of the best way to ensure your community stays safe.

Today I updated CommunityAdministrator.com with the latest WordPress software. I also needed to update the theme and 5 plugins. There are times when an update is simply a bug fix or a gives you additional features. You can even introduce security holes when you update, but generally the latest software is the most secure.

Not all software tells you when an update is available. WordPress does a great job of letting you know there is an update. Vbulletin also let’s you know but it’s not as obvious. To get notification of new updated you should sign up for the vendor’s mailing list or add their RSS feed to your RSS reader. Most software vendors will announce new versions one of these two ways. There’s also the Twitter and Facebook options, but not all of the software vendors announce updates this way.

It’s important to stay up to date. You have a responsibility to your community to try and keep them safe while they are on your site.

There are many types of online communities, but all of them need some sort of interaction between you and members of your community. Brand new online communities have a difficult time getting new discussions going. Who wants to talk to themselves? A blog or forum without any comments will not entice people to post their own comments and opinions. So how do you get the ball rolling? There are different methods for blogs than there are for forums. I will cover forums in a later article, but for now let’s look at blog comments.

You many have thousands of readers, but if no one comments then the perception is you don’t have any traffic. People like to hang out on popular sites, so making you blog ”look” popular is critical for getting a true following. Of course content is king and with poor content you’re not going to get anyone regularly reading no matter how many comments you have. So if you have stellar content how do you get people to comment?

Keep in mind that 90% of your readers will simply read. They will never comment no matter what your do. 9% of your users may comment, but if they do it will not be all that often. Then there is the 1%. Those 1% will make up a majority of your comments. This is simply the way online participation works.

One way to get people to comment is to ask for them. Ask for comments. Ask questions. Give people a reason to comment that they might not have come up with on their own. When asking questions make sure they are open ended questions. Don’t ask questions that only need yea and no answers. Ask questions that require at least a sentence as a reply.

When you do get a comment always reply. Communities need interaction. If you have a large enough user base you may be able to let other’s reply, but no comment should be without at least one reply. Generally when you reply the original commenter will feel they part of the team and a valuable member of the site. That feeling will drive them to comment even more.

Figure out what tone works best for your blog and stick with it. Are you going to confrontational or humble? Confrontational comments can really drive more interaction, but be careful it may backfire on you. Either way thank your users for commenting even when they disagree with you.

Make commenting easy. I almost never comment if I need to log in and most people are the same way. There are enough moderation tools out there that you should not need validated accounts. Let people simply fill out a form to post a comment. If you feel the need for validated accounts you might consider adding a forum to your site.

Another way to gain comments is by rewarding your users. One thing that has generated hundreds of comments for me is using the CommentLuv plugin for WordPress. I turn on dofollow and I also add the KeywordLuv plugin. Then I submit my blog to dofollow sites like dofollow.info. There is a onetime $5 charge, but it is worth the cost. Once you get your site listed on a few dofollow lists you will start to see more comments.

There will be an increase in all types of comments including outright spam and out of context spam. The outright spam is generally caught by one of the many anti-spam plugins so you should not really need to worry about it. Out of context spam will be spam posted by bots or humans, but it is obvious they never really read your post. Generic comments like “I love your site” will simply get deleted.

These plugin will also increase comments from people only looking for the dofollow love. Those are just fine. They read your post and make a comment that relates to your to that specific post. Even though these people don’t really care about your site and it’s content they are helping you in several ways. One they are generally adding valuable keywords to your post. They are creating new content that search engine like to find. They are adding to the discussion and may inspire others to comment. They are also making your blog “look” more active. That is huge when it comes to other users as well as advertisers.

I have Google’s image search a million times.  Okay maybe not that much, but I use it a fair amount.  I have never really thought about taking advantage of Google’s image search to benefit my own sites, but today the light went on.

Actually it was a slow site that caught my attention.  One of my forums was really slow and even unavailable at times.  At first I wanted to blame my host, Wired Tree, but it was not them it was me.  My forum was slow because of too much traffic on my Sacramento News site.

At first glance though I could not tell why.  A new story was published in the morning, but it was local story about new police cameras.  Not really the type of story to be generating a huge amount of traffic.

Google Analytics did not really help because they do not do real-time stats very well.  I can’t wait until tomorrow so I turned to another stats program I had installed.  Piwik to the rescue.  Piwik gave me the real-time stats I need to find where the traffic was coming from.  It was an image search for Cinco De Mayo.  Today is May 5th so that made sense.  Googling for Cinco De May I noticed my own image came up first in the image results.

As you can see Cinco De Mayo is a good holiday to drive traffic to one of my sites.  In this case it will be short lived, but having well placed images can really help your incoming traffic.   By 9am I had already tripled my traffic of the previous day.

Why did the image place so well in Google?  I believe it was several things.  The page content was about Cinco De Mayo.  The title, keyword, and description on the page all mentioned Cinco De Mayo.  Also the image title is “Cinco-de-Mayo-Sacramento.gif” and the ALT tag is “Cinco de Mayo in Sacramento”.  I believe the image name and ALT tag were huge factors.

From now on I am going to do a much better job at naming my images and using proper ALT tags.  You never know what may drive traffic to your sites in the future.

I have been looking at my bounce rate lately and wondering if I should be looking to improve it. So one of my questions became what is the average bounce rate. I found that there is no good answer. Each site varies greatly. Looking at your bounce rate against your competitors might be the best way to compare, but how often do you have that type of information?

Looking at my sites I have a bounce rate of 35% to 90% with everything in between. My news sites seem to have a higher bounce rate that other sites. Also forums seem to fair pretty well with bounce rates. My average bounce rate across all of my sites is 60%. I also notice the site with a 90% bounce rate also has a lot of international traffic. All of my other sites have primarily US based traffic.

There is some indication that Google may use your bounce rate as one of the many factor that affect your search engine ranking. That would require them to use Google toolbar data as their TOS for Analytics stays they will not use that data for search engine rankings.

If you are trying to build traffic then you want to figure out ways to lower your bounce rate and attract loyal readers. A high traffic site should not worry too much about your bounce rate. If you want to reduce your bounce rate you need to think of a few items.

Why would someone want to stay on your site? They found you now what? Do you have content that attracts them to click on another page? Do you have related topics under each post of page content? Get rid of pop-up ads. People don’t like them and will leave your site quickly. The same goes for too many advertisements. You need to pay the bills, but no one wants to see 47 ads on the first page of a site.

Another way to get people to stick around is to have a quick site. No one wants to wait 60 seconds for you page to load. Run you site on a quick server and don’t put too many resource intensive code bit on your site. Keep it simple and have great content are the best ways to keep loyal readers.

Setting up an online community is not easy work. Not only do you need to setup whatever software packages you want to use. Then you need to add content and customize the site you your needs. Then you need to get people to come. A online community is not really that if you are the only one talking.

In later posts I will discuss all of these things in more detail. For now let me offer this little bit of advice, “Do something everyday”. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Don’t ever forget about your online community or your users will forget about you. Every day you should respond to comment posts or forum posts. Every day you should try to get one more link to your site. Every day you should try to make a blog post or a forum post or write an article.

In reality you probably have a life outside of your online community. You probably take a vacation every once in a while. You may not be able to do something every single day, but you should try if you want a successful online community.