I installed the WordPress app for my iPhone. I am officially going mobile.

I have a lot going on outside of my communities, but that’s no excuse to not move my communities forward in 2012. My first goal is to get more organized. I need to a better system for making it through each of my communities each and every day. I should be able to contribute to the discussions consistently, something I did not do in 2011.

I am on the lookout for tools to help me get and stay organized. Mobile tools are good. I want to be able to everything from my phone if needed, but also sync that same information with my laptop or desktop. If you have any suggestions let me know.

One of the nice things about running established online communities is that you can take a break and things generally run just fine. I have spent a lot of time on my sports photography, but the primary sports seasons are over so back to managing my communities. My first task will be ensuring everything is up to date and secure.

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.

I have been trying to get access to the beta invite only release of Google+ (or Google Plus) and today it happened.  They let me in.  Silly Google.  I plan a writing a more in depth review later but I wanted to share some of my initial reactions.

The interface is nice and clean. It’s fast too.  I love the idea of circles.  I can put different people in different circle and share very specific information with each of my social circles.  This is nice because I may want to share something with family and friends that I don’t necessarily want my professional contacts to see.

The mobile web app is a little slow on my iPhone 3G.  The phone is old so I won’t hold that against them.  I need to upgrade to the 4G (or maybe 5G when it comes out).

So far I have 18 people in my circles.  It’s a little quite on Google+, but hopefully that is for a limited time.  I do like how I can view posts from only certain circles as well.  Sometimes I don’t want to see all the posts from an old friends that I really don’t see anymore, but still like sharing information with.

I have yet to play with any other features.  In the next few days I will check things out more and post a more detailed review.

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.

Our Twitter account is up and running if you would like to follow up.

Running an online community can be rewarding and profitable, but it can also be expensive and frustrating. Do you have what it takes to run an online community? What is your goal? To have fun, be an industry leader, make money, or promote your product are a few good reasons to run an online community.

An online community can take several forms, but generally involve running a CMS, a blog, a forum or all of the above. Keep in mind that technology does not create a community. If you are going to run a forum installing vBulletin or any other forum software is not going to create an instant community. There is a lot of work customizing and setting up any software. How will people find your site. Getting traffic can be one of the toughest challenges for a new community. When people do come to your site how will you encourage them to participate? The best software in the world is not going to solve these issues for you.

You must be committed to your new community. I have seen so many people install the software need. Place a few links on Craigslist and wonder why they don’t have a vibrant community by the end of the week. Building a community take months and even years to get established. There are ways to speed up that process, but do not expect overnight results.

No one wants to talk and interact with themselves so get someone talking. The toughest people to get talking are the first few new members. If you get someone to signup who do they talk to if there are no existing conversations? If you want to start a forum, think about starting the site out as a blog. Get some people to follow you and make comments. After you have some interaction you can decided to keep the blog commenting system or move over to a forum format. Either way your users will have someone to talk to.

You need to be a humble, but strong leader. Every community needs a leader. Are you cut out to lead? As a leader you will have a lot of negative comments thrown your way. Every successful community leader gets beat up from time to time. Be prepared to defend against it or learn from it. Sometime your community’s criticism is accurate and you need to swallow your pride and learn from it. As a community leader you need to inspire, excite, and encourage your users. Why should they take their time to interact with your community? As a leader is your job to give them those reasons.

Set the tone you want your community to have. As the leader of your community, your personality and leadership style sets the tone. Figure out how you will handle people that are rude or disruptive. It only takes one poison pill to taint your entire community.

Again running an online community and be very profitable and enjoyable, but don’t go into it with the thought that if I build it they will come, they won’t

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.