Part 5 - Driving Traffic

Prominence

Of course, the very word community implies a group of people. It's literally impossible to foster a community online if you don't a) have the traffic on your site, and b) drive that traffic to your community areas. This article won't focus on A - that's a separate issue. I will give you plenty to think about, however, with regard to getting people to your discussion area and postings. While much of this discussion can apply to commercial or promotional sites, I will be addressing mainly content sites.

First, there's the question of prominence and accessibility. If your community area is buried layers into your site, and if your main link to it is less than prominent, that will send the message that this is not an important feature to you. Even making "discuss" or "community" one of a list of navigation choices still doesn't emphasize it enough. Access to your site's community features should reflect equivalent status to your content if you really want it to be highly visited. And this is just the start - there are many additional ways to help drive interested, qualified visitors to your community.

Topic-specific traffic

One tactic that we at GMD have employed to large success (through a variation of our Dynadex software) is to create a section of the site index page where the newest or most recently active discussion posting headings are automatically indexed and updated every few hours. Check out indieWIRE or The Slant to see this daring but rewarding approach in live action. The danger is that anything anyone says can wind on your front page, but the reward is that every visitor to your site can see what conversations are happening in the discussion area without having to go there first. Even further, your willingness to devote such prime real estate sends the message that you value community highly.

This brings up a related point. There are some people who are drawn to BBS's and community areas out of a desire to participate in general, while others may be lured by specific issues or topics. In the example above, the links from the indexed subject lines lead directly to those postings or the newest reply. As I explained a while back, this individual posting location is an important feature of your BBS software because it lets you capture that second group - people who might not engage a link to a general discussion area.

Linking content with discussion

Here are some other ways to capture the subject specific participant. At The Slant, we introduced a technique that I still haven't seen used in many other places, which is surprising considering how interactive it is. We essentially bring our articles themselves (already generated by volunteer members of the community) down to the level of discussion by having the authors include a posting related to their article subject. It can be something more extreme, a related topic, a personal observation...anything that allows them to be completely subjective and at the same time induce readers to engage them in dialogue.

We link the subject line of these statements from the HTML article pages directly to the posting URL in the discussion area, so there's an almost seamless connection between the two. Even if the readers don't engage the posting (again with the passivity factor), many click through to find out what it says, increasing the page read numbers. And when a discussion does break out, a one page article can yield ten or more pages per visitor as the record keeps growing with each new posting.

After all, the Web's interactivity can let readers respond directly to writers by adding their own statements to the record. How could site producers NOT take advantage of that power? I estimate that as webizens continue to grow more sophisticated, this type of format will become an even more powerful community tool.

Another creative way to drive traffic to individual discussion topics lies in the use of email newsletters. Non-invasive opt-in newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your user base and drive traffic to the site. But they can be used to drive your discussions too. The indieWIRE daily digest has made particularly effective use of this tactic, proposing discussion topics in the newsletter with a link to a specific posting. With one click from the email text, users can be reading or participating in the forum on that subject.