Saturday, September 3, 2011

Tips For Improving The User Interaction On Your Community-Based Website Or Forum

If you have a community-based website such as a forum, a wiki, or even a blog that you are using to try and build a community of readers, the considerations for this sort of a site and making it successful can be far different than other types of websites such as sales pages or content sites. The main thing that you need to focus on for making a community website succeed is called user engagement, which are the different ways that you can get your website visitors to interact with the site and with each other. This article will give you a few critical suggestions and pieces of information about the best ways to make your community website as successful as possible, no matter what type of online community you are building.

On an online community website such as a forum which literally depends completely on user interaction and user-generated content to succeed and thrive, it is absolutely vital that your users are willing to interact with each other. Your goal needs to be not only to build website traffic and get people to your site, but more importantly you need to give them a reason to stay there. One tactic that you can use to get more people to stay on your website for longer periods of time is to run a promotion such as a contest related to the topic of your forum, because your users will not only want to participate with each other but they might also want to compete with each other in order to win the contest. The trick is to find ways to keep people on your site once they have arrived, which makes community-based websites different from most other websites.

One type of community website called a wiki is where the visitors to your site can change and update the information on certain pages, so getting your visitors to interact with the website itself can be a crucial part of the success of this kind of site. One way to improve the user engagement directly with the website itself is to include items such as quizzes or polls related to the topic of your website where your users can see what all the other users had to say. By getting your website visitors slightly involved in the interaction with your site by using those kinds of tools, it can open the door to greater interaction such as adding new informative pages to your wiki.

Another important point to remember no matter what type of community website you are operating is to use interesting and intriguing headlines on all of your posts and pages that will make people want to click. Just like you will probably not open up a book unless it has a compelling title, many website visitors will not explore your website any further than the homepage, let alone contribute their own unique user-generated content, unless the headlines that you are using will grab their attention. By following some of the tips in this article and focusing on user engagement on your community-based website, you can increase the amount of time that people will stay on your website and the amount of unique content that they will contribute, which will ultimately grow your business.


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