quick tips (42)

One of the best (and quickest) ways to drive traffic to your website is to build a paid search campaign on one of the big search engines such as Google or Bing & Yahoo!. Paid search is a great way to drive traffic to your site because it will bring in visitors that are already looking for your specific kind of product and/or service. Best of all, it can happen right away! You could have people coming to your website just hours after it has gone live.
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Unpopular Communities

I recently read "The Power of Unpopular" by Erika Napoletano, the no holds barred brand strategist who makes a splash in the marketing world with her frank, uncensored advice. While the advice in her book is primarily aimed at brands and companies, I found that much of the wisdom could easily be applied to online community. Here are my favorite takeaways for cultivating an "unpopular" community.
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How does Whole Foods Markets balance its overall brand social media efforts with those of local markets? Director of Social Media and Digital Marketing Natanya Anderson shares insight on the overarching ideology and regional practices at BlogWell Bay Area.
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You can’t mass-invite people to join your community. That’s spam. It’s ineffective and does more harm than good. Do you want a deleted e-mail to be someone’s first impression of your community? There are 3 very good and very effective ways to invite someone to join your community.
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A writer, lecturer at Stanford University and frequent speaker, Nir Eyal's specialty is educating companies and consumers on habits and behaviors that help and hinder their lives, both online and off. In talking about what traits apps need to "hook" users, much of his information was directly relevant to building communities that keep members coming back .
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Reading Julia Child's memoir, I found myself thinking that I could really learn a lot from her - and not just as a cook. Her life experience is amazing and her writing is full of tidbits that can be used as life lessons. I found that some of her philosophies can even be lessons for community managers.
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Too many communities focus on advice or industry news when they should be focused on community people and activities. The best content for any online community is content about the community. Here are 20 content ideas you can use.
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Are you a Professional or an Amateur?

These are actors (thankfully), but with Community Manager being such a new career path, there are those self-proclaimed experts that are just a load of talk at the end of the day. Fortunately, they are vastly outnumbered by the awesome, talented, always learning, always sharing community managers that make up the majority.
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Members need both the motivation to initiate and to overcome their fear of starting a discussion. Their motivation to initiate will be to either learn something (e.g. "Does anyone know how to....?"), to impress others (e.g. "does anyone else think business class travel isn't as great as it used to be?" or to bond with others (e.g. "I'm upset Kelly got fired from the Apprentice").
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