getting new users but little user activity

[sodani]

I have a fairly young community web site. I get about one new member/user every day, but I'm hardly getting anyone to create content or post comments.

One of the things that I say on the homepage is that registered users can interact with other users, and that may be what is drawing people to register.

This is a site where people can post certain types of stories, create a profile, create threads on a forum and comment. I have about 30 members now, but no activity except for my own.

Any ideas on what I can do to get people more interested?

[Pibs]

Post something controversial?

P.

[rogerd]

Check the Community Building Library [webmasterworld.com] for some good threads on starting a new forum and increasing participation.

If the architecture of your system allows the possibility of posting without registration, you might want to run that way for a few months and see if that helps.

[sodani]

Pibs - it's already quite a controversial site!

Thing is, it's not a forum. It's a community site, where people can create stories, post photos and more.

I guess maybe I need to get more content, and solicit people to participate.

[Beagle]

You need to let people know why they should post their stories and photos on your site instead of all the other choices out there. If you're getting new users/visitors, you probably have at least some people who are trying to decide among different options and at least some who are trying to decide if they want to post their work anywhere. Give them reasons to post - and on your site. Not necessarily financial reasons; in fact, if the topic's controversial, money's probably not the most important thing. What advantages are there to airing their views with the particular community you're trying to build?

[rokec]

Look, if you want good community site, you must have non-community site first for 2 months. If it will be free, many people will register (and many people will be active). When you think that you have enough members, change your service payable (or whatever you want to do).

[sodani]

Beagle - I understand what you're saying; that I need to win users over from my competitors. However, there really aren't any other sites out there like mine (from what I've seen). I'm in a space where people do a lot of viewing and reading, but not much writing. I don't think that these members are on other sites posting up a storm.

[sodani]

rokec - the site is free, and I have no plans of changing that in the near future.

[SuzyUK]

I too am developing a young (non-tech) community site (with no direct competition), it's very small and local.

I've been "working on it" since January 2006, deliberately launched it locally in July/August. Prior to that I'd done a lot of offline "programming" work, encouraging people (anyone who'd listen ;)) to keep reading, give me suggestions, contribute content and ideas that would be attributed to them later, once member names were up and running, if they wanted.

The reason I did it in July/August is because I knew that no matter how much I nagged them I couldn't get everyone away from sunshine and BBQ's, and it allowed me time to find out some teething troubles with those who were willing to try.

Got 35 or so members during that time, and a lot of them were willing to help input the existing content (I had to swat up on an online wysiwyg ;)) and now in September the member count is increasing every day which I can only presume is down to the weather and because most of the initial tech issues are ironed out already, the site is already getting contributing members, so new members don't feel they're coming to an "empty" party, which helps

I have one alias and have only used it twice (so far), there's a lot of people who want the site to succeed, even if they haven't contributed already, again I presume it's because they feel it's theirs already, they will get a familiar welcome as soon as they do actually contribute (everyone likes to be known!) and the darker nights are coming in so they're getting nosy..

I have been highlighting some site news in a local newsletter the last couple of months, and will continue to do so until there's too much to pick from, I feel this helps keep the site name in peoples faces for a while

I'm planning an "official" launch around the end of October (after the kids holidays!) but even before that I reckon I'm going to need to upgrade the bandwidth :o

If all goes well I should be just be administrating before long!

Don't know if there's a magic formula, site topic dependant I'd presume - but just thought I'd share how I'm doing with this one

Suzy

[edited by: SuzyUK at 7:56 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2006]

[sodani]

Thanks for your summary Suzy. I think that perhaps the problem with my site may be that at this point, people are more interested in consuming the content that is already there as opposed to contributing new content.

At this point, there's not a lot of stickiness :/

[sodani]

Another question I'd like to raise - Suzy, you say that there were people who were willing to help you with content. Now, if other people help you get a site off the ground by being a moderator, a contributor, or something of the like, and you start making money off of your site, do you owe these people anything?

My guess would be yes. I know that if someone asked me to help their site, and then they started making money on it and I wasn't receiving anything, I would be ticked off. Any thoughts?

[SuzyUK]

difficult one,

In my case with this one I'd say no, I've been hosting the site of my own back for a few years, the amount of development (and design) work I've done on it this year I could probably charge a good few thousand pounds if I had someone to charge! However the ultimate goal of this site is not just to make money, and if it eventually does it will go to cover the hosting, and then go into the community funds! The content/articles being contributed so far, are on the areas of the site that people are interested in, kinda like here ;)

If you don't want to feel you might have future obligations to people with well thought out contributions how about considering to pay them for a few articles?

[sodani]

Right. That's a good idea.

[netchicken1]

How do you know that your people are real people who want to interact.

For a while I had heaps of new members but they were posting links to their sites in their profile and nothing else. I disabled the ability to to that and it stopped.

Then I think that there are bots, at least one is identified, that act like real people yet are merely program designed to spread links.

When I instituted graphic identification the bots stopped also. However there are still people who join yet never post.

[sodani]

well, I certainly don't know whether or not they want to interact. So far, they really haven't. I don't think there are any bots because e-mail verification is required and I also have captcha. That, and there haven't been any members spreading lots of suspicious links =)