In my last post, I talked about the importance of achieving a large enough population to keep your community alive. At least in the beginning, online communities don’t grow by themselves. So here are some options to recruit members to your community.

  • Recruit from your corporate websites. Add banners promoting your community. If you have an e-commerce site, send visitors to your community after they complete a purchase.
  • Recruit from your company mailing list. Send out a special campaign presenting your community as a free benefit for customers. If you send out a customer newsletter, feature your community there. Integrate your community with your customer support activities, and have your support team recruit for you.
  • Recruit with rented e-mail lists. There are several companies which have highly qualified databases and can provide lists according to the type of users you want to target. As a long-term approach, this can be expensive and can bring in lower-quality members than other recruitment channels, but it is an easy way to build up critical mass to get things started.
  • Recruit through your advertising. Where appropriate, include your community URL in your company’s TV and print campaigns.
  • Recruit through search engine optimization. If you are at the beginning of your community project, make sure your website is built with SEO in mind. Design activities where members are generating large amounts of text content and, where possible, include activities related to frequently searched key words.
  • Recruit through search engine marketing. Buy sponsored links on search engines with Google AdWords. Just make sure that the key words you use are very relevant to your community’s content to avoid wasting money on clicks from visitors who will leave as soon as they arrive.
  • Recruit through viral marketing. Offer rewards to members for referring others to the site; offer links on the website to share content through e-mail, RSS, social bookmarking; provide branded tools, images, and gadgets for republication.
  • Recruit through social networks and blogs. The European rural tourism site, Toprural.com, for example, has profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, posts photos on Flickr and videos on Youtube, and maintains blogs in five languages. The Spanish travel community Minube.com uses Facebook Connect and has designed a travel application for Facebook. These are all powerful ways to get the word out.