In general, a community refers to a group of people. When groups of people interact wit each other and with a common website, they form online communities. Websites that enable these communities are an important part of the imminent Information Economy.

What's this... Information Economy all about?

Information is powerful stuff! There sure are alot of good applications for some good information. Seriously though, people need information. We've come to expect that we can easily search for any piece of information we want and find it in an instant. Who controls that information? For the most part, people get information from websites. Certainly many people still get a good deal of information from traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and TV, but when people want specific information, they go to the net. Internet advertising expenditures are on the rise. Never before have advertisers had such fine grained control over where their advertisements show up. The highly targeted nature of web ads makes then even more valuable to business than and other media advertising. This makes page views a very valuable commodity. If you can get a lot of people to look at something again and again, you increase your potential advertising revenues. All you need is some good information.

Ok, so we need information... I've got some stored up here somewhere, can we use that?

Sure. In fact, if you're thinking about starting a community, you should focus on something you enjoy. Since Information is so valuable to us, we're going to want to get as much of it as we can, so go for it, write away!

Eventually you'll probably want to get some more information. You'll need to find some new sources. Information ultimately comes from people who know things, so lets try to get them involved in your community. Hopefully we can encourage new members to join and start posting different kinds of content. This way you get a community at large generating information for you.

If I build a Community, who will come?
Seeding
You can't expect people to come participate in your community unless they find some valuable information there. Someone has to create this initial information to hook the first wave of oncoming users. Hopefully you know some people with a lot to say on your subject that we can get to create some content.

SEO
You can do some basic tricks to make sure your site is picked up by search engines. If the keywords you need to promote are in a competitive namespace, you'll need the influence of page rank to move up the charts. This can be done through viral promotion.

Sharing
If you can get people to post links to your content on other sites, search engines will find it much more valuable and it will come through in your search rankings. You can kickstart this process by hiring a web marketing firm to post some positive remarks on your content in some strategic locations online.

Will they come back?

Community Maintainers