The 3 Keys to Rapidly Growing a Community

Have you ever wondered how people grow an incredibly large following online? More importantly, have you ever wondered how that allows them to transform their business? That’s exactly what you will learn in this week’s Readitfor.me HOWTO Guide.

Our expert this week is Mark Schaefer - the author of “The Tao of Twitter” and also has 28 years of global sales and marketing experience and advanced degrees in business in applied behavioral sciences. He’s an award-winning business writer, university lecturer and innovator, receiving seven international patents for new product ideas with Fortune 100 companies. He teaches at Pellissippi State College in Knoxville and also serves as an adjunct professor of marketing at Rutgers University.

In this Readitfor.me HOWTO Guide, you are going to learn the 3 keys to rapidly growing a community, and how Mark Schaefer was able to create a website that just celebrated its 1 millionth page view.

Key #1: Creating content that is “human”

If you want to attract an audience online, it is critical that you sound like a human being. Although using “corporate-speak” might help you sleep better at night, it doesn’t help build relationships with your stakeholders. So, be yourself. If you have another person on your team creating online content for you, let them be themselves.

Key #2: Create content that is “entertaining”

It’s a very crowded world. We are all suffering from information density and information overload. Think about the blog posts or the videos or the magazine articles that really captivate you. Maybe they teach you something. Maybe they challenge you in a different way. However, most of the time they are also going to be entertaining. There are many ways to do this - add a little humour, mix up the media you are using, or interview an entertaining person from your industry. Keep things fresh for your audience, and they will keep coming back.

Key #3: Creating content that is “sharable”

The first 2 keys focus on content that people want to embrace. However, you also need a system in place so that people can help you spread the word and generate traffic back to your website. The simple things are to include “sharing” buttons on your website and blog so that your visitors can share your content to their networks with one click. The less obvious things are to understand how people will share - they will be sending a headline (probably the one you write) through a tweet, Facebook post or even email. So, make sure you are writing headlines that make it easy and compelling for people to share.