Community Zen

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Anyone running a membership website knows that keeping your members engaged and active is a challenging and time consuming part of the business. Smart membership site owners come up with creative and new ways to engage members and keep interest alive. Online discussion forums are great places to hook people, and there are some tips and tricks that may make it easier to keep people coming back for more.

Every entrepreneur (which is probably a good description of every one of your members) wants to show off what they’ve learned, and boast about the tips and tricks of the trade that have made them successful. Every entrepreneur also usually loves to commiserate and share their not-so-successful experiences, especially if they’ve overcome any of those hardships by coming up with their own great ideas.

Why not start a little contest on your forum? Consider starting a thread that asks people to submit their best tips for “whatever,” picking the top ones, and having other members vote on them? Offer some sort of simple prize for the top few contenders; you can give them a month’s subscription, an e-book, downloadable software, or a membership upgrade. Trust me when I tell you, people will be breaking a nail trying to submit their ideas. This is a genius idea, really, and you’ll find your forum to be quickly full of members consistently, and very lively and active.

When you’re done with that contest, ask for submissions of the best rags-to-riches stories, or ask people to post about things that maybe have not worked so well for them. Not only will your membership be clamoring for more, your forum will be practically running itself and bursting at the seams with action.

These ideas are really quite simple, but very effective. Keeping members engaged and active when you are running a membership site is really the key. How else do you expect to make any money from your membership site? Oh, that could be my next question for you. How DO you plan to make money? What’s your best idea???

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Related posts:

1. More Tips for Engaging Your Members
2. Making Your Membership Work For You