A friend of mine forwarded me an excellent post on how to grow a community online. What I loved about this post is that it is realistic.

Growing an online community doesn’t happen over night. It will take many years of hard work to realize your goals. Blogger Danny Brown shares some excellent points about building your own media empire. Here is a link to his post,

Here are a few of my own thoughts on the subject for your early days of starting out

  1. Make sure you build a newsletter from the very beginning. It will grow slowly but as you SEO takes off so will you! Be sure to embed your newsletter sign up on your web site. It is easily done with simple HTML code. Some good options to consider when starting out are: MailChimp and Vertical Response.
  2. Register your social media as soon as possible – make sure your names don’t get taken! In fact before choosing your name be sure to look and see if the social media names are still available. ie / www.facebook.com/companyabc www.twitter.com/companyabc

  3. Register your web site on as many free web directories as possible ie: Yahoo, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, Local just to name a few!
     
  4. Use other social media like Stumble Upon It, Digg It to build awareness of your site.
     
  5. Write, Write & Write some more. Reach out to guest bloggers of influence. You would be surprised at how many celebrities out there still love free publicity. Remember to tag, tag and tag your posts some more. Make sure you are aware of what key words are popular to your niche market.