What worked in the past may not work now ... what with t and fb and g, oh my!

What counts more than anything is to have a topic/theme that can inspire passion and participation. And is viral enough to get looky-loos clicking a serp to actually give it a shot.

Your "leaders", "ambassadors", "topic experts" and "builders" will reveal themselves over time.

Make the most of that first click to build a community, ie. more than enough to get the visitor interested, and at the same time reserve the sweetest parts to go pay (ahem, take a look at WW for one example of how that might be done).

Along the way have moderators to keep things in check, keep the threads clean of spam, and are even tempered enough to avoid any ideological or personal bias to get in the way of an active community.

NOTE: None of the above are EASY, GUARANTEED, or USUAL. Worse, it takes TIME and PATIENCE to create, build, and grow.

WORSE, the web, these days, assumes everything is free and INSTANT ... which is not true in real life, but the public perception is such that is a question is not answered in 12.5 seconds you just created a bad mouth spouting elsewhere. All of which is enough to give nightmares to growing a community!

Sounds negative, but it isn't ... just a reminder that hard work and dedication to achieve the results desired will be an hourly, daily, or weekly JOB that is never ending ... but if successful will be a gem and destination for those who might be interested in what is offered.

ADD: I don't think a country location is involved in all the above. Just the topic and passion.

Speaking from actual experience founding my own communities since 2004, starting a community is harder now because of Facebook and Reddit. Communities have taken a hit across the board.

The approach I took in starting communities is to create a ton of useful content and once it's ranking well, and with lots of links, create the forum. The bar on content has risen, which is why I say you need a lot of it. But if you're bolting it onto an already existing website, then you have a head start.

You will need people full time answering questions and in my experience it can take about a year of effort creating forum content and some sock puppetry before it starts ranking and people begin making it a home.

It won't happen by itself. You have to seed the forum with discussion on a daily basis and have people ready to answer all questions soon after someone posts.

If you haven't picked a forum software, Xenforo and phpBB are decent ones. I don't like VBulletin because of its long history of vulnerabilities (including as recently as last week) and I don't like BB Press because of it has limits to how big it can scale.

Good luck!

Roger Montti

Tangor, I sincerely appreciate all the effort you put into this response. I also agree with everything you said and do not take it negative. I know it's a big challenge. It seems like the start is particularly tricky because we need a few people to get involved who'll bring a few more people and help guide the feature development and membership growth.

Do you have any ideas about where to look for as you said, "leaders", "ambassadors", "topic experts" and "builders"?

Of course, there are a ton of people discussing every imaginable topic on T, FB, and other forum sites (Reddit, Quora, etc), but we don't want to build a community on another platform, we want to build a community that does not depend on another platform.

Roger,
Thank you for the insight. That has given me some ideas. We'll have to get more serious about the foundational content piece. And we'll figure out a way to post answers and notify people of replies.

It is being added on to an existing site and we're integrating it into the existing content pages, so we're not using any forum software. We're using Django.

May I ask, are you one of the founders of WW?

@CanadianGuy, i'd add to what's said that forums are a specific kind of discussion, and it does depend upon your topic focus. For example, many younger people are happier with short-form discussions, or even pictures and video. A long-form forum aimed at them would struggle from the outset.
If your audience is more interested in a long-form discussion you'll find an easier ride.

Thanks engine. I can see how those short-form platforms can be entertaining, but hard to see how it delivers valuable, useful info. At the same time, making it easy to include pics & video may be a requirement on today's web.

...hard to see how it delivers valuable, useful info.

Attention spans are much shorter for a number of reasons, and those that prefer short-form aren't really after in-depth conversation. Social media content is far more about "viral content" than about education.
I just saw an infographic earlier today which had a lot of views, but it was strewn with errors.
How many of those people seeing that infographic actually believe what's in there.
The long formats go into the detail it's impossible to show in an infographics such as the one I mentioned.

Ads: There's ad blindness, so be very careful about that, and it includes promotions and marketing in messages. If it's too busy the content gets lost.

Very true about attention spans and viral sensationalism.

We have no plans for ads at this point

@CanadianGuy ...

Roger's "at least a year" is a useful benchmark for building something new.

As for where to find movers and shakers, that depends on your niche, those who play, and those who have passion and a desire to share what THEY know.

We have a "no self-promotion" rule (which is actually a good rule!), but more specific answers might be possible if you reveal the NICHE you are targeting, such as: "entertainment", "transportation", "health", "art", "home improvement", "science", "news", "politics", etc. Each will have differing levels of "passion" and "experience".

The most successful communities revolve around authoritative content which can be checked and verified by others, and ultimately RISE as regards appearing in serps.

The "We have no plans for ads at this point" suggests the niche will grow by passion and not monetary. In that regard I suggest that's a GOOD place to start: Volunteer Leaders, Seeders, and Moderators are more likely to play.

Final: If you can provide a good community base, easy to use, your "leaders" will show themselves in their everyday participation. At that point it is up to you to nourish that activity and perhaps reward them with "moderator" or "admin" or "whatever" for that freely given effort on their part.

But none of this happens over night.

Worse, attention spans these days are so short IN GENERAL that the old tried and true "web community" has suffered under FB and T and I ... The NOISE is immense!

Good luck!

NOTE: IT CAN STILL BE DONE, just have patience!

I hear you tangor. We're not worried about being the biggest, but we do want people to know we have an option for them.
Our niche is real estate. Specifically, helping regular folks find answers as they prepare to buy and sell. (Not investors or commercial.) We're not a brokerage and we're not realtors but we do have a mechanism to connect people with an agent, if that's what they want. The community aspect is about giving people a way to find out more and discuss by topic and location. Cities, neighbourhoods, & condo buildings all have dedicated pages where people can post questions and answers. We don't have the topic pages yet, but it's looking like we should.

We're happy to 'reward' contributors as moderators or admins if they'd like to be involved.

We're looking at 2 general strategies for finding the founding community leaders. First is by topic, so getting more involved in existing real estate communities. The second is by contributors (for a lack of a better term), places where people who like to contribute are. Maybe some of those contributors are also interested in real estate.

Admittedly, I didn't think a lot about headwinds being created by the large social platforms. Considering how many times it's been mentioned here, I'm now thinking harder about it.

Could be a fun niche, but one fraught with a number of hidden perils. If you want to know more about that PM me here at WW and I'll share a short list of potential problems for your consideration.

As for the SM giants ... most of them are already regulated as being either a business, or a personal presence.

CanadianGuy,
No, I have nothing to do with the founding of WebmasterWorld. I just moderate here.

But WebmasterWorld was a huge inspiration for helping me understand terms of service, moderating and so on. I founded my own communities on other topics.

Like I said earlier, there's going to be some sock puppetry involved to get the community started. It's a turn off to post something and nobody's around or already having conversations. So some seeding is going to have to happen.

Good luck!

Roger

Understood Roger. We're working on it. So you thinking seeding before trying to recruit some community founders?
Once you have seed content, how do you find people who will engage?
I guess there's a certain amount of experimenting with content that inspires engagement.

>>>>>Once you have seed content, how do you find people who will engage?

The pages will begin to rank. If it's a standalone forum section then you'll want to optimize it for Niche Forum or Keyword Forum.

Some niches tend to attract people with questions. You just have to be there to engage with them, like a host at a restaurant. Can't leave people waiting, they ask questions, someone responds.

One of my sites attracts a ton of comments by people asking questions, which tends to improve the content.