In our last installment of our series on marketing tools, we briefly covered the topic of browsers, which without we’d be totally lost on the Internet. In this installment, we’re going to discuss community building tools.
Community building tools…what exactly are they?
Well, a community building tool is one that helps you to build a community. Okay, I know, that was a smart answer. The actual truth is, that’s exactly what it is. I guess what I need to do is define what a community is. A community is a place where more than one person can get together and interact with other people. Yes, that covers a lot of ground and thus covers a lot of tools. So let’s start with the simple communities and work our way up to the more complex ones.
A simple community would be something like a blog. A blog allows people to come to your page and post their comments. Thus, they are interacting with your blog. Now, we could program these blogs ourselves if we had the skills and the time, but there are tools on the Internet that make this an easy process.
One of these tools is Blogger. It really doesn’t get easier than this. You sign up with a Blogger account at Google, pick what you want your blog to look like, give it a name and you’re done. You can then make posts to your blog and allow others to leave their comments. You don’t have to know a thing about web design or web programming. It’s all done for you.
However, there is a limitation to Blogger and other tools like it as you don’t get your own domain. To rectify that problem, we have Wordpress, which is a script that you install on your own server. It’s easy to download and install and comes with easy to follow instructions. This way you can have a blog with the same functionality and have your own domain as well. Plus, Wordpress is a lot more powerful as there are a number of plugins that you can get for it to really turn your blog into a masterpiece.
In addition to tools for blogs, you have tools for even bigger community sites, such as bulletin boards and forums. If you can get a forum up and running and get enough traffic, this can become a nice income. If you don’t believe me, just ask Allen Says of the Warrior Forum. That man has a gold mine there.
One of the best tools for creating forums, and it’s free to boot, is phpBB. The script for this is assume and the support is just as great. It’s easy to install and looks great right out of the box. If you visit a number of forums online, you will find that many of them use phpBB to create them.
And these tools just about scratch the surface of the community building tools that are available to us. So there is absolutely no excuse not to have your own blog and your own forum.
