I’ve found that setting goals around my communiteering efforts can be an effective tool for keeping motivated, especially in those “plateau” periods of community growth when all your efforts seem to be for naught.

Here’s a simple 4 step program for improving your community through careful goal setting:

Step 1 - Choose One or Two Areas to Focus On

Keeping your focus narrow is critical, especially in the beginning when you’re just getting used to setting and reaching your goals.  If you are creating a new site or maybe finally getting serious about growing your community, the amount of work to do can seem daunting.  Are you trying to grow the average number of comments on your blog posts?  Are you trying to kick start your empty forums? 

Step 2 - Write Effective Goals

Mark and Mike from Manager-Tools.com have a great podcast series on setting effective goals.  Effective goals are measurable and time-bound.  That is, they clearly state what the objective is and the time by when it will be reached.  They don’t say anything about how you’ll reach the goal - that comes next.

Here are a few sample goals to help get you started:

• Average at least 5 new blog posts per week by the end of this month
• Grow RSS readership to 500 subscriptions by the end of May
• Enlist 3 new “key players” in my community to be guest bloggers by the end of June

Step 3 - Plan How to Reach Your Goals

Once you have the end-result in mind, come up with your plan for actually reaching the goal.  Separating the actions from the end-result is actually really easy, but many people find it difficult for some reason.  Assume, for example, you want to learn how to speak Spanish.  Your goal is to speak Spanish by a certain date.  Your action plan may involve starting with Spanish classes at the local community college, listening to Spanish radio and television, getting together with Spanish-speaking friends regularly to practice conversation, and finally booking yourself a trip to Mexico where you only speak Spanish the entire time!

Depending on which aspect of your community you’re trying to improve, your action plan will vary.  Pay attention to this blog and others in our blogroll for specific actions you can take to help build your community.

Step 4 - Check Your Progress Regularly, but not TOO Regularly

This part is like the weekly weigh-in when you’re in an exercise program.  Set a regular time of the week when you’ll check in to review your progress against your goal.  This can be motivating in multiple ways.  First, if you’re behind goals, you’ll see it sooner than later and will feel pressure to get caught up.  Second, if you’re on track or ahead of target, you should feel motivated to keep going because obviously whatever you’re doing is working!

Be mindful not to get caught up in the trap of checking in on your goals so often you lose sight of the general trend.  Your time is probably better spent each day working towards reaching your goals than repeating your check-in process over and over. 

What’s Next For Your Community?

So what are your communiteering goals for this week?  This month?  This year?  Got any great success stories of goal setting for communiteering you’d like to share?

Every blogger should read this eBook by Hunter Nuttall, The Zen of Blogging (PDF).  Whether you’re just getting started or you are an experienced blogger looking for a new perspective to kick-start your motivation, I think you’ll enjoy this thoroughly.

Via:  ProBlogger

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re looking for ways to build or improve the community on your web site or blog.  It’s certainly not easy, it doesn’t come for free, and it can require a great bit of maintenance until it reaches critical mass.

So where are you struggling?  I’d like to hear from our readers so we can dive more deeply into the specific topics you care about. 

Are your forums full of one or two reply “dead threads” and unanswered questions?  Is your blog suffering from a lack of comments?  Are your forums dominated by one or more “forum trolls” who inject negativity into every conversation?  Maybe you have a large number of users who only visit your site a couple of times and then never come back.  Unsure of how your web site or business model could even benefit from community? 

Point me to your site and be as specific as possible about your problems.  I’ll be happy to share my thoughts, and we’ll invite other readers to chime in to.  Just imagine… our community helping you build yours!

Chris Brogan shares some tips on building community around your blog.  As we all know, it takes a lot of time, focus, and energy.  Chris has some great tips in here.  If you’re not familiar with his blog, I highly recommend it for regular inspirational blogging/community tips.  He’s also one of the more prolific Twitterers I’ve met yet!

Read:  Free Tips For Your Blog

Though I haven’t been blogging here as often as I should be, I’ve been more active lately on some other sites I contribute to. As any of you who blog surely know, it can take a lot of energy and creativity to consistently come up with new content to post. But, as you also know, frequent blogging is critical to maintain a healthy level of readership.

Mining for Content with Online Services

• Technorati - This is one of my top idea generators. I subscribe to RSS feeds for key words related to my niche sites and view them daily (sometimes multiple times per day) to find new blog posts related to those topics.
• flickr - flickr also lets you create RSS feeds for keyword searches. This is a great way to discover new people who are interested in your niche. flickr is also a fantastic community site in and of itself!
• Twitter - Rapid fire mini blogging, stream of conscious texting, all around fun
• StumbleUpon - Tell it a little about what you like by clicking “I like it” buttons on your favorite sites and StumbleUpon helps you find new sites that other people with the same interest have shared.
• Subscribing to other related niche blogs - Pick your favorite news aggregator and subscribe to newsfeeds directly. The benefit of this over sites like Technorati is that there can be a delay of days sometimes between when authors publish stories and when centralized aggregators pick them up. If you wire up the feeds in your own desktop newsreader software, you can control exactly when you check for updates.

I also get a lot of tips and ideas from my readers. Not only does this make my job easier, but it also gives me an opportunity to thank one of our community members with a public nod on the main newsfeed:

• Bubbling up forum posts to the news feed - If you see a particularly interesting post or thread happening in your site’s forums, why not give it exposure on your news feed? It’s a great way to drive new eyes to your forums and get other members to chime in with their opinions.
• Sharing good news about a community member - If something good happens to one of your community members, such as a birthday, a promotion, winning a contest, etc. share it with other members by posting it to your newsfeed. A community is as strong as the bonds between its members, and giving them something to cheer each other on about only helps. Note, be sensitive to privacy. You might want to ask your members if they mind being under the spotlight on your main news feed - some people just don’t like public exposure under any circumstances.
• Tips shared from readers - Make sure your site has an easy to find way for readers to submit blog tips. This could be an online form, a forum dedicated to tips, or even posting an e-mail address on your page (but be careful about spam). The bottom line is, if your readers have something to share, then make it as easy as possible for them to share. Also, it is critical that you read every submission in a timely fashion (i.e. same day), and thank your readers even if you don’t end up using their tip.

So those are some of my tips for finding ideas to blog about. What other techniques do you use? Do you know of any other great news tools I should be using?

Lots of great content out there around building successful community sites lately!  I thought I’d share a quick list I’ve scanned but haven’t read thoroughly yet.  Be sure to let me know if you’ve seen anything else lately you think our readers would find useful!

• A Strategy for Building Niche Focused Blog Networks (ProBlogger)
• How to Come Up with Topics to Write About On Your Blog (ProBlogger)
• Community Lessons from Heather Champ (CommunityGuy)

Happy weekend!

Today I’m going to profile a site I recently stumbled.  I liked what I saw so much that I thought it deserved special attention and would serve as a great example of community done right.

Tools To Life is self help combined with Web 2.0.  Think of it as user generated support groups.  Membership is free and once you’ve joined, you can browse a wealth of life-enhancing tips, create “challenges” and invite other members to join in or join “challenges” created by other users, cheer each other on, and get useful feedback from peers.

The site re-launched itself as “Beta 2.0″ today and added several new features focused on helping its members succeed in reaching their goals.  I spent a few hours on Tools to Life today getting a feel for how well they’ve incorporated the concept of community into the new features and the overall site.  Here are some of the key elements they got right:

• Simple and inviting user interface - Their site is easy to navigate even for the first time browser.  Short video segments auto-play on each page telling you what the page is about and how to proceed.  It appears they’ve gone out of their way to make it easy and enticing for first time visitors to see the benefits of signing up and have provided a…
• Low barrier to joining - The Tools to Life site is completely free, and they make a big point of making sure prospective users understand that.  Joining is as simple as picking a username and supplying a couple of other bits of data.  Once you’re in the door, you can optionally fill out the…
• Fully customizable user profile - This allows TTL users to choose exactly what they want to share.  Skeptics and wallflowers are drawn out with bright colors, big text, and a list of 20 questions to tell other members about themselves. 
• Relationships are encouraged - Once you’ve joined, you can invite other people you know to join, create circles of friends & coaches, create and/or join support groups, and share as much or as little personal information about yourself and your goals as you like. 
• Participation is as simple as a single click - Digg style voting allows users to cheer each other’s achievements and breakthroughs.  A little positive feedback can go a long way in brightening someone’s day, and for those who get a lot of positive feedback…
• Top cheers are recognized on the home page - Users getting the most votes on their breakthroughs and achievements are mentioned on the home page.  This works on multiple levels:  1) potential site members see the lists first thing and want to “be there” so they join and start participating, 2) current members’ achievements are celebrated by the group, so they’re encouraged to keep participating, and 3) current members are constantly exposed to new challenges they can explore and join.

These are just a few of the reasons I think TTL is set up for some great success in the Web 2.0 world. 

If you have a suggestion for another site profile or you’d like me to take a look at your community to give you feedback on what you’re doing right and what you could improve, please leave a comment or Twitter me and I’ll be happy to take a look! 

I’ve completed upgrading Communiteer.com to WordPress 2.5 and I think I have everything working correctly again.  I also took the opportunity to clean up a few template  issues when the site is viewed under FireFox.  There’s still plenty of work to do on the overall template, but at least the clipped text is gone now.

If you have a WordPress-based blog, you should definitely check out the new version.  One-click plugin updates alone make the upgrade worthwhile!

Not 30 minutes after I’d added him to my follow list, Aaron Strout from Citizen Marketer pointed me to a great article he wrote on really getting started with Twitter as a social networking tool.  The more I use Twitter, the more I like it.  I can easily see how it will be useful for building critical mass around this and other blogs I run, for example.

…remember that like with community, it’s a two way street. People are more inclined to pay attention to your message if you share other people’s posts and reciprocate when they post.

If you’re new to Twitter too, be sure to give this gem a read!

Thanks Aaron!

For those of you like me who don’t want to pay $10/month for unlimited SMS messaging, now there’s TinyTwitter - a free application for Windows Mobile and Java-enabled phones.

TinyTwitter is also a tiny app, so it won’t take up much valuable space your device.  It loads quickly, which makes it convenient for rapid stream of consciousness tweeting.  You can configure it to update at a variety of intervals, including manually.  It will also notify you of any direct @replies.

I’m slowly getting into the whole Twitter thing, obviously being one of the last to the party.  If you haven’t gotten started yet, you’re not alone.  Maybe TinyTwitter will finally win you over?

You can follow my own Twitterings at http://twitter.com/communiteer. 

Via:  MobilityToday