How to start up a community site?

[Kamilla]

I've been thinking of setting up a community site with chat, dating, rentals etc in my native language. But I've been putting it off because getting it off the ground seems like alot of hard work. Noone is going to visit a dating/chat site if it doesn't have atleast a few profiles. Or look for apartment rentals if there are no listings.
So how do people get started? Just add fake profiles and copy rental ads from other sites? It doesn't seem kosher but I can't really figure out how else to get started.
And most my traffic is adult, I would also have to start from scratch getting mainstream traffic.

So, anyone who's started up a mainstream community lately and have some tips to share?
Thanks

[erots]

Originally Posted by Kamilla

I've been thinking of setting up a community site with chat, dating, rentals etc in my native language. But I've been putting it off because getting it off the ground seems like alot of hard work. Noone is going to visit a dating/chat site if it doesn't have atleast a few profiles. Or look for apartment rentals if there are no listings.
So how do people get started? Just add fake profiles and copy rental ads from other sites? It doesn't seem kosher but I can't really figure out how else to get started.
And most my traffic is adult, I would also have to start from scratch getting mainstream traffic.

So, anyone who's started up a mainstream community lately and have some tips to share?
Thanks

You do a adwords campaign targeting only swedish. Well actually you can do it everywhere. Advertising it has a "Fastly growing community." Now when people come to your site and see that there are no people they have no reason to sign up. So this is where you have to reward first 1000 somehow, money, gifts, whatever. So, when they click on the advertisment first they want to join it, they see that there are no people, but they see that you can get free gift, they still join. If it is free community then it should grow like snowball rolling down the swedish mountain and at the end of first month you can probably advertise it some other way.

I can't think any other easy way. But this should work very well.

[Kamilla]

Yes, the community would be free ofcourse, until it have grown to where it would be ok to charge.
Not sure if I want to pay for profiles as I would probably get a ton of fake ones that I had to pay for. Then I might as well add some myself lol
I'm not too worry about traffic. That seems to be the least of the problem.

Been searching for some companies that offers plugin content that you could add to start as filler atleast. But no such luck

[Bappage]

You need to give the impression of it being busy. I've got a classic car community site that only got busy when a few of my friends were online all the time answering posts on the forum.

Alternatively, set it up so they can only see the members after they've registered (for free) and make out on the registration page, that you're the busiest site on the net.

Mike

[Kamilla]

Yes, I would ofcourse invite friends. But few would add a profile as they are already in a relationship lol And none of them has an apartment for rent lol

I guess there are no plugins available, not even in english lol So if I decide to invest in a community, I have my work cut out for me lol

[KCat]

Why don't you try posting ads in places where people DO post their apartments for rent ads saying that they can list their ad for free at your site? Craigslist, LiveJournal communities, newspaper & so on would be good places to start. You may eventually be able to charge for the listings, but for now, offer it for free & I'm sure you'll get some bites.

[quazatron]

hi there,

communities are very hard to start up. i've done it only a few times and doing it almost alone is the most boring task in the world... seriously

wish i'd know companies that get paid for posting. they do exist nowadays:
http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/posting-services.html

well but since you want people in your native language, maybe you can attract some university students, promising them like $0.10 per msg for a given period. either for posting on forum or for the profiles. if you choose the right faculty, you'll get plenty of hot profiles for the dating service. heck, that is some fun thing to do

[Kamilla]

Originally Posted by KCat

Why don't you try posting ads in places where people DO post their apartments for rent ads saying that they can list their ad for free at your site? Craigslist, LiveJournal communities, newspaper & so on would be good places to start. You may eventually be able to charge for the listings, but for now, offer it for free & I'm sure you'll get some bites.

lol yes, I know that. But it will still be an uphill battle getting those few first listings/profiles etc.

[Kamilla]

Originally Posted by quazatron

hi there,

communities are very hard to start up. i've done it only a few times and doing it almost alone is the most boring task in the world... seriously

wish i'd know companies that get paid for posting. they do exist nowadays:
http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/posting-services.html

well but since you want people in your native language, maybe you can attract some university students, promising them like $0.10 per msg for a given period. either for posting on forum or for the profiles. if you choose the right faculty, you'll get plenty of hot profiles for the dating service. heck, that is some fun thing to do

Yes, I can totally see that. Running a community might be fun but trying to start one up seems like boring work.

I won't be hiring anyone to spam boards, but thanks for the suggestion.

[adulion]

im working on a huge community site at the minute with lots of ideas and abcking from local people so.. should be interesting- nothing onlin yet tho

[Dane]

Give them some kind of non member generated recurring content that will interest either the dateless or the apartmentless or both and update it on a weekly/monthly/whatever schedule to keep them coming back initially while the community builds itself. Then when it reaches critical mass you can back off some and let it run itself as far as providing the draw.

You could run a series of special apartment reviews for your area at least, or review the most romantic dinner/drink spots locally, then expand it.

Call up a couple apartment lease brokers and offer to run their apartments for free in a special and poast those a couple at a time.

Get an ebook (or a few) with resale rights on dating, relationships, apartment hunting, decorating apartments without pissing off landlords, etc... offer one of them free or at a very low cost to the members periodically... monthly or so.

Make it a Free LIFETIME membership for ONLY the first ### members and throw a ton of traffic at it. Then leverage those initial free members into content to attract paying members. Alternatively they must refer ## other people to the site to "win" their free lifetime membership, but there is a dead line for how long they can do this. (I have a script that will run such a promotion for you).

Be sure to include an invitation feature so that members can invite people to the site, and offer them some incentive to doing so.
Hit other daitng sites and hot or not sites with contact the member and invite them to a free lifetime membership on your site.

repost personal ads from usenet groups. (or dating tips, or apartment living tips, etc)

Think of what else people looking for dates and or apartments would be looking for, find sites with those things and do swaps. Let them give a free or discounted thing from your site when the sell, get a member whatever, and you give away or offer a discount for something on their site when some one joins. This way you both stand to obtain leads for a good percentage of the others customers... 4 or 5 good setups like this could do a lot for this type of site.

[Kamilla]

Hi Dane and thank you for your post.

The free memberships, invite friends etc are all ofcourse no-brainers. But a free membership to a empty site really isn't going to draw a crowd lol And that's my problem, kinda like 'the chicken or the egg'.

I've been looking for plugins of some sort. I haven't found much in english, let alone in swedish lol

Some sites do offer paid and free listings. The new listings are for members only, and after a few days those listings becomes free. Looks like all I can do is to contact those sites and ask if I can grab their listings in return for a link or something.
One site offers a sub lease service (anything from finding a fitting apartment, to help with contracts etc). And they charge almost $1000!! And if I remember correctly, that was just for 3 months of their service lol I doubt they'll let me use their listings hehehe

Thanks all for posting. It seems that I can't get around the hard work it will take to even get a project like this off the ground. I just hope I have the time lol

[johnshinil]

Kamilla

You have to make initial fake profiles and populate the site. Its essential. Because look, you know all the site functions and what can be entered.. people who will come to the site do not know what is possible.

So I think its essential you populate the site with .. I dont know around 10 fake profiles and make some fake discussion and ads... The ads I think you can "borrow" from a magazine or something.

Its not kosher, but its the only way to do it imho. As your user population will grow, these fake things will get diluted anyway.

[Kamilla]

Yes, I think you're right. Even if I don't like it, I guess I have to. I hope I atleast find one site who'll let me borrow their content for a return link or something. Then atleast the ads and profiles would be real...

[Globofun]

I always dreamed of joining a virtual swedish community.....even more since I found out you can attend swedish raves with your favorite gas mask!

[Kamilla]

Originally Posted by Globofun

I always dreamed of joining a virtual swedish community.....even more since I found out you can attend swedish raves with your favorite gas mask!

lol Correction: I wasn't wearing the gasmask. Just saw a guy who did.

[Carrie]

If I needed to populate the site with apartment listings I would:
- Call every local realtor I could find and ask for a listing of their apartments and ask to be updated whenever there is a new apartment.
- For the ones who sound savvy (read: business shark), I would tell them what I was doing and offer to make them a special free full-page ad with their photo, sales blurb selling themselves and why someone should choose them as their rental agent, with full contact info in exchange for them coming to the site and updating it whenever they find a new apartment (I'd make a simple form they could fill out and submit that would update the content area). After the first X number of realtors getting their own profile (non-dating) and "about me" page for free and updating my content for me, or the first X number of months once traffic had built up, I could start charging to let realtors create their profiles there and update their listings.
- I'd find all of the local newspapers online that list free apartments and see if they had RSS feeds. If they did, I'd incorporate the RSS feeds into my content area. If they didn't, I'd write a PHP script that would wget their listings daily, parse it, and publish it to my page
- I'd find (via yellow pages, driving around, asking people, calling realtors) all of the local apartment complexes. I'd list those in my database with full contact info. I'd also drive out to them with my digital camera and take a couple of shots of the property and the "sample" apartment that they usually have for folks to look at. If they didn't have a sample one but did have one empty, I'd ask to see it and then take pics of it (be sure to take pictures of the view out of the windows too, especially if it's a nice view)
- Apartment hunters also want to know about the area they'd be living in. I'd do community profiles of the cities/towns/villages/area where the majority of the apartments are available. Number of people, crime level, schools, libraries, movie theatres, nearby restaurants (within walking distance and driving distance), etc etc
- I would physically go to realtor's offices and leave small stacks of flyers (with permission) with the domain URL, my contact info, and what benefit my site would be to the realtors to come update listings and create profiles and telling how it's free advertising and/or a "free webpage" for those realtors who don't have their own yet.
- I'd also leave flyers in the apartment complex rental offices saying something like "This apartment complex is featured in MYDOMAIN.COM - visit us online to know when we have a vacancy!" blah blah
- I would post flyers in grocery stores in the entranceway where they have bulletin boards, in libraries on bulletin boards, on college campus bulletin boards and in the school's bookstore, on the bulletin boards in laundromats (apartment renters usually have to use laundromats), etc etc
- I would make sure the apartment listings had the ability for users to leave comments or rate the apartment complex
- I would offer the listings as an RSS feed

Setting up an apartment-hunting community would be easy as hell, just a lot of initial work.
Personally I would make the dating site a separate site. You can put it on the same server and pull info out of the same database if you want to (like for city reviews, restaurant guides, etc) but I really think it should be separate. You can cross-advertise the two sites on each other and say they're "sister" sites, but it would be much easier to get them off of the ground if they're two small rather empty sites instead of one incredibly large cavernous empty site.

[Kamilla]

Thanks Carrie for all those good ideas.
However, things here in Sweden are very different. In Stockholm (where I'm located) there has always been a shortage of apartments for as long as I can remember.
But I've never seen a sub lease broker. There is no middle man. Majority of these sub leases are without the apartment complex owners knowledge or consent. People just find places where they place their personal ads for apartment for rent.
Therefor I think I'll have a hard time finding a site that would be willing to offer me a xml feed, as I would be the direct competition.

Also, there are no apartments for rent from the complex owners. They either sell contracts (illegaly) or give them to friends/relatives/internal pool of interested parties. You can't drive around like you can in the usa, and see signs for apartments for rents. Doesn't exist here.

I wanted to make the site a large community with different categories. Maybe I will devide the site up later. But it will be hard enough to get people to one site, let alone two., when you don't have alot of initial content.

Thanks again

[TheShiftyEyedBastard]

Get something to give out as a contest, and post it up on the hundreds of contest website/forums out there. Make sure a full profile has to be filled out to be eligible, and maybe make a minimum post count.

Free incoming links = bonus!