Do it Right and Everyone Benefits. When done properly, a community effort on a business site can be profitable for both business and consumer. The business gains a loyal customer; loyal customers get to engage with like-minded people – and business. However, if it’s not done right, it will be a ghost town and backfire.

You may have visited sites that have community efforts. Most these days are ghost towns. Click into a message board and you’re likely to see most recent post is from two months ago…or a post that simply says “test”. This will hurt credibility of business. It’s like putting up a neon sign in a window saying Now Open and having doors locked.

In times past, online communities were built too fast and without forethought. The atmosphere was more like a ghost town than a community.

The complaint became that community doesn’t make money. Mopping floor and emptying trash doesn’t make money, but if you don’t do it, you’ll lose customers who come into a dingy store.

So how do you “do” community right? There are three tools - listed below in order of importance – and four actions to consider after you activate community. Do it right, and your bottom line will improve.

The Tools Available Forums. Message Boards are most engaging form of community available. Always have been. Always will be. Start small in building your sections and buildout as certain subject matter becomes popular. If you build too many sections at start, you’ll have a permanent ghost town before you can spell (critical) MASS.

Blogs. Web Logs, or more popular term – blogs, have become rage. It’s a form of community in that everyone can speak their own mind, but it’s almost like an editorial with replies being “letters to editor”. There is not much give and take in conversation.

Article Marketing can also be used for increasing your search engine rankings by having high page ranked sites publish your work.

Just as with any other venture, your objectives should be clear at start. Ask yourself these questions:

1.Are you writing articles as a long term method of driving traffic to your affiliate pages? 2.Are you promoting a specific product, service, mlm/network marketing program or is your aim to get leads? 3.Is this going to be your primary method of advertising?

Once you post your article on a site it can be picked up and reprinted thousands of times. Is your site going to be “Up” for next 5-10 years?

That’s why I say this is a long term strategy. You could have thousands of “hits” per year or per day from that one article.

Multiply that by 1000 or 10,000 and you have an idea of what this could mean to you.