Maintainers/Moderators of Livejournal (original) (raw)
10:02 AM 10/15/09 · A big thing with making communities is to get people to actually join them. This is not always so easy and most people seem to give up on it, as though just making the community itself is enough to attract members. If you've ever done an interests search and seen the bucketload of communities that show up at the end that're all listed as 'never updated' you can see what I'm talking about.
A couple weeks back I found a bizarre case. Usually when I make a new a community, while it's still in mind, I look to see if there's already an existing one. Either to see if I want to go there or if I think I can do better. Anyway, I found one under a keyword search for 'animated gifs' that had no posts at all. It was themed animation with accompanying video. Seemed like a cool idea so I popped over to the moderator to see why it had never gotten beyond the comm's creation...and found he posted the stuff that would've been in the community in his own journal.
Advertising had never occured to him.
Ideally you want to get members, posting ones, so that not only is your community popular but if you lag off on posts yourself there are others that are posting to take up the slack. More often than not this won't happen if you don't advertise.
Basic advertising works better if you've got more than just a link and blurb. Some comms have a graphic restriction, generally images under 500x300. I've recently got a basic format I use since most place allow for multi·community advertising per post.
Name: 
Random: We who run them must vent!
Theme: A moderators place to share with others about the comms we run
Bio: I run a lot of communities as do a number of my friends...seemed like a good idea to have a place to bitch & moan about that.
Typical Posts: rants, raves, questions, & other stuff about community managemrnt
HTML for this:
Used to advertise from my own journal but I recently setup an entirely separate account only for advertising. Seemed simpler than having to skip around all the other comms listed when I'm xposting. A ways back someone recommended a utility, that I sadly lost the link to, where you could select all the communities you wanted to post to and it would do them all in one stroke...
...that would've been so useful.
Where I currently advertise: Clicky!