Building Online Communities

I'm in the process of building online communities.

It certainly isn't easy, but at least the technical aspects are no longer an issue.

There are lots of online applications and software solutions for building an online community.

The hard part is getting the community started and keeping it going.

Building communities online is probably the best way to make some money online.

In the past, people have used PPC marketing to buy traffic and send it directly to sales pages or affiliate programs to make money. This never was a long-term strategy, but it did make a few people a lot of money for awhile. Now, even these people are giving up on the one and done click through model. Google Adwords has instituted new policies that make it harder to buy traffic into one page sites and sales letters. A lot of these former PPC marketers are starting to tell people how they made money in the past in order to build online communites of marketers.

Building online communities has many advantages over the old affiliate model of buying traffic into a sales page. First, you are building long-term value as you attract members who will return to your site while also building lots of content that can attract free search engine traffic.

The downside is that people are in your communites at times when they are not at the point of purchase. There is a good chance that they will return to your site or click a link on your community site when they are ready to purchase, but it doesn't come close to the direct marketing of putting an offer in front of someone at the very moment they are searching for a product or service.

For this reason, most online communites will depend on advertising revenue more than affiliate sales. The only difference is if the online community is focused on a specifc product so people will come to the site and do their research and then use the buy buttons on the site when they arte ready to make a purchase. This allows the online community to add value to the purchasing process while also allowing the shopper to add value to the community.

I know a lot of affiliates wish they could still play the PPC game (and some still do on some search engines) but the trend is weighing heavily against this business model.

The main alternatives is to have your own product or to build online communites.

I liek the idea of building online communites based on subjects I'm interested in.