Posted by Adam T. Sutton in Website Design Tips	July 17, 2007

Lost in the online publishing jungle? We have a map.

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group, LLC

When bringing your publication online, you're entering a business world unlike any other.

Yesterday's Daily compared publishing online to navigating the Amazon. There are two ways to do it:

1. Hacking your way through the jungle, risking your business and investments
   
2. Buying a map of cleared paths to definite locations

Some pioneering publishers have already cleared a path to "Profits-ville," and those paths intersect at various places, but don't worry, because the Mequoda Group has an archive of maps.

The Mequoda Library has hundreds of expert reviews, case studies and over a dozen handbooks to help you navigate the treacherous online publishing terrain.

Click here to read more about the Mequoda Library, an archive of publishing knowledge based on successful publishers big and small.

If you are trying to create a successful Membership Website, for example, we have a handbook at the library that explains how to achieve that goal—the Membership Website Publishing Handbook.

Inside the handbook we explain effective strategies used in successful Memberhsip Websites, like building an online community.

Community building means getting users involved with each other. This can be done with forums, chat rooms, message boards, file-sharing systems or any user-user interaction.

The best forms of community building encourage users to generate their own content and share it with other users. This draws users to both consume and create content.

Creating an online community is beneficial for several reasons:

• First, it increases repeat visitor counts because users want to comment on posts and see if anyone has replied to their posts.
• Second, it gives users a sense of belonging attributed to your brand. Users interact with like-minded people at your branded website.
• Third, most user content management programs (like forums) create a unique webpage for every post of user content, which is fantastic for SEO. The more webpages attributed to your URL, the higher your rankings should be.

Creating a community around your website adds value that the users create—costing you nothing—and it can boost your advertising inventory and search engine results.

Building a community is beneficial to almost any kind of website, not just Membership Websites, making it a commonly traveled path on the long road to online profitability.

Click here to access the Mequoda Library, our archive of online marketing and publishing research. It's guaranteed to help your online publication.

The Mequoda Library is an atlas of the online publishing business world. It charts an uncertain and expensive terrain—where creating your own map can be fatal to your business.

Study how other publishers have found success online in the Mequoda Library and you too will be navigating your way to "Profits-ville."