What to do when you lose interest in your community

At the start of a new community, your hopes and expectations are high. You have dreams that your community will rise to the top, and you vow to work as hard as you must to make that dream come true. But over time, that hope can start to fade away and you may lose interest. Whether it be a lack of motivation, or just a sudden disinterest in your community.

It happens to the best of us. Some would prefer to get the burden of spending countless hours online working on a website with no guarantees of success off their shoulders. Then there are the unfortunate group of people who don’t want to lose interest, but do. It is something that can be avoided, and in this article I am going to go over ways to keep your interests and standards high.

Maybe you can’t do it alone – Get some help

Some communities take more time and effort than others do to manage. Whether it is general moderation, or just behind the scene site maintenance, any help you can get will ultimately prove positive for you.

Sometimes having another person to run the site with you can give you back the motivation needed to start working at a successful community. I know from past experience that when I hired a new co-admin on a past forum it really helped get my mind set on becoming a successful forum.

The best parts of getting a helping hand are:

• Cuts down your work load. You can split the work 50/50, or assign different parts of your community to maintain.
• More ideas for improvement. One person is okay, but how much better are two or three people? Any type of brainstorming sessions, or something among those lines are great for planning ahead.
• The more knowledge, the better. If you are stumped on how to perform a specific task, or can’t quite figure out why Internet Explorer is messing up your design, ask your partner. There’s always a chance they know what’s up.

Do you have any guesses as to what a result of having a partner will be based on the three listed examples above? Yes, you got it less stress on your part. A smaller work load, more ideas to work with and more knowledge will mean you will have to think less, work less and know less. Talk about a stress reliever.

What is making you lose interest? Find it, and fix it

With an online community, anything can be making you lose interest. Maybe you aren’t getting the amount of comments you were hoping for on a blog, or not enough people are registering on your forum. The best advice I can give you is to not let it get to your head.

A successful website takes time, patience, and a hell of a lot of tolerance. If you can’t give time to your website, and don’t have patience or enough tolerance to put up with things then that is why you are having this sudden lack of interest.

Getting rid of distractions

If you’re like me, and thousands of other people out there who run more than one website, it can get hard to keep focus on every site. I know that since I started up Kolakube, my other blog UnWrules has gotten significantly less attention. But I take the extra time to manage both blogs, and I try my best to keep up with content. Lucky for me, UnWrules takes about 30 seconds a post, but that is not the case for most multi-bloggers and especially not the case for forum owners.

I am not saying to get rid of your other websites (because that would defeat the purpose this article!) but I am saying to even the time you spend on each site out. If you spend 30 minutes preparing a post on one blog, then spend 30 minutes getting a post ready on another. You have to find a good time management plan between each of your sites, and it will keep you on the ball and interested.

If you have to, expand or downsize your features

This can be a messy thing to do. It is extremely common for community owners to create a larger workload then they can handle by simply wanting more content that they can handle. This is especially common on forums, where you might offer too many services to handle. All of that leads to stress, and stress can lead to you ditching your community.

The greater the services, or the more quality the services?

You may want a lot of things to do on your forum or blog. But can you handle all of them? You shouldn’t want to offer what you can’t provide, but offer what you can provide. Start out small with one thing you are really good at. Then as you get better at it and figure out a system of doing things, it’s then you should offer more. By understanding the supply and demand of your community, you can determine whether or not to keep the number of services to a minimum, or to just offer more.

When Less is More

On a blog, there are no limits as to how many categories you can write about. Same goes for a forum. But you shouldn’t start out big, start out small. With lesser categories or forums you will have to cover a lot less material but still dish it out at a great pace.

It will also create larger discussions. Your users will not be going all over the place to find something they want to comment on, it will all be right there. Of course, the same thing for services. Once you think you can handle more, go for it. Keep in mind of course to introduce new discussion topics at a slow pace so you can adapt to it, and more importantly your readers can adapt to it.

Don’t let ignorance ruin you

There is always something new to learn about your niche. Not everyone knows everything. Hell, I bet not even Darren Rowse knows everything there is to know about blogging, or John Chow not knowing everything there is to know about posting random crap on his blog (sorry you two, but I subscribe to both of your blogs so I hope that compensates ).

Go out there, learn something new. Go to competitor sites, read around. You will probably learn something new from there. You never know what a little piece of knowledge can do for you. It may just be that motivation you have been needing to find all along.

If all else fails, put it up for sale

Your community, regardless of the size, doesn’t deserve to just be shut down because you can’t put your heart into your website anymore. Give it an honest chance, and try to sell your website to someone who can put their time into it. While selling it to someone else doesn’t mean your community will improve, it’s better than you just leaving it to sit there doing nothing.

What should I do before I sell my community?

• You should always come up with a fair price. Take into account all of your expenses (hosting, licenses, modifications/themes, etc.) and factor them into your price.
• If you for some reason have any private information (like passwords to things not related to your community), then remove all those things beforehand.
• Read What’s Your Web Site Worth? by Georgina Laidlaw from SitePoint
• Then go to the SitePoint Marketplace and put your site up for sale.

My community doesn’t sell, now what?

Hopefully you haven’t gotten to the point where you put your community up for sale. If you have, and you failed to sell your community then you are stuck with it whether you like it or not. You should never have gotten to this point ever. That just means you planned wrong, and your expectations were wrong. If the above tips haven’t helped you get back into focus on your community then you should just ask yourself if starting the community was right.

I hope this article has given you a better insight on the importance of keeping interested in your blog. You always have to remember that success doesn’t happen over night, it takes time. Giving up on your community will not be worth it.

Tagged as: choosing the right niche, giving up on a blog, giving up on a forum, losing interest in a blog, losing interest in a forum