This is a great way to bring people with similar interests together. For instance if your passion is art then you can have a place where artists can come and share ideas or get help. If you have a product that you are selling then this can be a place for purchasers of your product to get together and rave about it or get help with it.
This book has many fabulous ideas on how to create a community on your site for your topic of interest. It explains how you can set up and use things such as mailing lists, newsgroups, chat rooms and message boards to your advantage to get people to come back to your site over and over again.
With the tons of tips and help this book offers your readers will be flocking to your site everyday to see what the latest chit-chat is and what other people have to say. Because of all this new found glory for your site you will be reaping the benefits in page view. If you have joined some affiliate programs or have some commercial banners on your site then you will finally be making money from all your hard work.
How to get people to come to your site in the first place is another hurdle you will have to jump first. If people don't come at first then they can't possibly come again later so you will have to do something to get people to come in the first place. This book offers lots of help with that too.
Learn the key to designing a home page for your community that will be enticing and lure your readers in. Find out how to get listed in directories, how to post announcements to other mailing lists, message boards and newsgroups without being pinned as a spammer.
There are unwelcome attributes to every venture and a Web community has it's share as well. You may get people who post unrelated things on your boards. Depending on what the subject of your community is you may also be subject to rude people who post nasty things too. You must decide, as the community moderator whether you should delete these posts, respond to them or just leave them on your site. You will also learn how to deal with such things in this book.
Other important things you must know about are things such as copyright laws, dealing with children under 13 and stalkers. There are laws out there to protect you and laws out there to prosecute you if you don't follow the laws. This book goes over these issues and more and tells you how to be careful so you, and your community members don't run into trouble.
In the end, after all is set up and running, you will still need to manage and update your community and the site that goes along with it. Sometimes the little things mean a lot and you can learn what those little things are and how to deal with them too.
As with all the "Poor Richard's" books that I have read I highly recommend this book. It is thorough and easy to understand. It is written so the average person just starting out can get through it yet in depth enough that even the more advanced Web designer will get a lot out it.
