The slides of my WordCamp Victoria 2012 talk for people's use.

1. Growing Robust Online
Communities with WordPress
Raul Pacheco
HB Strategies/Hummingbird604.com
http://www.twitter.com/hummingbird604
http://www.facebook.com/hummingbird604
http://gplus.to/hummingbird604com

2. I dedicate this talk to:
- Rebecca Bollwitt, who first taught me
WordPress (and mentored me through many,
many WP tools) -- happy belated birthday!
- The best online and
offline community
builders I know of: Derek
K. Miller (+) and Airdrie
Miller.
- My book(s) co-author, Arieanna
Schweber, who is now expecting her
second child :) Thanks for doing these
2 projects (both of which include
WordPress stuff) with me!

3. Communities that Rock
Creating kick-ass online
communities
Arieanna Schweber (@arieanna) & Raul
Pacheco (@hummingbird604)
Available at:
http://hummingbird604.com/book

5. What is a community?

6. Communities have many shapes and sizes

7. What are the attributes of robust online
communities?
- readers visit your site daily (if you write daily)
- your average time-on-site is over 35 seconds
- you have a high proportion of traffic coming from direct URLs (people typing in
your URL / using a bookmark)
- you have a high click-through rate on posts promoted to outside social networks
- you have comments on most of your posts, usually many comments per post
- you get a lot of votes in your polls
- people send you tips via email, Twitter or Facebook
Schweber and Pacheco (2011)

8. Tip #1: Promote others as a way to build a
robust online community
(case study: Miss604.com)

9. Tip #2: Have bidirectional conversation as a
way to build a robust online community
(case study: ActiveMama.com)

10. Tip #3: Reblog as a method to create
interesting content
(case study: Raincoaster.com)

11. Tip #4: Always make your WordPress blog the
hub of all your social media activity.

12. General tips to build robust online
communities on WordPress
- Say thanks. A lot.
- Attribute, credit and disclose. ALWAYS (hat tips Janni
Aragon).
- Write with pretty visuals (hat tips Rebecca Bollwitt).
- Tell a good story (hat tips Erica Hargreave and Isabella Mori).
- Rise above the trolls (hat tips Lorraine Murphy).
- Write for you, before you write for others (this is totally me)
- Stop worrying about your stats.

13. Types of blog posts

14. How I build online community using
WordPress
I'm going to write a blog post on my site, live.
... unless, of course, the technology fails me. In that case, oh
well.

15. Questions?
Raul Pacheco
raul@hummingbird604.com
http://hummingbird604.com
@hummingbird604