Starting a new community is an exciting endeavor. You’ll probably have a checklist of tasks to accomplish, many of which can have a price tag attached. This article will provide some tips on how to start a SocialEngine community on a shoestring budget.
Freebies!
The SocialEngine Certified Marketplace has a lot of great free plugins by talented third-party experts. With free certified plugins, you can add some great features and not break the bank. Check out this list of free plugins:
Birthdays Plugin – by SocialEngineAddOns
Buffer Share Plugin – by ScriptTechs
Custom & Short Member Profile URLs – by SocialEngineSolutions
Feature Member Widget – by ScriptTechs
Google Translate Plugin – by ScriptTechs
Groups by Category Widget – by ScriptTechs
Happy Holidays Plugin – by ScriptTechs
Letter Avatar of Member Name Plugin – by SocialEngineSolutions
Likes Plugin – by SocialEngineAddOns
Poke Plugin – by SocialEngineAddOns
Random Blogs Widget – by ScriptTechs
Random Groups Widget – by ScriptTechs
Random Polls Widget – by ScriptTechs
Responsive Clean Wide Theme – by SocialEngine Solutions
Server Monitor – by WebHive
Staff Display Block – by ScriptTechs
Uplinks – by ScriptTechs
That’s quite a list of free plugins! That gives you a lot of nice features for your community. Once you have your site set up with your new features, you’ll want some members to enjoy them.
Promoting
The best free way to promote your new website is through word of mouth. Get some friends and family on your site and have them invite their friends. Post blogs, photos and other content and get your friends and family to do the same. As you start filling the site with good content, the search engines will have more to grab and your SEO will go up. This will help to bring your website up in the search results when someone is looking for the same sort of community.
Make sure you set up your Keywords and META tags so that bots can properly categorize your site and so that it shows better in search results.
Join forums, blogs, Facebook groups, etc that are in line with your website niche. Post and contribute in those areas in order to build your reputation there. Most will allow you to either have a link to your website on your profile or to have it as your signature. Just don’t spam those places or all of your hard work could be deleted as none of them allow spam.
We hope you’ve found this article helpful! For more help with building your website, please feel free to join our community!
“While technology is important, it’s what we do with it that truly matters.” ~ Muhammad Yunus
