How to build an online community? Every marketer at least once thought about it. Communities mask a lot of learning opportunities offered by the best industry experts who are keener to share knowledge and expertise with like-minded professionals. In the current digital marketing landscape, communities are struggling to bring new users onboard and keep them engaged.
To give you some proof, take a look at a graph below that demonstrates monthly traffic (April 2015 till December 2015) to Inbound.org from, once a very popular community platform.

Inbound.org era has come to an end. It was a long and strenuous process. It’s hard to believe that such a powerful community that nurtured so many talented experts no longer exists. I remember the days when being featured in Inbound’s newsletter meant getting anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 online visitors. So for those of you who are still looking for a new source of the traffic to replace Inbound, then give Zeist and Growthhackers a shot, both of these platforms are great.
Some time ago, Alexandra had a great conversation on LinkedIn with 21 acclaimed experts that shared their thoughts on this topic. If you don’t want to end up like Inbound, then this post has some very interesting insights. You’ll find out about the nuances of a well-structured community and how to improve engagement. Many experts were actively using Inbound and contributing to the community. So we asked them about the steps you need to avoid in order to make your community an outstanding one.
In this article:
Concentrate on engagement


David Iwanow


Derek Gleason

Kalo Yankulov
- Personally reaching out to potential members and inviting them.
- Writing a lot of unique content by yourself.
Engaging new members with personalized welcome messages, and pretty much everything else that could create some initial engagement in your group or message board.
Be prepared to do a lot of upfront work before you get people involved and active in your community. Think about the value you can provide to the people that you invite, before asking them to do something like, for example, sharing or commenting. In other words, be ready to give before you get.


Prateek Tiwari

Sugandha Bansal
- Add a layer of exclusivity to keep quality high;
- Welcome new community members and brief them about the community goal;
- Lead with relevant information, researches, and interesting topics like can create polls and share its result for quality conversations;
- Encourage engagement and can instill an ethos of helping each other;
- Invite Influencers and ask your members to refer the niche related contacts- quality brings quality always!

Ashley Sava

Nishita Goyal

Siavash Namdar

Himanshu Rauthan

Eyal Katz

Jake Rheude

Daniel Waas
Communities live and die by the engagement of their members. And all it takes to get someone engaged is a friendly human hello to pull them in.
Show you’re interested in them and get to know the people in your community. Ask them questions. Poll them on a thought you have. Share something truly unique to them based on what you’ve learned about them.
In short, prompt interaction by taking the first step.
Tap into emotions through meaningful communication

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

Alex Birkett

Erman Ergun

Matt Antonino

Chris Makara

Molly Stovold

Olga Galik

Kamelia Stone

Krishna Rajaganesan

Jonas Sickler

Angelina Harper

Matt Diggity

Greg Digneo
However, once a community reaches a certain scale, marketers tend to find it. They dump links, become promotional, and do not contribute in a meaningful way. This ruins the experience for all of those who care about what the community was built around in the first place.

William Oleksiienko
Be it educational product courses, walk-through videos, or blog posts with our first-hand learnings — we are focused on building the most relevant, hands-on content that will help sales teams not just make the most out of our product but also level up their sales strategy in general.
However, the best way to create value within your community is by having a two-way conversation with the audience. That is why we contribute to platforms like Quora and SalesHacker as well as relevant communities on LinkedIn.

Shealyn Rager


Anurag Singh


Ivan Escott
This means to send a LinkedIn connection request, follow them on Twitter, comment on their blog posts, send a friend request on Facebook, or engage in mutual online communities. Use touchpoints that you think are the most appropriate for the type of outreach you are doing. Warm up the people you want to connect with so that your initial email doesn’t have to be so cold.

Sam Carr

Jana Rumberger

Andrew Miller


Ken Ott
Don’t stop innovating

Alex Tachalova

Matt Shealy

Tomasz Mortimer

Pavol Sikula


Nathan Rand
There are several general steps that one should follow if you are building an online marketplace.
— Validate your idea for your business
— Identify your business niche/industry
— Focus on design aspects for your marketplace platform
— Decide on the aspects of the development phase
— Plan for the long-term

Shrushti Shah
I would also recommend you to connect through email and enable live chat functionality on your website so that you stay connected with them on a regular basis. Once you have gained their attention, the next step is to push ahead with the promotion of your products and services. Apart from this, I would also recommend you connect with your target audience through Quora, Reddit, and other online forums. Remember, people love engaging and quality-driven content. Once you try these mediums it will help you to build an engaging online community for your business. Always keep this in mind: Slow and steady wins the race. Be patient and you will reap rich dividends in the end.

Burkhard Berger

Gal Dubinski


Daniel Ndukwu

Romualdas Juskevicius

Sharon Koifman

Garrett Sussman

Freya Kuka

Ricky Wang
What do I mean «it will work?» You will get happier customers which means more leads and a market that knows you as a trustworthy brand. Whether your company is trying to find new ways to add more functionality to your product or get your sales pitch across, creating a blueprint for the future is essential. To get your market engaged, promote your business through «personalized» email marketing or engaging webinars.
Who knows? Maybe in a quick meeting, your potential customers will give you valuable insight on how you could improve your product or service. Are not they the ones that are going to buy from you? At the end of the day, you have just gotta keep growing and improving, but make sure that growth is geared toward prospective leads.

Ieva Dauderyte
Invest in your community’s brand advocates



Luca Ramassa

Sam Hurley
A thriving community is likely the result of two core actions: Awesome marketing and members' inclination to spread the word. The latter is particularly powerful — Achieve this across influential users right through to first-time testers, and growth is a given… Empowerment is the key!

Josh Garofalo

Jimmy Rodriguez

Polina Haryacha

Jeremy Galante

Anwesha Das

Users want to control community’s content on their end



Jessica Edgson

Lee Savery

David Roberts

Varun Goyal

Ryan Carruthers

Danielle Strouther
Community isn’t about link repository

Elvis Malkic
- Make your posts motivating
- Don’t just create a link repository for mundane articles.
A community provides opportunities for people to meet and communicate with one another and with the industry experts; to connect with professionals outside the community. Besides, being a part of a community allows you to improve your skills and learn new things.

Robert McGuire


Don’t torment your users with bad design





Diana Minter



Alexey Chalimov

Decide how your community will benefit its users

Yam Regev
I mean, each community member, whether it is a community of professionals, gets an added value from being an active part of the community itself. Otherwise, they won’t stay there.
It seems that no professional communities can thrive by solely discussing the agenda and actionizing it, while communities of professionals need to feel more self-empowered as they contribute to the community.
The bigger the added value is for a professional member, the more they will give from themselves for the community to thrive. Yam wrote an article about this, read it in its entirety here.

Kathleen Slattery Booth

Ankit Prakash

Tytus Golas

Jon Torres

David Cacik

Robb Fahrion


Geoff Walters

Tomer Aharon

Bojana Vojnović

Martin Lünendonk


Whitney Erickson

Jessica Volbrecht
Social Media is the Place to Start

Ayesha Ambreen

Martin Hojman

Tereza Litsa

Waqar Azeem
Lastly, signup for professional social media management tools to grow your business in the market.

Vikas Kalwani

Ron Stefanski
Define Your Goals First


Chris Mitchell



George Mathew

Chris Wagner

Ahmad Benguesmia

Judit Pál
To Wrap Up:
There’s a lot to think about. Yet, we need to draw a conclusion to this subject and see what should have been done differently. Here are some tips that will help you improve your own community:
- Show value of being part of your community
- Encourage your active users
- Create an atmosphere for people to connect with others
- Build meaningful conversations with community members
It’s extremely important to create such community platforms that give participants value, teach them new skills and help them grow professionally. I hope these tips will provide some clarity on why brands need to take their users' voice seriously encourage you to create a perfect community of your own.
Did we forget something? Most likely, there’s a lot more to providing the best user experience for your community. What would you add to our list?
Alex Tachalova