Virtuous Circle of Online Community

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The virtuous circle of online communities makes for a powerful engine for increasing awareness of your brand. Stages:

• More Site Visitors - The more people who visit your community's web site, the more people there are who will become members of the community.
• More Members - The more members of your community, the more people there are posting ideas and topics.
• More Ideas & Topics - The more ideas and topics in your community, the more comments that are generated, with typically many comments per discussion thread or--in a research community--per idea.
• More Comments - The more comments, the more pages there are to the web site. (Think of those discussion threads that take multiple pages because of all the comments.)
• More Pages - The more pages there are to the community's web site, the more content there is to be linked to and indexed, leading to higher search engine rank.
• Higher Search Engine Rank - The higher the search engine rank of your community web site, the more site visitors your site will attract.
• More Site Visitors - The more people who visit your community's web site, the more people there are who will become members of the community...

Once a public online community is spun up, the centripetal force of community activity will lead to ever greater community activity, in a virtuous circle.  Online communities are the perpetual motion machines of marketing!