Help:Building a community

Once you've built your wiki, you'll undoubtedly want to begin attracting contributors. After all, wikis are community projects, so you definitely want to make sure you get others involved whenever you can! Learning the art of promotion is one of the most important things to do as a founder if you want to create a successful community around your wiki.

Why promote?
Why not promote? Wikis are at their best when they are collaborative, community-based projects. Unless you promote your wiki in some way, you will have very few visitors&mdash;including both readers and contributors. One or two people can construct a wiki by themselves, but most of a wiki's objectives can often be best achieved with more people. This is especially true when it comes to community building.

To do that, you want to make sure people can find your wiki. You will want to identify places where potential contributors could be attracted and then talk about it there. Founders and the early contributors will likely carry a lot of this weight themselves, but only at first. Once more users start to join the wiki, more people will be able to spread the word and help the wiki grow.

How to promote
Before you even begin promoting your wiki, you want to make sure there is something to promote. It’s not enough to go through the wiki creation process. You need to begin creating the content of the wiki. It's important to get your basic structure, help pages, and forums sorted out, as well as the most content you can. The more and better content you have, the more attractive your wiki will be to search engines.

Once all of that is done, there are any number of ways to promote your wiki. Just remember that there is no single “best way” to promote a wiki, so you should choose whatever seems appropriate to your topic and the community you wish to build. Having said that, here are a few ways you might be able to promote your wiki:


 * Talk about the wiki on websites that have similar topics, and explain that the wiki can be a common effort for all fans of that topic.
 * Be welcoming to visitors and encourage them to become part of the wiki.
 * Encourage the best contributors to contribute even more!
 * Once you have 200 pages, you can apply for a Wikia Spotlight to advertise your wiki on similar wikis.
 * Create an awesome theme for your wiki so potential readers and contributors can see a great looking wiki when they arrive.
 * Create a Facebook fan page for your wiki so readers, contributors, and others can "Like" your page. Be sure to post about your wiki's Facebook page here.
 * Create a Twitter page for your wiki and spread the word to your followers in 160 characters or less! Be sure to post about your wiki's Twitter page here.
 * Make a YouTube account for your wiki so you can upload interesting but relevant videos, and create an appealing channel to invite users to subscribe to.
 * Post at Admin Central that your wiki is looking for editors.
 * Use the promote tool to feature your wiki on Wikia's main page.

Next pages

 * Learn how to start a new wiki
 * Learn how to build a successful wiki
 * Learn how to raise your wiki's Google ranking

Further Help & Feedback
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