Type any relevant search term into Google, scroll to the bottom, and see what related terms appear.
You can create discussions/articles/interviews about famous modern architects, write about jobs and job descriptions, or discuss 911 conspiracy theories.
If you do it well, you will get plenty of inbound links and attract plenty of traffic.
It’s a surefire way to create a generic ‘me too’ community which will struggle to achieve critical mass.
Do you imagine most architects today spend their time looking for job descriptions, trying to figure out what they do, and researching famous modern architects?
The people most likely to become active members already know the answers to these questions.
Imagine we broke down the size of architectural cohorts by experience below:
The biggest single group for most professionals will be students. Then as people continue their careers they begin to drop out of the funnel.
If you build or design a community to cater solely to those searching for the most frequent terms, you will usually be targeting the newcomers. The lack of real expertise will soon become apparent and the group will collapse.
When you have an established, mature, community, it makes sense to target this group for replenishment. But to do it at the beginning is nuts and the competition for these terms are fierce. Far better to figure out a wide variety of niche terms experienced architects search for and create content, discussions, and events around them instead.
That’s going to mean speaking and surveying this group to uncover the specific terms they search for online. That’s far more difficult – which is exactly the competitive barrier you want to be on the other side of.
We’re now just 8 days away from our FeverBee SPRINT event. If you want to learn a lot of advanced community skills from 14 world-class experts and ourselves, I hope you will join us at: http://sprint.feverbee.com.