From Blog Post To Community

Thinking through my recent blog post, how to drive traffic to a new site it occurs to me that it's lacking in both depth and breadth. That is, there are plenty of ideas that could be added to it, and there's plenty of detail that could be provided for each item. But how to grow it efficiently?

I could take the brute force approach and dedicate myself to collecting up this information and logging it as I learn about it. That's both tedious, and assumes I have expertise I don't have. It seems to me that a smarter approach would to be turn this post into a community project. I could take a page from the Wikipedia playbook, and let the world contribute and grow this list.

The cool part is just how easy this should be to do. Here's the approach I would take:

1. Create a free Wiki at PBWiki.com
2. Set the Wiki up to be read only, and include a note at the top that people who are interested in contributing should contact me
3. Make the front page of the Wiki the list of tips that I started in my blog post
4. To demonstrate how detail could be added, I would make a supporting page for a variety of the list items, giving much needed statistics
5. I might consider upgrading to a PBWiki account that allows me to have a custom domain name, so I can tell people to visit tpemarketingtips.com instead of tpemarketingtips.pbwiki.com
6. Make a call for contributors on Facebook, Twitter, my blog and anywhere else that might have folks who are interested in documenting this sort of knowledge
7. Between myself and others, watch the site grow

The cool part about this isn't this specific idea (which I'm not sure I have the time to pursue), but that anyone can turn any collection of information they have into a community site. Regardless of community size, budget and technical skills - this is totally doable.