How to Increase Member Activity and Community Size on a Website
Back in the day when I was first learning how to use PHP and MySQL, I decided that I wanted to use these skills to create a browser-based RPG much like Kings of Chaos, X-Kings, or the countless other games of similar nature. My installment was titled The Arena, and it was the single most successful game that I have ever created to this day.
The objective of this game was to build an army of soldiers and increase your stats to gain a high rank in the leaderboard. This game grew in size and became bigger than I could have ever hoped for; it was not unusual for there to be 40 people online during it’s peak times. So how does a developer cause a community to grow to such capacities? Here’s the trick…
The reason that this game became so popular was due to a little programmer’s trick known as the infamous referral bonus. I’m sure most readers already know what I’m talking about; a referral bonus gives users an incentive to invite other people to a website. When users would refer someone to the Arena, they would gain units to their army and gold (the game’s currency). In addition, if the person referred was an active member, they would naturally gain more units due to the player’s activity.
When developing a website, it is extremely important to give user’s some sort of an incentive to stay and invite others. For example, if you run a forum, members will be more likely to come back if you log the number of posts that they make. Users like to see numbers that show how much time they have spent on a given website. The more statistics you log, the better. Perhaps you could give users the ability to edit their posts after they achieve a certain postcount milestone.
Creating a leaderboard is also a handy trick to increase activity on your site. People enjoy seeing how they stack up against other members of a site. If you cater to your members, they will reward you by coming back to your website.
Keep that in mind, and happy developing!
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