Rebranding a Community - Step 6-8: Get Your Content and SEO Working
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Step 6: Put in Your New Content
Begin to fill in your site with content. If you have a forum, post your discussion topics. If you have a blog, set your posts up to run over the next few days/weeks (depending on how much you have). If you have a social networking style site, then make the first full profile. The idea here is to get some things onto the site to entice new viewers to stay for a while. I know that this sounds like a one-time thing, but it's not; you may have to topic load and spark debate for a while until the magic begins to happen for your site.
Step 7: Alter Your Search Engine Standings
This is tricky; many of the big search engines won't let you manage your own listings for them. Only time will get your site's listing changed, but on a niche and self listing site (like Blog Catalogue) you can change over your information on your own. So make the changes where you can, and keep an eye on your listings in the big engines. If your listing is swapping categories, you may want to contact the search engine's admins to get an idea of how to be moved to the new, correct category.
Step 8: Build New Links
There is a lot of debate on the best way to do this, but little on its importance. You can build links to your site with valid (non-spam) link-building services, or by adding thoughtful comments to blogs in the same topic area. Just be sure that the links are relevant and from quality sites. Don't spam.
This process may take a bit of time to get done. In fact ,you can pretty much have no doubts that this will be a time- and labor-intensive task, but if you take the care to follow all of these steps, then you can re-brand a dead, dull and lifeless community into a place where new users will actually want to come and visit.
Think of it as the online version of renovating your bathroom, only with the potential to give you both a cool new space to hang out in and a source of income if you monetize it. Just remember that this is an ongoing process and you will still have to nurture it, otherwise it will fall into a state of chaos and fall prey to spam of all sorts. So play for the long term and consider this a first step to a great new online world.
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