How to be successful with Q&A system?

Question

Hi,

 

I'm Jose from Sweden and I would like to use you product it looks really nice. But I have couple of questions:

 

1- How can I keep a Q&A community really active?

2- How can I incentive to our moderates in to keep my community clean? I mean, without needless questions.

3- Do you have any tutorial about basic tips when you want to create this kind of communities? 

 

Best regards,

 

Jose Sinisterra

Answer 1

Preface: There is NO guarantee that your site will be successful.

In the following you find answers and ideas, I also point to some of my premium plugins:

1. Check the most popular q2a sites to get an idea of what they are about: http://www.question2answer.org/sites.php (use google translator if you don't understand the languages).

2. Create a community, gather people with knowledge and passion (this task is tough).

2a. Play the who-is-the-best-game. E.g. use the best users plugin (pro).

2b. Reward them. Example: I am giving out 6 awards per month on http://www.klaustukai.lt/ and 4 awards on http://www.gute-mathe-fragen.de/

2c. Be a social person, connect and engage.

3. Have a fast website (ranks higher in Google). Use advanced themes that are responsive for mobile devices, e.g. q2apro-theme diligent.

4. WRITE great content that people need and share. Experience: I paid a ghostwriter for 10 months. The max. audience I can ever engange is 4 mio. people - which are speaking Lithuanian, quite small, but I managed to Alexa Rank ~1 Mio. and local ~4000.

5. EASIER: Focus on one topic, not hundreds. My specific math forum got one of the biggest in Germany (currently 32786 questions), the general forum in Lithuanian must still grow (about 3500 questions).

Opposite to others, I do not recommend the use of social networks. Check out *the* biggest forum ware: stackoverflow.com and stackexchange.com - they do not use FB or G+.

And again: Focus on great content, this excites people and make them come back!

Hope that helps :)
Kai

 

PS: Enhance your users' experience by installing free and premium plugins, see http://www.q2apro.com/plugins/ and http://www.question2answer.org/addons.php

Comments

Thanks!

It's possible to use your plugins with another theme?

Best regards,

Jose

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Yes they should work with most of the themes.

Answer 2

Try to use a modern, responsive theme. If you understand that the new 1.7 alpha might be buggy, it might be worth downloading that (here: https://github.com/q2a/question2answer/tree/dev) and using the new "Snow Flat" theme. This is designed to be modern, work on all devices, well and improve SEO.

Are you creating a general Q&A community or one for a specific topic? The latter is better, in most cases. Some Q2A sites based on Pokémon, math homework etc are really popular.

Social network activity, especially Twitter is REALLY important. Create a Twitter account for the site, and this will bring users in and keep them active. Reddit is also really good for advertising.

I don't understand your second question, please rephrase it in the original post?

Comments

I mean, in this kind of community the moderate users must to receive a payment for it or how it's works?

The community that I want to create is about general topics.