ISO Advice: Encouraging Wannabe Blog Writers in our Forum

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Hello Discourse community! First time poster, and brand new community manager with Zolidar.

We’re soon to launch our Discourse forum with an emphasis on small business advisors gaining more reputation for themselves, as well as finding each other (not so much emphasis on lead generation per se, we’ll have another feature within our software for this).

I’d like some advice from more sage community managers. We’ve identified a pain point among our small business advisor users: they want to start a blog writing about their experience as consultants, but don’t want the pressure to commit to writing blog posts regularly, uncertain of the traffic they’ll get that way, and would refer a more tailored/specific audience than what they’d get publishing to LinkedIn. Enter: the Zolidar employee ownership advisor community.

Our pitch to this type of user: You will get a targeted and ready audience to read about your experience. You can build your identity as all of this shows up alongside your community profile.

The ask here: To get these users rolling in our forum, would you suggest a sub-category, a topic thread per person, or some other means of encouraging this type of user?

All thoughts related to encouraging this type of user in our forum welcome!

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I would suggest this. Individual topics may clutter the forum a lot without much categorisation. At least with subcategories dedicated to each small company/user, the posts are more efficiently placed. It also confines the user to their subcategory, so you can limit certain users to posting topics in that category.

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How many subcategories do you expect to create? You can only limit the permission to create topics to a group, so you would also need a group per category.

User Portfolio is something that came to my mind. Using that, you can add a “blog” button to each user’s usercard and a new tab to their profile where all their blog posts are shown.

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I would not suggest this. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it at all. Huge numbers of categories can cause performance issues for admin users. Besides that, you’ll end up with hundreds of ghost towns.

I would suggest using one category and use tags for individual users.

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