Unhappy with the activity on your community? One way to take matters into your own hands is to start topics on your forums, allowing people who want to participate to add to the activity, rather than having them feel as if they have to create the activity. After you get past the standard sort of threads, you may be wondering: where can I get ideas for new ones? Let’s talk about five of my favorite ways.

1. Social Bookmarking and News Sites

My favorite way to find interesting and/or funny content that I can share is on social news sites. My two favorites for this purpose are Digg (add me) and Mixx (me). The quickest way to do it is to visit the site and open up the main category pages or the categories that most interest you and scan the top stories. Share the ones that you feel are the most interesting and appropriate for your community.

There are plenty of other ones, like StumbleUpon (me), Yahoo! Buzz (me), Propeller (me), reddit (me) and Kirtsy (me). There are also niche sites dedicated to specific topics that may be even more helpful, such as Tip’d for financial news and Sphinn (me) for online marketing news.

2. News Aggregators

These sites allow you to see the biggest news stories of the day, from a very wide array of publications, from just a single site, which can save you time. The ones that I recommend are Google News and Yahoo! News. The sites are pretty straightforward.

But, perhaps even a bigger benefit is the ability to search for news related to your community’s niche in one place. So, for example, if your forums were about the Jonas Brothers, you could run a search for “Jonas Brothers” on Google News. You would then be able to see all related headlines and you can even sort them by date to find the most recent ones, if you need to. Or if your community was about or was interested in breastfeeding, you could monitor that.

A cool way to monitor these sources is with an RSS reader. For example, here’s the RSS feed for the Google News search “Jonas Brothers.” You can also subscribe to e-mail news alerts.

Funny story. I had someone send me a message on AOL Instant Messenger and tell me that they were interested in affiliating with my site. They wanted to know what my traffic was. So, I thanked them for their interest and asked what their website was.

I took a look at it and while it looked OK, it was similar to what our site was (if different as far as what was/wasn’t allowed), but smaller. In considering the site, I didn’t see any reason to affiliate. So, I thanked him again for his interest, but said that I would have to decline, at this time.

Here’s where it gets good. His next message is basically “Yeah, same here. My members say your site is boring, anyway.” Heh. I didn’t send him another message and he didn’t send me one, either.

So, I visit my site and I see that, before contacting me directly, this person had posted a thread in our introductions forum. Basically, he gave a really quick introduction and asked about affiliating. Then, he closed his message with “This place looks great!” Heh.

Let’s recap. This guy went from “This place looks great!” to “I want to affiliate with you.” to “I didn’t want to affiliate with you, anyway. My members say your site is boring.” All in few minutes. Instant classic.

On last night’s episode of SuccessfoolTV, I came on to talk about online community, forums, social media, the book and more. I thought it went really well and that it was really informative, so I wanted to share it. You can check it out below.

Live TV by Ustream

Thank you to Alejandro for having me and to everyone who stopped in, helped to spread the word through Twitter and had kind words to say, during and after. I really appreciate it.

I wrote a guest post on The Graduate Student Survival Blog on the subject of blogging for dollars. The premise was to talk about how you could create a profitable blog in three months with a budget of $20. The blog is a part of the Albany Times Union website. Thanks to Brandon Mendelson for having me.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger is, of course, known as leader in the blogging world. But, what some may not know about Darren is that he is the owner of a great digital photography community, the Digital Photography School Forum.

And, once in a while, he steps outside of the blogging realm and writes about forums. In September, he wrote a post called “What I Learned by Increasing My Forum Membership by 400 in 24 Hours.” It’s a great reminder that it’s just as important, if not more so, to cultivate and worry about the people you do have – rather than worry about the ones you do not.

In the post, Darren highlighted two methods by which he grew his community’s member base. One was to contact recently active members, thank them for participating and invite them to spread the word to their friends.

The other one, that accounted for half of the membership boost, was to simply e-mail unconfirmed members. That is, members that have not yet confirmed their account. This relates to what I want to write about today.

Simply, remind people that you exist. Sometimes people sign up and forget you. Sometimes people make a few posts and forget you. Sometimes people make a bunch of posts… drift… and forget you. You can bring some of them back by reminding them that, yes, you do, in fact, still exist. You may be surprised by the impact that this can have.

How can you remind people you exist? Well, in Darren’s case, he used a once off message. This is good. Newsletters, activity digests and other forms of e-mail communication can also be used. If you have developed a community of people who use your site, outside of your site, such as on MySpace, Facebook, etc., those outlets can be similarly used, as long as you are responsible for them (a MySpace group or Facebook fan page that you started, etc.).

Some of these things require only a basic effort, maybe an hour or so of your time in the case of a once off. But, the benefit you receive from that time can be tremendous.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has a great post on forum giveaways, talking in detail about one he ran recently. He definitely an interesting take on the pluses and minuses of running one.