G'day folks. This question piqued my interest, for reasons that will be obvious.

I'm also involved in the beta-testing of the StackExchange community Q&A platform for a site that I run, and part of that beta-testing is asking questions and posting answers to kick the tires and make sure things work.

With no other users around to begin with, I most certainly created test accounts to work the system. I made some non-admin accounts to witness features in action under limited access use-cases. For instance, it was easy to forget new users can't post comments, or vote. I learned it's important to up-vote new users quickly, so they can pay it forward – otherwise it's a catch-22. I've also posted as "anonymous" to witness how unregistered users experience the site; e.g. no voting permitted, even with sufficient earned reputation.

With those test accounts, rather than posting blah-blah "testing, testing, 1.. 2.. 3.." or "Is this thing on?" variety of questions – which I would later have to delete as administrator – I instead posted some real questions: a few FAQs which people could find useful.

Such seeded content was also key in providing the minimum threshold of unique and interesting content for Google to take my site seriously and actually index it. That was a critical milestone.

Now I get search traffic and Analytics keyword data essential for SEO. I don't see practicing SEO as being disingeneous, either – SEO in honest hands helps others locate what they want to find. This is one reason I continue to like posting FAQs to my site: Users with very specific and obscure questions bring long-tail traffic to the site (which is welcome) but not much fat-head traffic – and FAQs get some of that.

A much more important part of the exercise has been the community-building. I don't have the advantage of an existing community centered around content I've developed already. So I'm using my site to get some of my existing thoughts down in plain view. Yes, I've asked questions I thought I knew the answer to – and then was surprised to discover I didn't, actually! The community has taught me. I don't assume I have all the answers or have considered all the angles.

I've also discovered that many people are more comfortable starting out in the community by answering a question that's out there rather than coming up with a new one of their own. Some people want to participate, but don't have that easy in. Seeding a few questions and leaving them unanswered on the site is the easy in they are looking for. Once somebody new understands how the site works after leaving a few answers and seeing how people vote/comment on them, etc. they tend to venture further.

Furthermore, I'm running some ad campaigns – including one expensive one – and so there ought to be something to draw visitors in to actually participate at the site, otherwise I've wasted money on many one-time casual drive-by views. Unanswered questions work wonders in converting viewers into participants, and those participants like to come back to see how their answer was received by the community. And then they, too, start to vote. It's a virtuous cycle.

Another area I think I did well with is ensuring people see my site as inclusive. With a topic like finance it's easy for discussion to get locale-specific. I'm Canadian, and wanted to build a site Canadians would feel welcome at – yet I didn't want to build a site just for Canadians. There's a lot of knowledge people can share about money without regard to locale. So, I created a multiple country taxonomy and icon system to show users that the site is inclusive and that questions both broad and locale-specific are welcome. There have been some very interesting answers with people from multiple countries exchanging perspectives. Note that establishing the country taxonomy also required seeding some questions. With StackExchange, tags cannot (yet) be created in a vacuum.

Anyway, building a community is much harder than it looks. Quality seeded content is a great help.

I do agree with JW on the last points – ask friends and family to help out. I have two sisters who help with some Q&A, and many friends do, too. One friend liked the idea so much he volunteered to be a moderator.

And yes, use Facebook and Twitter to your advantage. But many Facebook fans and Twitter followers just follow out of politeness and will never participate at your site unless you entice them. You'll need to be a content tease to draw them in or even beg for a visit here and there.

JW may have realized a blog is much the same: subscribers aren't necessarily going to participate actively at your site just because they read your blog. But, I would still have given my left nut to have had a very popular blog to begin with. Not to mention the head start! I was the last in my topic peer group to get accepted into the beta. :-/

Finally, I also think plain-old marketing and business knowledge helps:

• Think strategically.
• Have design appeal.
• Write good copy.
• Advertise.

p.s. If you still haven't guessed, I'm the competition that JW is referring to.

For what it's worth, I respect JW and I'd prefer to win him over than to win.

I'm new to building a community and would by no means consider myself an expert on these things, but I would say that content on the site that is useful to people is a good thing.

My general principles have been to find likeminded people (via twitter, forums etc.), help them where I can, and be nice to my "competitors". There are quite a few AV forums and blogs that I could view as my competition, instead I've taken the view that you get more flies with honey and I've linked to them if they have helpful content, and posted a few times on their sites.

As far as building a community is concerned, no one likes to feel as if they are the only one in the room, so I think it is important to keep a steady turnover of content so your regular users don't drift away. I've seen this happen with one of the sites I like and post on regularly. The admin was very anonymous, and after a few weeks with little new content, the regulars stopped showing up and it is now pretty much dead.

Another reason to seed with content is that the core users on forums are often pretty hardcore. They are less likely to ask questions as they know how to find out the answers. So me playing a little dumb is a good way to draw some of that wisdom out. I reason that eventually drive by users who've found answers on my site via Google 3 or 4 times will start to come straight to us to look, and start asking my core users.

I have posted several questions/answers on my site to help build the content, especially on quiet days. A lot of them are FAQ-like questions that I get asked by friends and family. Having posted these on my site I can now direct them to the appropriate question and have got a few new users as a result. Some of the people I've helped have gone on to use my Amazon affiliate for their next purchase by way of thanks, which helps me advertise.

I also post some questions that I know an answer to, but would like to find out what alternatives, if any, there are to my default approach. Some user answers have opened my eyes to whole new approaches and technologies this way, which is great.

I've been active on other sites and forums using the same technology or on the same subject. I don't always know the best answer, but am willing to spend a little time googling and collating my findings from several sources so at least I've contributed. I've been particularly active helping other administrators of StackExchange sites, and sharing some of the tricks and hacks I've made to my site to get it up and running. As a result of this I think I've generated a bit of good karma, a few new friends, and around 1/3 of all my hits to my site come from my activity on other sites.

Despite my natural inclinations I've been pretty active on Twitter. I've got some new users by following other Twitterers who post on keywords related to my site. I look for words like HTPC, HDMI etc appearing in their tweets and occasionally I spot someone asking about something covered on my site and tell them where they can find an answer.

One thing I would never do is speak ill of my competition. Even if my opinion is valid, mud slinging comes across as mean spirited and paints me in a bad light. As BasicallyMoney says, better to win people over than to win.