My presentation at Web2Expo, NYC 2009 - on Building a Successful Developer Community. Included is tips on building your community, your site, SEO tips, free products to help, and more.

1. Building a Site for your Developer Community Lauren Cooney GPM, Web Platform & Standards Microsoft lcooney@microsoft.com www.twitter.com/lcooney

3. Apache Foundation

4. Eclipse

5. CodePlex Foundation

7. Cooney’s 5 Forces of Site Community

8. #1: Clarity

9. Why am I building this website? What are my Top Level Goals? Questions to ask: What need am I addressing? Does my company already have a site that addresses these needs? What results do I want to see? How am I going to achieve these goals? What does success look like?

10. #2: Customer

11. Who is my Target Audience? Address: Who is the target audience? Is there another community out there that fits these needs (competitor/partner?) Do I partner or do I create my own community? What is my differentiator & how do I create that (is there one of value)?

13. Figuring out your site customer involves segmenting the target audience

15. Data is available on lots of different websites for free or a fraction of the cost of analyst reports/DevTrackers

16. Scouring public blogs, wikis, research sites

17. Sometimes analysts offer up free reports

20. Good content is absolutely critical; poor content means you’ll lose customers (no repeat visitors)

21. Helps new users or current customers learn about news, new products & information critical

22. Important in helping customers build out their skill set

24. Developer websites need code

25. Interactive content is good (but keep it short & to the point)

26. Short Videos

27. Learning tutorials

28. Demos

29. Step by step articles/how to

30. Interviews with the experts

31. Blogs

33. Ensure you have company buy-in; ask engineers/product managers to contribute

34. Ask the community to contribute

35. Syndication deals

37. Rating ability

39. #4 Community

41. Allow for feedback & bi-directional conversations

42. Employees listen & react

43. Voting/commenting/rating abilities

44. Clean UI/easy to use

45. User Contribution is high

47. Trying to On Ramp To Our Stuff – Where Do You Start? How do I onboard the community?

48. How do I Start to get Noticed? Real World Example (www.microsoft.com/web)

49. SEO SEOSEO Microsoft SEO Toolkit

51. Bootstrapping Organic Search Search keywords such as “Install PHP Windows”, “Install Wordpress”, “Search Optimization Tools”, etc. Drive search traffic by leveraging top apps (Wordpress 40% PHP app market share), products and workload keywords Start building Organic (Discovery) by raising awareness initially with Advertising (Direct) traffic. Build Top Product/App Pages enable ad traffic that also lend themselves towards organic search for /Web Compliment with site-wide optimization of content/link structures for search

52. #5: Connect

54. Comments sections

55. Phone number

56. Email aliases

58. Audience Connection Methods Pick your methods of communication Ensure it scales Make it easy to remember/access/push method: user names, links, RSS, ATOM Commitment Be Patient

59. Provide Personalities Provide Interesting Facts/Tidbits/ Information What are you doing? Be polite and respectful Take time to respond Be relevant; be credible HAVE PASSION!

60. Core Takeaways

61. Questions?

62. Lauren Cooney Web Platform & Standards, MicrosoftFollow me on Twitter: @lcooneyEmail me: lcooney@microsoft.com Thank You!