The biggest thing that will make or break your online community is keeping your content fresh. There is nothing worse than coming to a website where you are looking for information and the information you find is out of date. You will go to that website once and only once.

When your members come to your online community they want to see pertinent, up-to-date information. This can seem like it would be a full-time job for someone, and if you only have one person doing it, it could be. However, with a plan and a little delegation, your online community can be the information rich tool you (and your members) want it to be. The key is to make your online community the place for your members to go and find information about your subject matter. Let's discuss some ways to do that.

First, go to the websites of your industry magazines and see if they have RSS feeds that you can republish on your site. If not, contact the trade magazine and see if you can work out a deal to publish a few articles a month on your site, with a link back to their subscription page. This gets you the articles you need and gives them the potential subscribers they want.

Look to your members for content. Your membership is the single largest knowledge base on your subject matter. Take advantage of that for your online community. I have seen successful "File Drives" where members are asked to submit files they would be willing to share. The person who submits the most files gets an iPod. This can be a very effective way to seed your file library if you don't have a lot of files to start out with.

In many cases your members are already sending out press releases. Insist that they also send them to your association as well to be posted in your community. This allows your members to get exposure as well as other members to keep an up-to-date pulse on what is going on in your industry.

You can also ask your Committee Chairs to write up a paragraph every month about things that the committee has worked on and accomplished that month. This is a good read for members to see what action the association is taking on their behalf and also helps to be sure your committees actually accomplish something since they will have to write about it.

You can also tap into industry vendors. Believe me, they would be happy to offer non-sales based information (whitepapers, articles, etc) that will give your members some great knowledge and in turn allow the vendor to position itself as a trusted resource. (is this something you can make money on, you bet.)

These are just a few ideas on how to keep your online community fresh with new content on a regular basis with little work from one individual. Every industry and membership makeup is different, but by having a plan in place you can have an information rich online community with plenty of time to devote to other tasks.