9 Accelerators for Vocation Network Startups
By Daniel Benner, president of GINDIE.com

1. Seed the community with quality members. Building relationships with individuals and organizations that already have active followings is essential for getting a vocation network launched. These people in turn attract more quality members and can influence your growth.
2. Minimize the impact of voyeurs. GINDIE does this well by avoiding mandatory fields for vocation skills and resources. What typically happens is that the voyeurs will put up false identities and don’t tag themselves in the folksonomy. That’s ok, because they won’t show up in any searches. This keeps our good profiles at the top of the search engine results.
3. Focus on growing the value of the community. I use a professional grade social networking platform, so I can focus on creating content that keeps the community active. Most communities that I see stagnating are usually struggling with bad UI designs that work against any efforts to build real community interaction on the site. Content is King, everything else is just details.
4. Craw, walk, run with community building. Creating a successful vocation network is more work than creating a social network.  It takes time to launch a community that is really working together to create intra-community commerce, so be patient and persistent.
5. Lead with value and they will follow. If you provide real value to the members of the community then you will be in the position to ask them to respond and they will respond. Example, by providing the right environment for my community to raise the visibility and accessibility of their talent and resources, plus relevant content, plus lots of TLC. I get over a 50% response to my calls to action on the site.
6. Helping members succeed differentiates you enormously. Some of the best connectors and future advocates of a vocation network are marginally computer literate. I have receive many emails from members saying that helping them reset a password or figure out why a photo is not uploading does not go un-noticed and they become long time advocates for the community. Again, I spend more time leading my community than doing technical work on it.
7. Encourage vouching within the community. First of all people do business with people they trust or believe they can trust. When members vouch for each other so that people can identify who has worked with who and have an audit trail this begins to develop the kind of trust necessary for commerce to happen. Second, this encourages members to invite her professional network in to vouch for her.
8. Play the upper hand with initial advertising opportunities. A vocation network is a potential gold mine for some product vendors. At first you can not offer the raw volume that command attention, but you don’t have to cow tow to clients. Offer to help them raise the awareness of their products and brands for limited time for free. Track the results and if you can demonstrate that they received value then their very likely to become regular advertisers.
9. Experiment with catalysts for creating a market place. The only way you will break away from the pack is to take chances with different strategies that will turn your community into a market place. In the end nothing breeds success like success!

One of the successful community builders that I admire is Lindsay Blanton, owner of radioreference.com. He has successfully become the internet destination for radio scanner enthusiats. He has over 155,788 registered users and is a real pioneer of monetizing his content by creating services that his members are happy to buy. I asked Lindsay to explain what it takes to monetize your community.

5 Ways to Monetize Your Community
By Lindsay Blanton, owner of Radioreference.com

1. Content is king.  End of story.  If you are going to create a successful online community, content is the #1 driver and is what will bring visitors back to the site.  If you don't have content that drives significant value to the customer, then they'll go elsewhere for it.  If you are trying to start an online business where there isn't any content, either generate it yourself or find another business.
2. Make any user submitted content freely available.  Heck, make all content freely available.  Every single piece of content on radioreference.com is free to all users.   Advanced Searches, PDF whitepapers and reports, Web services access, etc costs money.
3. To monetize the content, develop value added services around the free content.  Customized news alerts and watch pages, personalization, reporting, better search features, web services, you name it.  Keep the raw content free and provide rudimentary approaches to access the content - develop value added services around that free content and charge what the market will bear.
4. To sustain cash flow - make sure you have processes in place to keep users coming back to your site, for example:   Newsletters, email "notifications" of changes to content, and advertising.  One thing I've found is that people will just flat forget that your site exists.  I might send out a newsletter once a quarter - and that single action will drive 15K in revenue in subscriptions (new and renewals).  This is especially true in the hobbyist market.
5. Finally, develop partnerships with others in the field.  One of the biggest things I did was develop a web service that allowed software developers to write applications that could directly access data and content from the site.  I then made access to the web service part of the premium subscription services.  The result?  App developers added support in their apps, and people paid me for access.  Everyone wins - the user purchases the software app from the developer, and purchases a premium subscription.  So, I developed a platform for lots of people to succeed.