Member Avatar for goodtaste

Hi! This is basically a question. I have traffic and am getting more every week. But one must always be improving, so I'm curious about this and want to use the community as a sounding board. I just read an article in which Brian Halligan of hubspot.com said that to have a successful business online one must create a site that has changed "from a one-way sales message to a collaborative, living, breathing hub for your marketplace."

What does that mean exactly in your mind? I would love to hear the different interpretations. I don't believe that everyone should run and turn their site into a forum, so there must be a way to adapt the concept. Share your thoughts!

Thanks!

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by sophiatristin

Dani AI

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The "living hub" idea that quoted is less about features and more about purpose: a site that regularly delivers value, signals activity, and helps people move toward outcomes (learn, buy, solve). That makes a site worth revisiting. Activity should be low-friction, relevant to the visitor's intent, and measured so changes can be judged.

Practical, evergreen building blocks that follow that purpose: create focused content hubs (an anchor page plus short, updateable pieces), surface recent activity so the page feels current, and enable tiny contributions (one-click reactions, short tips, annotated highlights) rather than forcing a full forum. Treat social channels as distribution — amplify onsite moments rather than outsource community. Performance and mobile-first design are prerequisites: slow pages lose returning users faster than any UX tweak can gain them.

Measure and iterate. Pick one high-traffic page, add a single interactive element, and run an experiment for several weeks. Track returning-visitor rate, time-on-page, social shares, and email signups as primary signals. If participation is low, reduce friction (fewer fields, social logins), explain the benefit in microcopy, and surface recent contributions in navigation. Avoid feature bloat: every interactive item should have a clear KPI.

This ties the thread together: take ’s point about variety, combine it with ’s emphasis on interaction, and use distribution ideas from and as amplification—not substitutes. A simple rollout plan:

  1. choose a high-traffic page and a success metric
  2. add one lightweight feature (reactions, featured comments, or a recommendations strip)
  3. run and measure for 4–8 weeks
  4. keep what moves metrics; remove the rest

Caution: prioritize speed, clarity, and a single measured change at a time.

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Member Avatar for shaniadavid

Well i would recommend you to start using hubpages, google knol and squidoo which can make your posts lively and drive traffic to your website!

Member Avatar for shahzebkhan

it should be user interactive.. like commenting and polls ..
also it has sharing options to all social media sites.. to get traffic
it must be updated twice a week
that would be awesome...

Member Avatar for goodtaste

Very interesting points. Thank you!

Member Avatar for Dani

Keep the user engaged through some form of interactivity. If the user isn't commenting or posting, then they are interacting with your site in some fashion (flash, videos, AJAX interactivity, etc).

If your site is just the same static pages, then once they read them once, the user never has a reason to ever return. Give the user a different experience each time so they always have a reason to go back.

Member Avatar for sophiatristin

Hubpages, google knol and squidoo is a best place to making site and posts lively. It also helps to getting more and more traffic in web. Other way is a .NET data provider which is access directly to Oracle database.

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