When most people launch a site they want to get as many people as possible to register and become active on it. Whether it’s a forum, a portal site, or even a blog - people want users to register and participate. To do this webmasters typically promote their sites like crazy through SEM, PPC, offline advertising, direct ad purchases, forum posting, blog comments, etc. The main goal is get as many people to your site as possible and hope to God a few of them register.

On the other hand, have you ever tried telling people they can’t register? A lot of sites make registration available only through personal invite or application, and it works.

reverse psychology
(in nontechnical use) a method of getting another person to do what one wants by pretending not to want it or to want something else or something more.

When someone hears or sees that a website is exclusive then they usually want to join it if nothing more than to see why it’s off limits to the general public. Moreover, when someone does get accepted into the site they feel a sense of accomplishment and pride in being one of the “few” allowed into an exclusive site. This typically means that you’ll have a higher registered user activity.

A recent example of this method in practice is over at Mintpages. I got an invite for Mintpages a few months ago. It was a really young community then but has grown extremely fast. The web development community niche is an extremely competative one. Mintpages quite honestly doesn’t provide anything at all above and beyond what you could find at any other development forum. The only thing they did differently was to make their community invite only (or by application). This made the people who were invited to join the community want to post because they felt as if they were above the average developer. I’m actually a bit disappointed in Mintpages because the community they were able to create in such a short amount of time was great; however, they did absolutely nothing to grow it. It’s still active, but not nearly as popular as it could be based on the initial interest.

Another example of a community with an exclusive memberbase is the 9rules blog network. Members of 9rules are bloggers who have to apply during preset application periods. If they’re accepted they get to add a 9rules banner to their page (seen on the right) as well as gain the benefit of getting targeted traffic from the 9rules homepage and other bloggers in the network. The main attraction for bloggers wishing to join the 9rules network is the potential traffic from the site. However, there are a ton of other blog networks out there. What makes 9rules stand out? I think it’s due to their exclusive memberbase. If any blogger who wanted could join the network it would just turn into another blog directory. But because it is so exclusive the bloggers who are able to join the network gain a certain amount of prestige in the blogosphere which yields respect and traffic.

For most webmasters the conventional strategy of mass promotion is probably always going to be the way to go. However, one should always consider the possibility of creating a community built around an exclusive memberbase. It has its pros and cons, and it always depends on the industry you’re targeting. Notice both of my examples were based around a skill industry - web development/blogging. Reputation goes a long way in these fields and belonging to an exclusive community raises that reputation. Will this work for every niche? Probably not. But it’s up to you to find out where it works and where it doesn’t.

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