Ben Huh, the guy behind ICanHasCheezBurger.com, created a community which now numbers over 1 million unique visitors a month, all from funny cat pictures with captions.  I kid you not.  He knows what he’s talking about.  His monthly uniques almost tripled in 2008.

How did he do it?  Well, here are 15 of his top tips.

One of the web’s most unique sites also comes with the most unusual name, I Can Has Cheezburger (dot-com).  The name comes from one of the captions on the jillions of crazy cat pictures found on the site.  You can browse the pictures, copy them to your site/blog/profile, or create your own funny caption in 3 easy steps.  (And remember cats have poor grammar and spelling abilities.)

Ben knows what he’s talking about.  Here is a summary of his 15 keys to building a community.  The link to the full post is at the bottom.

1. Convert Casual Users into Fans

The number one rule of creating a great community is to enable people to share the positive experience that they’ve had on your site. Your aim should be to convert casual users into fans because fans are the ones that will share your content with others.

2. Love on Your Existing Fans, but Not Too Much

3. Empower your Users

4. Make More People Happy

5. Stop Engineering and Start Thinking About the Market

6. Don’t Skimp on Great Content

7. Provide Ways to Give Feedback

8. Power of Little

Offer users lots of small, simple things to do on your site that don’t require login, such as rating, commenting, saving a favorite, creating an account and finally (hopefully) they will do the most difficult thing of all, contribute to your site.

9. Encourage ‘Thefting’

10. Be Willing to Prune Your Community

11. Measure the Number of Shared Experiences, not Users

12. Shared Experiences = Goodwill

13. Create Info Porn

People love to look at data about themselves. It the reason why there is a mirror in practically every elevator that you’ve been in. If you have data about your user’s behavior on your site then show it to them. Update it on a daily basis and they will come back on a daily basis. One of the most popular pages on Lol cats is the page that tells people how many ‘fans’ they have.

14. Don’t Pay Contributors

15. Don’t Confuse Sharing with Marketing

When your users share content with others they are not marketing. They don’t even think about it in that way and in turn you shouldn’t treat them as marketers. Don’t force marketing messages at them, it will burn their trust.

See the full post here.

Here’s a link to his site’s unique visitor stats for 2008 at Compete.com.

Check out www.ICanHasCheezburger.com here.

 

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