Let’s suppose you’ve managed to round up a few dozens smart people, who each have posted on your site a few times. Now all that’s left is to lay back and watch the magic happen, right?

Wrong! If you stop here, you’ll pretty soon see traffic and engagement slide back down to zero, as people’s busy lives take over and they forget to visit your site.

This is why it’s very important to actively engage your community. And the easiest way to do this is to get people to ask questions.

Simple questions can result in extremely popular threads with dozens or hundreds of replies. Examples include:

• What are you working on?
• How would you improve this community?
• Who would you like us to invite here?
• Can you introduce yourself?

You can even make these threads into monthly events. For example, Hacker News features monthly “Who’s Hiring?” and ”Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer?” threads to help members find jobs.

Ask Me Anything

Of course, the ultimate question thread is the “AMA”, for “Ask Me Anything”, where you get a well-known personality to answer your members’ questions.

Not only is this a fantastic way to generate engagement, it’s also usually quite fun (not to mention a nice ego boost) for the person doing the answering, too.