Having a community in your blog is one of the best ways to promote. Besides that people in your community are active readers, they are also active promoters. This post is about what are the people in your community, what are the positive effects and how you can build a vibrant community.
What are the People in Your Community
Most of the active people in your community are also bloggers like you. By active people, I mean the people that tweet your posts and comment on your blog entries. The amount of bloggers in your community varies a lot between niches, but you can rest assured that at least 50% of the active people are bloggers. On some sites, like this, nearly all active people are also bloggers.
Positive Effects
Tweets on Twitter
Active readers tweet your posts a lot. By this you get more visitors, which is course great.
General Promotion
Active people promote your site to their friends. They send emails to their friends and talk to them avout your blog.
Getting Back Links
As I said before, most people in your community are bloggers. They have a blog and these people tend to link back to your articles. Back links effect your ranking in search engines a lot. More back links you get the better.
Community Building for Beginners
To get a community, you need returning readers. Returning readers need that you have good content and a good first impression of your site. To get started read these articles:
After you have read those two articles, you have noticed that blog commenting is a big part of having a successful blog. To do blog commenting successfully, you should read these article:
If you have understood the concepts from these articles and start applying them you are on your way to building a vibrant community. Just have fun with your readers and interact with them. That’s the way to build a good community.
Conclusion
Community building takes a lot of time. There is no way to rush it. You can blow up your whole community by not being reactive and interactive. Most blog readers are bloggers them self. These guys can help a lot with link building so value them. Every person who is in your blog community is valuable. Treat them accordingly.
At some point though, aren’t you going to have to reach out *beyond* the blogging community? It’s all well and good to help fellow bloggers out, interact and share ideas – I’m all for that – but if your goal is to make money in some fashion, don’t you think it would be hard to sell a product to someone who’s doing virtually the same exact thing?
Of course, I’m playing devil’s advocate a bit here… but going around in circles having bloggers retweet and backlink each other to death may get to the point down the line where it’s just becomes “preaching to the choir” and not effective for getting to the next level.
Jordan Cooper´s last blog ..Stop Offering Offline Solutions to Online Problems
I get your point and I think of it this way. The way to reach the bigger audience is to get people through search engines. To get traffic from SEs you need back links and your community will help you a lot in that. In fact your active community in some cases is not your exact target for the product you are selling. Have you ever thought of that?
Linking each other, we all will get stronger. The anchor texts are such a big deal, that if we just link each other with the good anchor texts, we all will be well off…
Thanks a lot for your comment Jordan! Great to read some consturctive comments that really engage.
100% agree with what you said but those people can be potential buyers too, though there is a slim chance of this. But having an community of like minded people proves to be beneficial if done in the ‘right’ way. Don’t ask me the right way actually.. it’s more of an experimental tactics and depends on how you take things.
Bangaloreloka´s last blog ..What’s my Blogging Plan 2010 with Bangaloreloka?
From my experience, the blogging community helps you with several things like helping with SEO and adding credibility but they don’t usually put money in your pockets. Even some of my most regular visitors haven’t made me a penny.
Most of my income are from new visitors, either on their first or second visit to my site.
However, without the former, the latter wouldn’t happen. You really need the community to build that foundation.
Exactly. My point was that you really need first have the community that helps you build links and after that you can SE traffic etc.
Thanks for the comment Gabe.
Building community is one of the hardest things you will ever do on your blog but if you do it correctly the benefits are massive. The easiest and most obvious way to do it is through services like twitter and Facebook but replying to comments on your own blog and interacting with your users as well as replying to emails and nuturing your community are equally important.
Building a blogger community also good for expanding your knowledge. I personally love to comment in blogs and love to retweet if I understand the subject line. It also a good way to make yourself valuable on social site by sharing good thing. Also building a community around your blog helps you to brand it.
Arafat Hossain Piyada´s last blog ..Following Microsoft Virus Scanning Advice May Push You In Danger (Security Alert)
Found your blog through a comment you left on Smatbloggerz, which is how community is spread, I think. I have recently been on a mission to find blogs with similar content that I can become a part of their community and begin to comment regularly. I think you are absolutely right about community. It is something so many new bloggers don’t have a clue about, they just want to be Darren Rouse or John Chow overnight and when it doesn’t happen, they give up.
Put the money in the back of your mind, and concentrate on content, interaction, and community first. The rest will fall into place over time. That’s my theory anyway….
BTW, I almost left without subscribing to RSS because I couldn’t find it, you really should think about making it more visible instead of in tiny print in your footer….
Keith´s last blog ..What Browser Are You Using?
According to me every new blogger should join the blogging community. You get to know a lot from these communities…….. You could have a lot of blogger friends from these communities…… which in turn will be very beneficial……..
I will remember your advice here. My blog is five months old and I’m trying to build a community. Boy, its hard.
Community is everything at the start, it’s the ripple effect tha will turn into a wave. A community will get you so far and then hopefully once your community is big enough hopefully they will start spreading your content for you.
Looking outside your market place is a good way to do it, for instance today I have contributed to photography, meditation and even travel websites.
Community is much larger than the people who see your site, it’s the people who use the internet!
TheInfoPreneur´s last blog ..Good or Bad, Be Unique
I’m still waiting for the wave
. Thanks for the comment.