“Tactical Tips for Building an Online Community” plus 1 more

Tactical Tips for Building an Online Community

Posted: 02 Aug 2011 01:01 PM PDT

This guest post is by Jim Nelson of Tripawds.com.

With all the wonderful feedback on my guest post about how we utilize WordPress multisite and discussion forums to build community for our rather niche market, I thought I might offer some detail about specific tactics and network plugins we use to keep members informed, active and increasing in number.

Here are just a few social media nuts and bolts that keep the Tripawds Blogs community together. These methods work for us, as proven by growing membership and increased traffic to featured blogs and archived content.

My recommendations are by no means the only solutions for generating measurable success, though. Please do comment below with your own recommendations for encouraging social interaction on membership sites.

How to build community on membership sites

The freemium model: Make it free, with perks for paid members. Offer free blogs and use a Supporter plugin to enable enhanced features, or set membership levels for accessing premium content.
Create featured blogs: Post regularly to a set of sites targeting specific topics. Example: Tripawds followers will find weekly posts in separate blogs for Gear, Gifts, Nutrition, Downloads, and Amazon Reviews.
Install Recent Global Posts widgets: Display recent posts from all blogs across your network, and bump your featured blog posts to pin them throughout the day.
Update topics for featured blogs: Create specific forum topics for each of your sites and reply whenever your blog posts get kicked out of recent posts widgets. Encourage subscribing to topics for notification of new blog posts.
Include member and blog directories: Provide searchable directories of all users and blogs. Edit directory pages to include descriptions and avatars of featured blogs and site administrators.
Provide global site search: The WordPress admin bar only allows searching of the blog being viewed. Use a plugin that enables searching of all blogs and provide instructions for searching discussion forums and member or blog directories.
Create a blog ring: Show network-wide global content in the headers and footers of all blogs across your network. Include links to your forums and directories or featured blogs. Here’s how we did it.
Create a default New Blog template: Install a plugin that lets you activate a default theme for all new blogs complete with with settings, blogroll links, and text widgets, and use a Supporter plugin that lets you enable premium themes for paid subscribers.
Welcome all new bloggers: In addition to customizing the default first “Hello World” comment from your WordPress settings, reply to the first real post published on new blogs. Also create a forum discussion for welcoming new bloggers, and update the topic after first posts get published. Encourage members to subscribe to topic for notification of new blogs.
Thank paying members: If you offer paid premium accounts, create a forum topic for announcing all new Supporter blogs.
Encourage commenting on blogs: Create global RSS feeds for all blogs and comments to facilitate the following of member activities.
Display recent posts in the Dashboard: Use the Multisite Dashboard Feed Widget to show recent posts from all blogs in every user dashboard.
Create a custom menu: Use a theme that supports custom menus and link to featured blogs and specific forums to make network navigation easy.
Foster friendships: A Friends plugin can be used to help members connect and show their support of others with widgets on their blogs.
Provide technical support: Create a forum dedicated to answering tech support questions, and have a featured blog for posting announcements of new features and how to videos.
Use a discreet pop-up: Direct new visitors from external sites to valuable content or welcome them with encouragment to join using a Popover plugin.
Branch out: Offer podcasts of interviews with community members or discussions about pertinent topics with the tools available at BlogTalkRadio. Direct traffic to a dedicated forum or featured blog for all show archives and the upcoming program schedule.
Keep it fun: Start an “Anything Goes” forum for allowing members to rant and rave about whatever they wish. And consider creating a fun blog offering some sort of comic relief. Tripawds has the KillBarney blog which follows the travels of our dog Jerry’s favorite toy as it visits members and their dogs.
Teach members to help: Encouage members to engage in all aspects of the community by showing them how to post in forums or publish a blog. Provide information about RSS feeds and how to use a reader, tell them how to subscribe or watch forum topics, and provide them with links to popular posts that should be shared with all new members.

Most importantly, engage with your community. Maintaining a multisite network for any cause can be time consuming. The more passionate you are about your work the easier it will be. Lack of passion is easily identified by members—especially paying ones—and can result in quick burnout. I have certain boilerplate comments with links to our most frequently recommended content, but I rarely use them and always edit them when I do to avoid appearing disingenuous.

Epilogue

Examples for all of the above tactics in use can be seen at my blog. The BuddyPress plugin is also available for building community among WordPress multisite members, complete with groups, forums and activity streams.

For those like me who have never played around with BuddyPress, however, I hope the tips above help you make the most of your multisite network. The vast majority of plugins I use to accomplish everything I’ve discussed come from WPMU Dev. If others have suggestions for different plugins or arguments for using BuddyPress, please share them in the comments.

Jim Nelson is co-founder of the Tripawds Blogs community and an active member of the WPMU Dev discussion forums. He and his wife Rene were featured in “Nature, Why We love Cats and Dogs” on PBS with their three-legged dog Jerry.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Tactical Tips for Building an Online Community

You Have to Write about Making Money Blogging to Make Money Blogging [Misconceptions New Bloggers Have #3]

Posted: 02 Aug 2011 07:04 AM PDT

This post is the third in a series examining misconceptions and myths about blogging that many new (and some experienced) bloggers have about blogging.

We’ve already discussed the misconceptions that blogging takes super-human effort (or is easy!) and that you must post every day on your blog.

Today’s misconception is all about money. It’s one I hear every day as I observe what people say about making money from blogging.

Only people who sell make money blogging resources make money blogging.
The most profitable topics to blog about are blogging tips or making money blogging.
It’s impossible to make money blogging on “normal,” everyday topics.

Why this myth exists

The reality is that most people who talk about making money blogging are those trying to create a name for themselves in that very niche. I guess part of creating authority and credibility is to show what you do, so bloggers in this niche are often not averse to sharing their earnings.

On the flip-side, many bloggers who are making a living from blogging in other niches either don’t have an avenue through which to talk about it, or don’t want to (for privacy reasons or because they don’t want to alert the competition to their success).

As a result, the impression that new bloggers often get is that nobody is making money blogging except for those writing about it.

The reality of the Make Money Blogging/Blog Tips niche

Lets look at a few of the realities of working in this niche.

You can make good money blogging about blogging. It’s true—there is money to be made in this space. Teaching others to blog and to make a living from it can be profitable. I make enough to live (and some) on from ProBlogger each month, and know of at least five or six other bloggers in the niche who would be at a similar level. As with any topic that has anything to do with money, this can be a lucrative niche.
It is a crowded niche when it comes to finding readers. As a result of the success of some (and the public broadcasting of the results), many others have joined the hunt for market share in this space. I’ve not seen figures on it, but I suspect the result of this is that it’s one of the more crowded niches. As a result, breaking into the niche and making a name for yourself can be tough.
It is a crowded niche when it comes to products. If you want to monetize in the Make Money Blogging niche by releasing a product, there are not only a lot of other blogs, but a lot of products you’ll need to compete with. Not a day goes by when I’m not approached by another blogger wanting me to promote their ebook, course, or tool… Again, it’s hard to stand out, and I suspect that many bloggers have simply bought enough products already, and are not that interested in buying more.
There’s a lot of suspicion about the topic. Due to the nature of the topic, there’s rightly a lot of suspicion about it. Unfortunately over the years, this niche has attracted its fair share of dubious characters and those who have used less-than-ethical-and-transparent tactics to make a name for themselves. This has created a lot of suspicion among the general public about the niche. I’m kind of happy about this suspicion, as I’ve seen a lot of people ripped off, but it does make this a tricky space to operate in. My recent banning (and then reinstatement) from YouTube seems to have occurred because many in the niche were tarred with the same brush (most of the accounts terminated had videos including the words “make money online”).
Bloggers are perhaps more reluctant to spend money than other audiences. Let’s be clear: I’m not calling you cheap! But one of the factors to consider in this niche is that the barriers to entry for the blogosphere (as opposed to other pastimes) are extremely low. You can set up a blog for free, there are thousands of blogging themes, tools, and how-to instructions out there for free, and there’s plenty of free help within the niche. As a result, many bloggers don’t come to their blogs with the expectation of having to spend much money. This can impact the bottom line for those trying to operate in this niche (I’ll touch on this more below).

The reality of other niches

I’m not going to pretend that all other niches are lucrative. I know a lot of bloggers with decent readerships who struggle to monetize, since their topics don’t lend themselves to monetization. However, my experience shows me that there is certainly a lot of opportunity in other niches, and that, in many ways, they can be easier to monetize than the blogging tips niche.

Personally, I’ve found it a lot easier to build significantly larger audiences and higher profits in other niches. My photography blog has around five to six times the readership of ProBlogger, and is more than five to six times as profitable.

The photography niche is very competitive, but there are some other upsides including:

The market place is bigger: There are a lot more people around who own cameras than have blogs.
The audience is more of a spending audience: I mentioned above that because blogging has low barriers to entry, bloggers are often less likely to spend money. Photography is a little different. People increasingly are spending thousands of dollars on cameras, they buy photography magazines and books, they enrol in courses … there’s just more of a willingness to spend in that niche.
The audience isn’t as suspicious: While people still have a healthy suspicion of online marketers in this space, there are fewer barriers on this front.

This assessment isn’t just relevant to the photography space—plenty of other niches are similarly larger and have audiences that are more used to spending.

What should you blog about?

This probably isn’t the place for a full exploration of how to choose a niche for your blog (I’ll include some links below for more on that). However, my general advice on this is to choose a topic on which there’s a healthy demand for content (it’s hard to have a successful blog on a topic that nobody but you is interested in), and which you know something about (and preferably have a passion or interest in).

My co-author on the ProBlogger Book, Chris Garrett, presented last year at the ProBlogger training day in Melbourne, and used a slide which I think is a great visual on this point: