ProBlogger: How to Build Community on a Blog: 24 Must Read Articles from around the Web

How to Build Community on a Blog: 24 Must Read Articles from around the Web

Posted: 28 Mar 2013 08:42 AM PDT

This week we’ve published a series of posts on the topic of building community on a blog with these posts:

9 Benefits [and 3 Costs] Of Building Community On Your Blog

The 5 Stages of Building a Culture of Community on a Blog [A Case Study]

7 Strategies for Growing Community on Your Blog

Today Jade Craven continues this series by looking at what others around the web have written on the topic of building community on blogs.

There is a lot of conversation around the topic of building a community around your blog. It is a fantastic technique, but it is actually an extremely complex issue. The 'rules' differ for each community. A business blog doesn't have the same goals as a personal blogger.

In this post, I curate my favourite resources on building a engaged and loyal blog community.

Think about what is important to you.

There are several things you will need to consider before deciding on what strategies to use.

Ask yourself whether you are building an audience or a community. Answering this question can help you take the right direction with your community building efforts. If this concept resonates with you, check out: It Isn’t About YOU: The Importance Of Building Community.
What role does value play in your community? Check out Building Community with Value
Are you focusing on your community too much? Matt Cheuvront reminds us that our personal opinion is valuable.

Strategies:

Make readers famous.

In an earlier post about building community. Darren recommended that you make a reader famous. Here are some examples I have seen within my own community.

Gavin Aung Than regularly interacts with his a community – most notably through his 'readers of the month' feature. As a result, he has a highly engaged audience who will rapidly share his content and help out with tasks such as translating the comics.
Scott Dinsmore has a ‘Reader Spotlight‘ series.

Do you know of any other ways bloggers have made their readers famous?

Blog commenting

Benefits of Blogging – Building a Community: Kristi Hines talks about the benefits of creating a community and gives us three ideas on how to do so. One of the tips that Kirsti gave was using blog comments to grow your community.
Marcus Sheridan wrote a fantastic post on Social Media examiner about 19 Ways to Build Relationships With Blog Comments. Marcus has had a lot of success building his community at The Sales Lion. You can learn more about his philosophy at The One Great Key to Building a Blog Community and Changing Lives
Gini Dietrich explored how you can take this concept to the next level with her article Building Your Online Community. It's worth asking yourself What are you trying to accomplish with your Blog and other Social Media efforts before you try this though.

Other ideas:

Create a weekly round-up post. These do incredibly well. Read: How to Create Your Own Industry Recap, Resources, & Mashups
Roundups a form of content curation. You can get more ideas via Creating Community By Curating Content
We’ve been talking about Pinterest a fair bit on Problogger recently. In addition to leveraging it for traffic, you can use it as a tool to learn more about your community. Check out 5 Ways to Use Pinterest as a Community Building Tool
You can’t create a community by yourself. You need to encourage others to advocate on your behalf. How to Recruit Bloggers to Help Grow Your Online Community is an incredibly useful post.