The Best Addition to Your Blog Is a Great Community
You can add widgets, bells, and whistles, but the absolute best addition to any blog is people who return for the value of the content and connections you provide. A community is made up of people who stay in tune with your content, with you as the blogger, and even with each other in one way or another.
What A Blog’s Community Looks Like
Even before the advent of the internet, a community was more than a mere geographical area within a set of prescribed boundaries. The word “community” has far more to do with the relationships between people inside it and how they interact with one another.
A blog’s community is enthusiastically tied to that blog’s brand and content. Members discuss content with one another, discover new connections within the circle, and contribute to the value of your blog. A community actually begins to shape the nature and personality of a blog over time and therefore, a community can be grown, but rarely controlled.
Why a Community is So Vital
If your blog is going to thrive, you need people to make contributions in the form of internal content (especially comments and discussion) but also to share your content with connections outside your community. One fact that Facebook understands well is that human relationships are far more important than directory listings and organic search results. Showing up in search results represents the infancy of the web while showing up in resources shared by people in relationships with one another is the future.
Without a community, your blog’s success is always on its last leg. Its survival is dependent upon a returning, faithful audience who grow to trust that you’ll continue to contribute value to their lives even when you miss a beat here and there.
How to Start Building Your Blog’s Community
I’m going to be writing about this issue more in depth in a multi-part series on building your blog’s community, but for now know this one dominating principle – be social. Connect with people. Speak their language, respond to their needs, and forge bridges of ongoing communication. Being social is far more important than joining social networks or using social tools.
Before I proceed with my series, what are your thoughts about online communities? How important are they? How do you start building them?
In addition to serving as Editor of Fuel Your Blogging, Brandon is also a Pastor at Saddleback Church and Online Community Coordinator for Pastors.com. He’s also a web designer, blogger, and church communications consultant. Catch him on his own blog or on Twitter.
Hey Brandon,
Nice post. Great community is very important for any blog.
Looking forward to see the next part of this post.
Thanks for sharing this great Post.
~Dev
No problem Dev, thanks for weighing in.
So true, social networking = social community = social interaction.
Really looking forward to future posts
Thanks, Elaine, I hope I reach your expectations.
Your post is dated June 8th… I’ve seen it displayed on other blogs and seen tweets about it… but you have two Lame comments (make that 3 with mine ;))… exactly what i come up against when I write “hit” posts!
Your “Community Theory” in real life on the net:
Yet I’ll see total BS crappily written posts get hundreds of comments! I won’t name any names, but after reading one of these I asked myself “what are these people smoking?” There were comments, links, kudos, tweets about a post written about getting blog traffic, a post so poorly-written that it bordered on idiocy! Yet it was tweeted and re-tweeted and blogged about by people who should know better! SOMETHING is wrong with this picture!
Your post here is well thought out and constructed. But it’s not attracting comments. I don’t understand why.
Dave, that’s well worth another post topic. I don’t know that comments equal community. Some blogs are “do follow” and show link love for the commeter’s last post, etc. There isn’t anything wrong with these things. In fact, I use them on other blogs, but we have to face the fact that if people comment for the motive of linkbacks, seo, etc. are they really participating in a community effort?
Personally, I’d rather see comments like yours that extend the content and discussion one hundred times more than “nice post.” Thanks for adding to the community, Dave!
Right on. Communities are made up of real people. I’ve noticed a much more social blog scene now that I’m part of BlogEngage. Before that, I assumed everyone was as disconnected as I was.
Tia, good example. Brian has done an awesome job at building a tight community.
I think the biggest thing with creating a community online is realizing that it takes time to foster authentic relationships with others. For me personally, its always been more of a quality over quantity approach as mass “be-friending” is more often ignored or overlooked by those who have no incentive to take part in what you have to say.
Rondal, that’s a digital age-old argument about mass friending. Ultimately, I think you’re right in that we can only truly manage so many authentic relationships. Excellent point.
A lot of good information here and I like how youve presented it, simple and easy to understand! Good job Brandon!
Thanks Martin!
What I love about this post is that I have had the opportunity to watch you put this into practice over the past few months. The amount of energy you must have to keep up with multiple websites, social media outlets, and your full-time job amazes me. I think it shows that this approach requires a lot more effort, but I’ve also seen how it pays dividends as people have followed you from site to site. Can’t wait to read more of your thoughts and tips on building an online community.
Thanks Brad, I hope I don’t disappoint you!
Building a community on your blog is definitely worth it but takes much time. I’m slowly building mine and have bought not only Jame’s 20/7 Rule ebook but also his Motivated As Hell Workbook and I feel so far he has illustrated a lot of great point in that about community and how to build it up.
It just takes doing what you what done to you but better. I make sure that no matter what, if I comment, I take the time to retweet and if I feel it’s a GREAT post I will even put it on Facebook.
I do that because it shows I appreciate what’s going on.
Also, and I feel this is most important, is leaving a comment that actually show you give a crap.
What do you think?
I discovered the importance of building communities with blogs only a few months ago. I’ve been writing great articles on my business blog but really any care to add comments. The blog just appears to be a loner.
But a few months ago thinking of how to add more activity to the blog and of course build a following for the blog, I installed commentluv plugin and since then I’ve seen increased traffic most of which are repeat readers who loving coming around to say one or two things.
By the way thought I’ll see some related posts that will lead me to the series on building a community with your blog!
Yep, CommentLuv is a sweet addition, especially for spreading the love around in a blog’s community.