6 Tips to Build Community On Your Blog

One of the goals of a business blog could be to build a community. The question is how to go about building a community of fans on your blog?

Let’s discuss some ways to leverage from your blog community:

6 Tips for Building Community on Your Blog

#1 Comments

Blog comments are an obvious place to start and you should take full advantage of this powerful blog feature. How do you encourage more comments?

• Ask questions at the end of your post
• Interact with your readers by acknowledging their comments
• Answer questions that arise in the comments
• Set the tone you want and moderate comments if you’re getting a lot of spam
• Go one step further and check out your readers’ blogs and comment on their posts
• Be positive, encouraging and grateful for the time your reader took to share his/her time and thoughts with you

#2 Make it all about your reader

Most people don’t care that you’re an expert, but they want to know how you can solve their problems. Therefore:

• Focus on what your readers wants. Comments and feedback will give you a lot of clues.
• Answer reader questions. Post a form on your site soliciting questions.
• Post questions for discussion.
• Put the spotlight on your readers by featuring their questions or comments.
• Create a weekly roundup featuring links to your readers’ content (check out the Fetching Friday Resources Mashup on Kikolani.com for a great example)

#3 Make your content interactive

Everyone loves to share their opinion.

• Create polls with Polldaddy.com or Vizu.com
• Create a quiz
• Have contests and competitions

#4 Solicit guest posts and invite your audience to contribute content

• Articles
• Tutorials
• Gather a selection of tips on a subject
• Post images and request suggestions for captions

#5 Create action steps

While it’s nice to express your opinion on what and why your reader should do something, giving them action steps so they can immediately implement your advice helps build credibility with your audience and demonstrates that not only do you know what you’re talking about, they can be successful to if they apply what you teach.

• Give step by step homework
• Include a video tutorial
• Post an assignment that is related to your article and ask your readers to submit their results in the comments.

#6 Create more connection points with your fans and take your community off the blog.

Your audience spends time on social networks so do a poll (see #3) to find out where the majority spend their social time and engage with them there.

• Create a private forum (either paid or free)
• Publish a newsletter with different content (good for building your list!)
• Create a group(s) on your primary topic, on Facebook or LinkedIn

I trust that these tips will inspire you to actively use your blog to build a community around your brand.

Here are the blog community building action steps…

1. Pick one of the six tips to implement in the next week.
2. Focus on just one activity for the week. Don’t try to implement more than one tactic since you’ll want to be able to determine what results you get and focusing on one at a time will give your clearer feedback.
3. If you need a specific tool to implement the tip, then get it, install it, use it.

Take Action Now!

Please visit my Facebook Page: Integrated Communication Advisor and let me know how it’s going with building community on your blog!