Tips to build a Community around yourself and your blog

Blogging is all about sharing. You share what interests you, what you want to tell your potential customers, your products, hooks etc.

And your sharing mission will go in vain if no one gets your message. Do you know what I mean? Imagine yourself playing a rocking music which is really amazing on a stage in front of no audience. A blog without community is just like that.

You put your most important, and valuable content out there but if there’s no one who reads it, shares it and comments on it, then what’s the use? The whole purpose of blogging goes void.

By all means you need a community around your blog and yourself, if you run a blog as a business or a promoter of your business. With a vibrant community you can expect that;

1. Your blog posts naturally reach your community (the first tier).
2. Your blog posts get shared by the community to their friends/fans/followers, which is multiple times of exposure to your content (other than the first tier; there can be multiple tiers here).
3. Your blog posts go viral {as a result of (1) and (2)}.
4. You easily become an authority in your niche (if your content is really worthwhile).
5. Make money online – finally, ha!

As you can see, your blogging success greatly depends on the community you build around yourself and your blog.

Without further delay, let me tell you 5 powerful ways in which you can build a community around yourself and your blog.

Get Out There

You cannot dwell in a cave. Seriously, if you’re a blogger and if you want to become a known person to everyone, you need to get out there.

People should be able to easily find you. Most bloggers think that if they write a blog (doesn’t matter even if they deliver top quality content) then people will come and find them at their blog.

Now, a blog is just a micro entity when you look at the internet which is a macro entity. Can you find a needle inside a sea? Your blog is just a needle inside the sea of internet. People will never find you unless you send some smoke signals.

Where can people find you? There are various places outside of your blog where you can put your presence. Social media sites is the first step! The most popular and common ones being Twitter, Facebook, Google plus, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg and so on.

Other than social media avenues, you can gather where bloggers gather. Examples of such places include Blog Engage, Blokube, Blog Interact, Facebook groups and so on.

The easier you make it for people to find you, the easier it will be for you to build a community.

Engagement

What I told with the previous point is just the first step. But it is an incomplete step. When you just get out there, nothing happens!

Let’s say you took my advice and went out and created accounts in all social media avenues you know of. Will you build a community out of your accounts? Nope! Not yet.

You need to engage with people. A community can be built only if there’s engagement. You couldn’t call it a community otherwise.

So how can you engage with your community in social media? Get more friends and followers. For this you need to take the first step (unless you are extremely popular before you start). You need to find people who are having the same interests as you.

You can always search for people with specific keywords in all the popular social media sites and then complete your first step – follow/friend/connect with them.

The second thing you can do is spread and appreciate others work. Everyone is on social media for a purpose. And if someone has posted their blog post’s link or a link to their video/podcast, this means that they want that link to get to as many people as it can (just as you would expect your link to be).

So get in and help them. With Twitter you can always Retweet other’s tweets or Tweet their blog posts with their @handle so that they know that you’ve tweeted. Similarly you can tag them with their name when you share on Facebook and Google plus (with Google plus you need to type +Name). Make sure you don’t tag anyone irrelevantly.

The more you share the more you will get shared. That’s pretty much the basic principle of social media marketing (apart from delivering quality content, of course).

Comment On Others Blogs

Blog commenting is a nice way to build community because you can put your opinion on other blog. You can discuss stuff with the host blogger. You can also build some cool links.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is another area which is very much ignored when it comes to building a community. With guest posting you can easily showcase you expertise in front of a big blog’s audience. You now have a chance to interact with the community of another big blog which is a great thing, because you’re performing in a bigger stage.

Have A Super Focus

You may be a jack of all things, but you need to be focused if you want to build a targeted community. If you write about beauty, and blogging tips, and fitness, and chocolates, and bicycles and photography all in one blog you can’t make it. Let’s assume that a visitor interested in your beauty tips finds you somewhere in one of the social media sites.

Now when he/she visits your blog and finds an amazing beauty tip, he/she will share it and possibly comment on the post. Now the same visitor returns, multiple times and then finds that you have made a post on blogging tips, and then on photography and then about chocolates.

You will lose that visitor whom you earned through your amazing beauty tip blog post. Somake sure your content is laser targeted. You can be interested in a handful of stuff, but then you need a handful of blogs to deliver content, not just one blog.

Here, you have three tips to build a community around yourself and your blog.And, before you start doing (or considering) any of these, please make sure you deliver quality both in and outside your blog.

Please feel free to add your own tips here.

PRASHANT KUMAR