Building a Community Around Your Blog

If readers have a personal attachment to you and other readers of your blog they’ll be more likely to return again and again (or read your feed), talk about you in glowing terms elsewhere, and help you when you need it. Unfortunately, the only sense of community on most blogs is created in the comments section, and even then it’s severely limited. Readers are encouraged to discuss only the topic at hand, not talk and interact for the sake of it.

In this post, I want to suggest seven ways to step outside the comments section as we’ve known it and start building a community around your blog.

What are the benefits?

• your blog will feel different to other blogs


• interactivity engages readers and creates a positive impression


• interactivity grabs attention — encouraging links, comments, and so on


• a sense of community creates loyal readers


• readers who like you will help you out in various ways

Where do I start?

These are some ideas you can experiment with. Feel free to add your own in the comments section or ask for more information on any ideas that pique your interest.

1. Pick experts
Segment your blog into its main topics and pick a reader to become the designated ‘expert’ on each topic. The expert agrees to answer reader questions on their topic via email and, in return, gets a link back to their site on the ‘experts’ page. This allows loyal readers to effectively become part of the blog while alleviating some of your work load. It also provides a means for new visitors to get their questions answered.

2. Group chats
You could set aside one hour a week for web chats on your blog’s IRC channel (after you make one, of course!). Let your visitors know what time you’ll be available for chatting and make sure to explain your timezone so international readers can determine when they need to show up. This could be a great way for your readers to get to know you and each other.

3. Elevate commenters to bloggers
After all, The Huffington Post is doing it. You could select the month’s best commenter (chosen either by yourself or by the community) and allow them a guest-posting spot on your blog. Readers may aspire to winning the guest-post spot and make a greater effort to comment regularly and intelligently.

4. Put your heads together
Your readers can be an incredible source of knowledge. Write a post with them collaboratively by asking them for tips on a certain topic. Allow them to submit their short tips via the comments section. Publish the tips as a list post, adding in your own points. This allows readers to have a role in creating the content they usually passively consume. Group projects can also result in projects with a depth that would have been difficult for a time-strapped blogger.

5. Add a forum to your blog
You can either host a forum or use one of the many free forum services available online. If your forum grows to be quite popular it can become a defining community and meeting place within your niche. Even if it’s only small it can provide you with an opportunity to get to know your readers. Remember, though, that your forum is a reflection on your blog. If you make it, take care of it.

6. Stop speaking and listen
Every so often take the time to ask questions rather than provide answers. Ask your readers what they like about your blog, and what they don’t like so much. Ask them what they would like you to write about, and what their favorite posts were. Most importantly, take action as a result of the answers you get. You certainly don’t have to radically change the focus of your blog, but do show that you have taken the answers on board. You might do this by writing about some of the suggested topics, or by not writing about some of the things readers expressed disinterest in.

7. Let comments be the content
You could create a weekly post in which you and your readers are encouraged to chat about anything and everything in the comments section, or perhaps provide a broad topic. The post would contain no content other than stating that the comments are open for discussion. Readers could use the post as an opportunity to ask questions and to get to know you and each other. The Guardian Gamesblog seems to make one of these Chatterbox posts each day and they’ve proven incredibly popular (often reaching 400 comments).

Over to you

• What do you do to build a sense of community around your blog?


• Do you have any additional ideas about how this could be done?