Creating a succesful blog community
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
I know a thing or two about online community.
When creating an online community the most important ingredient one can have is members. Therefore, when you set out to build a blog community you need to recruit strong leaders, these will be your blog authors. So the first thing you need to do is to invite good bloggers to lead or in this case write. Easier said than done, right? Well, yes and no. Just because someone is a good writer doesn’t mean they will be a good blogger and just because someone isn’t a writer doesn’t mean they can’t blog. I’ve found that the best recipe for success, when it comes to finding a good blogger, is to find someone who has a good deal of experience in the community subject and is willing to evolve. Evolution is important because if they can’t evolve into what the readers are hungry for the blog will never go anywhere.
The second main ingredient for creating a blog community is comments. Comments (and if you’ve looked through my blog, remember: Do as I say not as I do) are the tangible community members. Of course, the rest of the community are the readers who don’t comment but still must be counted as they are reading and possibly participating via word of mouth or email. Many of these “lurkers” are in fact coming back for the comments so it’s important that you have some[comments].
In my experience controversial topics works really well for getting a lot of comments. The more controversial a topic can be the better the more likely you are to motivate people to reach out and hit that “submit a comment” button. Having proponents and opponents for whatever the topic may be can make your comment section quite heated and thus vastly more entertaining.
The third important ingredient is access. So many community websites want to password protect their online community, for good reason. But when your community website includes or is a blog community you greatly restrict your viral growth.
Here’s the take home message.
Building a successful blog community should start with these three things:
1. Good bloggers - who are willing to evolve
2. Blog entries that attract comments
3. Access - so that readers can actually read your blog(s)
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