When you start out blogging you’re going to hear a lot of different things on what you should be concentrating on first.
You should focus on SEO, keywords, search engine marketing, building back links, or having a great commenting system. Those things are great and will have to be taken care of in time but when starting out blogging or even trying to expand on your blog your focus should be building and creating a community around your blog.
You can have about 1000 incoming links that rank you high on Alexa but if no one is ever reading or interacting with your blog it means nothing. I started out blogging in 2009 and when I first started out I thought that if my entire focus was not on SEO that my blog would die and no one would ever find me. Well, as you would probably assume my entire focus was on SEO and I got a lot of back links and I ranked high for great keywords but I started to realize that no one was commenting on blog posts and my bounce rate was entirely too high.
One day I was out in a Starbucks and was just looking around at everyone conversing and realized that their were so many people working on different tasks in a group.
It made me think that some of the best work is sometimes done when in a group of people that think and act like you.
I took that mindset and brought it into blogging and how having a community of like minded people is the one focus that I should concentrate on first with starting out in the blogosphere.
Building a solid interacting community online is something that you won’t be advised to do when starting out online unless you have a mentor that tells you to or by examples of other great bloggers. You won’t be told to create a brand and a buzz that will have people going bonkers over your blog posts as Christian has on Smart Boy Designs. But, that’s what you should be doing. When you start to think of the idea of creating a community you want to WHY you should create one and how you should grow that community in a unique way to get the best benefits for both your community and your brand.
When I first created GenYRants the idea of the community is to offer generation-y the opportunity to voice their opinions on topics that they feel are important. With doing that we then expand on our community by offering great resources and tools that gen-y should be using to network and explore within our generation. The hardest part was to distinguish the unique side of the community and how we are going to be different from other blogs and companies that focus their attention on generation-y.
That’s what you should be thinking of when building your community.
What are you going to offer them that no one else is and how are you going to make it unique for them that they feel special when visiting your site each time.
So, when you look at your blogging community look to see what you’re offering them that is unique? What brand and voice are you creating to make your blog unique?
If you are having trouble with building a community for your blog look into expanding your social media into different areas. Build a LinkedIn group so that you can build a professional community to gather different ideas and perspectives. You’re going to have to think outside of the box with creating your community. The normal pushing content and guest blogging is a great way but you want to build a sustainable community as you would a business by trying different social platforms to create and grow your community.
Justice Wordlaw IV is an internet entrepreneur. He helps companies and entrepreneurs gain leads to their business and shows them how to their convert their leads into sales.
