How To Build a Real Community Around Your Blog?

One major difference between a good dynamic content site and a good blog is the community factor. A blog allows readers to interact with you and share their thoughts. That’s the major difference between a good Web 1.0 site and Web 2.0 site. The truth is building a real community around your blog is a big challenge. What do I mean by real community?

A real community is one that keeps people coming back to your site and interact with you and other users. Some folks run blogs that get occassional blogs from readers who get to their sites via Google and other search engines, but if you can’t retain these guys, you do not have a real community.

When there is a challenge, there is an opportunity. It’s nice to get people to your blog consistently via RSS, but you want their comments and their interaction. The truth is, the blog architecture allows many-to-many forms of communication, but most blogs use a glorified one-to-many form of communication. You write a blog post and then you allow others to communicate with you. But you want them to engage with each other with or without you being a part of the discussion. If your niche is narrow enough, you can start a social network or forum around your blog.

Create Your Own Community:

You can always use services such as Ning, Pligg or KickApps to design mini social networks in your niche. What I like about these solutions is that they are free and you can customize them to duplicate your blog’s experience in your social community as well. For example, if you are running a tennis blog, think about how engaging your own social tennis network would be. Of course, tennis is now a very overcrowded market with many social networks. The true promise of Web 2.0 is many-to-many user engagement, and that’s the best way to empower users and make them want to come back to you and your community for more. That’s what I believe is the future of blogging. You can have the best content in the world on your blog, but unless you can create a sense of community around your blog, you cannot expect to make it big time in the blogging world. Thankfully, there are many free tools that you can use, so there is no excuse not to do it.

Do you have a social network to complement your blog? In your opinion, what are the challenges and the opportunities of creating a real community around your blog?