Building a community around your blog is important if you want to go places. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but as time goes by and you continue to put in the required work, you’ll get your breakthrough. In this post, I teach you how to build a blog following.
Readers are needed to build an online community. Their interaction contributes to a spirited and animated online forum which accommodates networking.
Building a community around your blog isn’t peaches and cream, however. Diligence, persistence, and a handful of hard work is needed to get the results you want.
For your convenience, I’ve outlined a few practices you can pick up to build a following around your blog.
1. Write Engaging Content
This is the first and most vital step in building an engaging and loyal following. Readers flock to your blog because of the content you provide; it needs to be buoyant. They should beam with joy in anticipation of your next blog entry.
Practising good grammar, diction, and mechanics will help your readers stick around.
Creating a schedule for your blog is also essential. A schedule helps your readers to anticipate your next move and chime in whenever a post goes live.
2. Reply to Comments on Your Blog
A responsive community is an active one. Spend time responding to comments and enquiries from readers.
When you fail to acknowledge comments raised on a blog post, you could inadvertently tell your readers that their comments are inconsequential. Setting aside time to respond to comments encourage readers to comment more and stick around.
3. Guest Post for Other Bloggers
One of the best things about blogging is having a large and supportive community at your disposal. Networking with other bloggers provides tremendous opportunities for growth and a ladder for you to impact a wider audience.
Good business acumen is also important. Ensure to interact with commenters when guest posting so other readers can get to know you.
4. Allow Others to Guest Post on Your Blog
Do not be tight-fisted. While you make efforts to share your expertise with another blogger’s audience, leave the door open for other bloggers to share with your audience.
You benefit from this collaboration in various ways.
- You give your readers something new.
You might already be providing good and engaging content – that’s wonderful. However, guest bloggers can bring their insight, expertise, and voice to your audience. They can breathe life into your blog and also take along their audience for the ride.
- You get help with writing to update your blog frequently.
Maybe you’re busy tackling other areas of your business to create more income opportunities and aren’t able to dedicate time to write. Inviting other guest bloggers to share with your blog is an ideal and inexpensive way to keep your blog afloat and frequent. By the way, if you find it difficult finding time writing for your blog, check out my blog post on how to write more.
5. Get Involved with Other Communities
There are so many support groups for bloggers to grow together. Some communities exist as standalone forums while others operate from social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. When you interact frequently in these communities, people get to know who you are and where to find you.
Not all communities are made equally. Some are spammy and stand for nothing. Join communities that relate to your blog’s topic since the bloggers there will share your interests.
The aim of joining and interacting with communities is to decide what’s take-worthy. But, that doesn’t mean you cannot give. The more you give, the more benefits your business will derive.
6. Ensure Your Blog Is Accessible
You don’t want to get your readers flustered. They have things to do and won’t sit around to wait for your blog to load. Proper maintenance and performance optimization should ensure that your blog is always up and running.
There are situations you won’t be able to control, but you should at least have things in place to know if your blog is down and what recourse can be taken.
Strive to reduce the number of 404 your blog encounters. That ticks readers off when they’re routed to a nonexistent page and it’s also not good for your website’s ranking. Too many missing pages affect your blog.
7. Give Away Something
People love free stuff. Throw contests on your blog. Contests are great ways to boost your website’s traffic, especially when it dips.
A contest can feature anything. You can also give away what you think people are interested in. The aim of running a contest is to ensure that you get your readers to do something in exchange for the free gift you want to give.
There are legal implications involved when running contests online so ensure to get acquainted with laws governing that aspect of blogging.
8. Ask Your Readers What They Want
Don’t just pull an article title out of nowhere and write. Consult your readers first. You’re writing for them. Don’t assume they’ll love your ideas because you do. If you’re not up for creating polls on social media soliciting your followers help, a nifty trick is to conduct Keyword research using tools such as Jaaxy and Ahrefs.
Also, give readers a way to contact you privately by including a contact page on your website. For transparency, you can also create a blog post asking your readers what topics they’d love to see and areas in which you could improve.
If you’re coy and wish not to have constructive criticisms posted as comments, ask your readers to make contact privately.
9. Keep in Touch with Your Readers Through Email
A mailing list draws you closer to your readers. Once you have their contact details, you’ll be able to reach out personally when you have offers and promotions.
But, your readers won’t always want to be sold to. Limit the number of sales pitch you send out. A good way to reach your readers is to offer value more than a sales line.
If you find that you’re always blabbing about the goodness of your products every time you’re sending an email, there’s a problem. Go back to the drawing board.
When you add a subscription form to your website, your readers are able to opt in and will receive an email whenever a new entry goes live.
Do you have any tips to make this article on ‘how to build a blog following better’? Have you used an effective method to build a community around your blog that’s not on my list? Drop me a comment down below and I’ll hit you up as soon as possible.
