Mutate Your Blog into a Community

Whether you are running a journalistic or a business blog, the number of visitors is a metric that you want to see growing whenever you check up on your analytics. If you have a fan base of regular readers and you can clearly establish that they are interested in your content, you might want to start considering building an online community.

Why? There are many reasons why an active and engaged community is a much needed element for a prosperous blog or a website. From increasing your revenue to gaining brand ambassadors – a community can launch your blog better than any other strategy. Not to mention the fact that you can always rely on a constructive feedback of your regular readers. If you are able to take some criticism and learn from it – this is definitely an aspect that will help you in developing your content strategy.

Narrowing the niche

There are more than 150.000.000 blogs online. So the competition may be a little bit fierce, of course, but you shouldn’t get discouraged. In fact, most blogs fail due to bad strategies and inconsistent content, and since there are more than 300 million regular readers, you are bound to get some traffic your way no matter the industry. However, if you find yourself with regular readers, but with little or no engagement on your blog, even when you are following your content calendar and your SEO and SMM strategies, maybe the time has come to give your strategy a touch up.

The very first step to building a community within your regular audience is to narrow your niche and your topics. If you are covering a particular product/service/brand/whatever, and people are coming to you to get the latest on the named topic – it is clear that they want to be included. After you establish that there is an obvious interest, you have to provide more for your audience.

For instance, building a community of movie enthusiasts is almost an impossible goal, especially because of the well-funded and organized competition in this niche in particular. But if you focus on one genre, things get a bit less difficult. By listening to your audience you will be able to focus your efforts on the topics which interests them the most, and if you want to build a community – encourage them to engage in the conversation.

FYI, if you are not sure what searches get you the most readers, visit your webmaster tools and examine the keywords list.

Encouraging the Engagement

Even the most popular Vloggers encourage their viewers to subscribe and like their videos. And even the most popular blogs are encouraging people to leave a comment in their comment section. Why? Because it works.

If your analytics show that you have regular readers on your blog, but you are getting zero engagement, there are a couple of things that you can do.

First of all, if you have a pop up window on your blog, know that they are driving your readers away. You simply have to be an established brand and have tens of thousands of regular readers for a pop up to work. If you have less than a thousand readers, but you are still insisting on pushing ads on your blog – don’t expect any engagement and watch your bounce rate grow.

The second thing is – a unique sales proposal. Your blog, or your website, needs to offer more than any other similar in that niche. The best thing you can do to accomplish this is to simply spy on your competition. “Borrow” their ideas, combine them and bring them to perfection. When people reach your blog, you need to stand out and offer as much as possible.

It also wouldn’t hurt to get more visual with your content. Did you know that visual content increases the number of readers by 80%? Most content marketers are focusing their efforts in this department in particular, since people are quick to click through to a landing page that is simply interesting at the first glance, instead of investing in written content that gets no readers.

The last, but not the least, is to have a platform that supports your audience and their comments. Try Disqus, as it supports Twitter and Facebook accounts as well.

Nifty Helpful Tools

Building an online community may sound as an easy task, but in fact it is hard and time-consuming job that will take up most of your day. It is not unusual for someone to spend a few hours on Facebook daily, but if you believe that that alone is enough to maintain a group of readers and keep them engaged – you are utterly wrong. This is why you will have to learn to appreciate certain tools.

We mentioned Disqus and I am advising to utilize this platform because it can be integrated easily with social media networks. Another alternative for this tool is Discourse. However, maintaining a crowd of people through the comment section is simply undoable. This is why I would love to recommend Slack as a great, and free, platform for your regular readers and a great alternative for your community. With Slack, you can invite your readers, send them direct messages, share files, content, and what is more important it can update your readers about your latest publications and more.

Since consistency is very important, you need to ensure that your content distribution and your social media efforts will remain constant. This is why you will probably want to start using certain social media marketing tools. We already published an article on this topic here, and if there are some tools that you consider crucial for social media marketing and we failed to mention it, let us know in the comment section!

Don’t switch your style too often. If you have regular readers who are well accustomed to your platforms and tools that you use – don’t take that away from them. People appreciate consistency.

Creating Brand Ambassadors

At the very end, know that building a community is all about encouraging people to become your brand ambassadors. The process of “mutating” your blog into a community may come off as a potentially demanding task, but don’t question the ROI of this project. Your community will bring you more readers by referral, and also simply because you are offering something more than content itself.

The first reason why you want and need brand ambassadors is brand awareness. When your readers share your content, they are bringing you far more readers than you would usually get from your own shares, within your own Facebook group even. Why is this so? Simply because people trust their friends and their personal contacts. The only thing that you have to do is produce engaging content.

The other reason is: because they will definitely help you increase your conversions. 84% of consumers trust their family and relatives, we’ve established that, but the reach of your brand ambassadors goes far beyond that number. Believe it or not, a total of 68% of consumers trust reviews and recommendations from other consumers. So when people are looking for you, a few recommendations from your own community won’t hurt your business as well.

Always monitor your brand mentions, and never miss an opportunity to get engaged in the conversation. Encourage your community to share your content as well, and offer incentives to the ones that do share your blog.

The Conclusion

Don’t take your regular visitors for granted. Keep them returning to your blog and keep them engaged in your community. Let them know that their opinion is valuable to you, and if you are running a business – offer them regular discounts.

The sort of a relationship which will allow them to contribute to your blog and get some recognition and benefit from it, will definitely help you grow your fan base. Always make sure that they are well taken care of – you don’t want them to navigate away from your website to a different one just because you failed to give them something they were desperately asking for.