I have to create a community myself!

If possible, take a look at my blog http://technotip.org/

Thanks again.

1. RESPOND to comments on your blog. Especially if there are only a few. Why do so many starting out blogs think it’s okay to ignore their readers????

2. Encourage comments by asking questions, highlighting answers and so on. I know I could do better on writing posts as a continuation of a discussion in my comments sections.

I like your list Darren. There’s some ideas on there that I’m planning on trying.

Because my largest blog is a personal blog, I also use things like:

1. A weekly meme which has some of my readers blogging on a common topic one day a week.

2. I’ve just started having regular swaps which puts my readers into a more personal contact with one another.

While these things seem more “natural” on a personal blog, I guess you could adapt them to any blogging niche if you’re creative enough (eg. host a “review” swap where each person buddies up with another and they review one another’s blog on their’s).

I think giveaways also increase the positive vibe around a blog which can add to the whole “community” feel as well. Making readers feel like they matter.

I think that every blogger should take the opportunity to participate in their community and encourage others to do the same. When readers see that the blogger (owner) is very active in the comments section, he or she will probably want to comment more because he or she feels it is more alive than other places they’ve been to – and they can get a response to any questions they may have relating to the post.

The most important factor to remember about community is to know who participates actively and who does not. You can do this by getting people to add you to social media sites, and continually telling them to do this to encourage a loyal readership that will keep coming back. You can analyse your comments and find out who participates actively – then reward them…Using widgets from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog can help you gauge this.

Bringing a sense of competition to a blog has a feeling like no other, if there is something that the community can win by participating – they’ll step up to the challenge. This is usually in the form of giving a banner or text link to the top commenter or doing something that gives them a bit of added publicity and promotion on your blog for their own site.

I read a couple of the previous comments and I certainly agree that having ongoing polls is an important aspect of a blog. I would only do this is the readership of a blog is big enough for the poll to be of any value whatsoever.

Adding forums are also a great idea, but these are reserved for blogs with over 10,000 RSS subscribers because the forums will look dead if a very limited amount of people participate in it. Steve Pavlina now has a forum where people can discuss articles published on the site, I think the ‘comments’ section has been ditched. This is fine for a person like Steve to do because he has the readership to do that.

Creating a community feedback section is an invaluable part of any successful blog – but this is once again reserved for blogs with higher numbers because blogs with less than 500 RSS readers don’t tend to get huge amounts of enquiries.
Lastly, I agree with Darren’s point about community participation projects – Courtney Tuttle’s Writing Project is a great example of this. All in all, community is about being active both at your blog and at your reader’s blogs.

The Good Husband Deeds Series has generated a little buzz and made my readers email me with questions.

Also, a recent poll that I did caused quite a discussion as well.

If you’re writing in a niche where it’s easy to find a “beginner”, how about inviting one of them (probably one of your readers!) to give you a weekly update on how they’re getting on. You can then provide commentary and links to relevant posts on your blog…

It creates a nice sense of “us together” rather than “you the blogger, them the readers”, and it keeps people coming back for the next installment.

Take a look at http://www.theofficediet.com/2008/04/07/introducing-anna/ if you want to see how I kicked this off on The Office Diet!

Best,

Ali

Ali

Asking questions has not been too successful for me although I will keep trying as well as try some more of the techniques you mention.

@troy I realized that blogs were communities not too long after starting blogging publicly – not sure that my incentive to continue would be so strong without this keeping this concept in mind.

1: Make a group highlighting your blog in popular social networking websites and invite your readers to join it.

2: Ask your readers to spread that group among their friends in the social networking sites :)

I’ve actually get comments on my blog where I could do a blog post giving homework. And I have not thought of doing so in the past. Homework is easy to think of.

Asking for work to be done on my own blog, is something I could easily have done when I did a series of translations using the free tools, or website submissions to different foreign directories. But now it seems like I need to spend some time thinking of something.

Thank you for opening horizons!