Tips to Create a Blog Community to and Grow Your Blog

Take a look at the most successful blogs and you'll notice they have a few things in common. One of those things is a powerful and vocal blog community. Your blog community is the audience of readers who not only consume your blog content but also interact with you through comments and email as well as social media.

These are people that you've built a relationship with. They trust the content that you publish on your blog and know they can rely on it to be interesting, useful, or meaningful to them. They're quick to share your blog posts through their social media profiles, and they'll even start to interact with each other.

Your blog community doesn't just include people that you've become close friends with. It includes people that you have diverse relationships with, some stronger than others, but all of the relationships occur in and around your blog as the central "meeting" place.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] Tips to Create a Blog Community to and Grow Your Blog[/caption]

Following are five easy tips to create a blog community to grow your blog and reach your blogging goals.

1. Write Compelling Content

Not only do you need to write great blog content that your audience wants to read, but you also need to write content that people want to share and talk about. If your content is so dull that no one is motivated to take some kind of action after reading it other than clicking away from your blog, then you'll never be able to create a thriving blog community.

2. Make Conversation Easy and Natural

You need to write blog posts that attract comments and conversation. It's hard to build a blog community if no one interacts with you or each other, so follow the 3 Cs of blogging (comments, conversation, and community) to do it successfully.

3. Don't Ignore Your Audience

If someone publishes a comment on one of your blog posts, you should respond. Of course, as your blog grows, you might not be able to respond to every blog comment personally, but at that point, your community might be vibrant enough that other readers will respond directly to each other's comments. If you write blog posts about topics that drive a lot of comments quickly because people are likely to want to talk about them, then be prepared to moderate and respond to an influx of comments in a timely manner. Your response means little to a reader if it's published days or weeks after they originally commented on your post. 

4. Be Social

Building a blog community doesn't happen on your blog alone. You have to get out and interact outside of your blog, too. You can use the top social media sites and social media marketing tricks to build your blog community. You can even use Twitter to build your blog community.

5. Use Alternate Distribution Channels

Even your most loyal blog readers might need alternate ways to consume your blog content from time to time. Whether they want to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed via a feed reader or email or they want to access your content through other sources where you syndicate your blog content, you should provide as many ways as possible to easily access your content at any time of day and from any device.