Blogussion » build your community

3 Types of Communities All into One. Creating Your Personal Community.

Derek Jensen — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:02:21 +0000

How does your community resemble you and your ability? This is all about us effectivily creating a community that knows who we are and what we are about. It’s not just about creating a general community or supporters. It’s about creating your community.

Why create new communities when you change?

We can create communities centered around us, our voice, our vision, our purpose, and not necessarily just our blog. When doing something different we should not have to worry about building a completely brand new community.

If you created a community that’s centered around your presence the whole table turns.

Remember a community is when we have one person behind us. I’m going to go through the types of communities we create and why creating your personal community is beneficial.

Looking Over the Types of Communities

A Community Behind You All the Way

This is your personal community. Some may be your friends and family that always have your support in what you do, but many will be people you have personally connected with on and/or offline. These people could be apart of an alliance you have created overtime. All that matters is that these people know your core values, what you want, and your big picture of things. So, here it does not really matter what you want or build, it matters who you are.

What are ways you have created your community? For me and many others networking and helping people along the way has built me a small but very special community.

The Customer Community

Making money online is talked about all the time. One of the reasons you make money online is because you have customers. Without a customer community we would not be able to support ourselves and the other communities.

A Community from Another Community

Here is a community that supports you because you support someone else and they in return support you. If that does not make sense to you, think about it this way. Say you’ve connected with other people that already have their established community and they see that. More than likely they are going to be willing to tell you to their community. Their community then also comes to you. This is a community from another community.

We ultimately have the control over all of these communities and how they form to create our one community.

Having All These Communities

We need all of these communities to really function and can’t just have a community behind you all the way. But, what if your personal community were your customers too? Its very possible and doable. One great way is to instill some urge in your community. That urge along with you striving to stand out and be unique will be the driving force for all three communities to be one.

You define yourself. You define your community.

No urge, then you have 3 distinct communities. No uniqueness, then you have 3 distinct communities. No you, well the pattern continues. It might seem harder to form these 3 types of communities into one, but really its up to you and your community your creating.

Making Sure You Have Your Community

Now, what if you don’t have your own community.

Your own community being ones that just don’t visit your blog from other sites, more than one time customers, and people that will be with you because they believe in your vision and purpose.

If you don’t have your own community you will experience short-term rewards in all areas I’ve just mentioned. And what if you decide to do another thing or slowly go away from what you’ve been doing? Well, you’ll want a community that supports and follows YOU for if you decide to change things up or make a smart expansion most of them will join you there too.

WARNING: Don’t misuse this ability to do anything at anytime and think they will go along with you. A community only follows you because they know you.

Benefits of Having Your Personal Community

They will back you up if anyone not currently apart of your community says something wrong about you
They’ll provide you excellent and beneficial advice
You come out with something, more than likely they will support it
They’ll tell people about you in good name

No need to create new communities anymore if you be yourself

You should feel proud to have your very own community. You can even give them a very special name to show your appreciation for them.

Sure there are many types of communities that we can create, but if we create one solid community that believes in us and our purpose that’s just one step to greatness. The other steps are up to you, your passion, and you over-delivering all the time.

Do you feel you have your own community or are you in the process still? Be truthful.

Build Your Community, Stop Begging for One

Seth — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 05:00:54 +0000

Recently I house sat a small dog named Louis (Looey) for a couple of weeks. He was an incredibly well trained dog that never once made a mess on the floor, ruined my furniture, scratched my door, or barked all night.

By the end of the week I realized that Louis was a one in a million kind of dog. He waited until I took him out to go the bathroom, he was ready when I put him to bed, and the best part is that he never begged.

Now what I learned from Louis can help everyone with their blogging. Except for what was absolutely necessary Louis, strangely enough, was a self-sufficient dog.

Stop Begging for Hand-Outs

Depending on other bloggers that are bigger than you to drop you scraps from their over-abundant plates is one of the biggest signs of failed blogging.

Instead of sitting by and waiting for someone with lots of traffic, a high-pagerank, and more than the average amount of generosity to graciously link, tweet, or stumble your blog, do it yourself. You have to get out there in the blogosphere and stop begging for someone else to get your goals for you.

Imagine how different the world would be if we each lived out our own dreams and stopped being an imposter in someone else’s. @prosperbydesign

To break down how we depend on big bloggers for everything I would like to take a look at the sources of traffic for your blog. I am sure you know your statistics because if you are anything like me you wake up, get on the computer and either shout “Hurray!” or put your head down gloomily in shame all based on the numbers.

Evaluating this data, how much of the traffic came from efforts you made to bring it their? Where you the one kicking everyone’s trash by producing a new product? Did you come out with an incredible resource? Did you manually submit your best content to social media like Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious? Or are you taking an active role in Twitter. Maybe you say yes to the social bookmarking but are not sure about the other questions. I am not trying to tell you that referrals are bad in any way. In fact they are the best form of traffic!

The point I am getting at is whether the traffic you now have is because at some point, some blogger, some where found your content and liked it enough to link to it. Or is it because you were out making the most of your time and really promoting it.

If you are like a lot of bloggers I am sure you do not like promotion. It’s long and can be tedious to build backlinks, comment, and do “regular” begging to the bigger bloggers. So let me fill you in on what you can do to drastically alter your traffic.

How to Increase Your Traffic

The key to building your own traffic is providing something worth networking for. I mean the big bloggers will come to you if you have something they need or want to share with their readers.

They will come begging to you if you put the time into coming up with the right product and strategy for marketing it.

For example, Blogussion has seen incredible traffic recently due to lots of promotional efforts being made. We are now reaching our once lofty expectations for pageviews, length of visits, and subscribers.

Most importantly we worked for it. Building excellent content was the first step. We provided something for our visitors to both enjoy and learn from.

Next we got people outside of our own blog administration pages to actually look at it! This is how we did it.

2 Guest Posts at Problogger in the same week.
Stumbling Articles as they are published.
(BIG) Stumbling older posts in our archives which could easily go viral!
Emailing a few of our fellow Bloggers to Stumble our posts as well.
Commenting on a VARIETY of blogs both in and outside our niche
Emailing bloggers to collaborate on future projects
Helping our current subscribers and commentators with personal questions and responses.
Guest posts every week somewhere!
Developing our Twitter profiles to maximize exposure through sincere tweets, honest RT’s and lots of real @replies.
Helping Big bloggers when they are busy by asking them what we can do for them… occasionally its with a guest post!

Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks

If you are still wondering if you can do this, just know that it is completely possible. All the things we are doing are so easy to do when you actually sit down and do them.

Another great way to help is by building a community of smaller to medium sized blogs. Start paying attention to the needs of other bloggers you know. Help them with a guest post, link to one of their stellar articles, email with a useful link to an article you know they need for a future project, and of course tweets, stumbles and diggs!

If everyone starts going out of their way to do things for others, they’ll notice a pattern that will start working for them too! People like helping people that help them (confusing enough ). So to start it out right, start subscribing to others stumbles by going to their profiles, adding them as followers, and subscribing to their blogs.

After doing this you will find a very well respected and helpful community that is starting to be built all around you. So stop begging, and start building the blog you want to have.

Time for Action

To get things started right now, here is a list of things you can do before your leave this page to build a community around you. We wont do this very often (for fear of spammers), but its a great way to build your community. Just make sure to be BRIEF:

Put a brief description of your blog (1-2 sentences) in the comments below. Let us all know what your blog is about. You don’t need to link to it because commentluv does that for you.
Let others know your favorite social media site
Tell everyone how you can help them.
Tell us how we can help you.
Determine to help someone on the comment list every day until you have completed the list. After some time you will have made a lot of friends and built some good traffic.

Here is an example for you to follow:

1. Blogussion is a resource for bloggers to get targeted blogging tips, tricks and design help.
2. StumbleUpon
3. Email with an honest critique of your current blogging
4. Stumble this post!