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.

Related posts:

1. Instill the Urge for Community Response

2. Creating Interest Within Your Community With E-Book

3. Creating a Trend to Effectively Stand Out

One of the most important things you can do after you have published your post is reply to the readers who have graciously left a comment on what you wrote. Unfortunately, it’s also something that many people don’t do, or do well enough. Maybe it’s because they get a lot of comments, and maybe they just don’t care. But let me tell you, it’s crucial you keep up with your readers the best you can.

Replying to comments is one of the greatest ways to build a community on your blog. It encourages more discussion, and it gives you a chance to get to know your readers, and for your readers to get to know you.

But over time as your blog grows, it becomes harder to keep up with all the readers who comment on your articles. So, you are going from replying to a small handful of comments to dozens and dozens every time. How can you keep up?

I do my best to keep up with any comment I get on my posts. I mean, it’s the least I can do. Sometimes I miss a few, and sometimes I don’t do a great job of keeping conversation flowing. But, I do try my best. And you should to, regardless of blog size.

I have been thinking about more ways to better keep up with replying to the comments I get here. I would usually wait a a day or two after the post has been published and then reply to them, but that’s just not smart! By that time, the discussion has always died out.

The purpose of replying to comments is not just so you look like a nice blogger, but so you keep conversation flowing and readers interested. So, I looked at my approach to doing it and decided I was all wrong.

I want to share with you some of my new strategies for replying to blog comments, and I hope you can take a look at them and figure out how to implement them into your own flow.

1. Schedule it With Similar Activities

I have been trying to make replying to comments one of the first things I do when I get ready for work. Since I schedule all of my posts to publish while I’m asleep, I wake up to new comments everyday.

Once I get ready to work, I decide to reply to comments when I reply to emails I also receive overnight. Grouping these two activities together really makes it easier since they’re so similar.

But go crazy with it. Reply to comments when you respond to tweets on Twitter, or when you’re reading others’ blogs and commenting there.

2. Have Fun!

Don’t make replying to comments a chore, make them enjoyable. As a blogger, you probably don’t get as much interaction with other people anyway (I kid, I kid), so use this time to get social and talk to your dedicated readers!

But the moment you start making it feel like you’re actually doing work instead of having fun, the less you will actually want to do it. So don’t force yourself to do it, just make it as enjoyable as possible!

3. Encourage Reader-to-Reader Interaction

A lazy way to take care of your comments is to get readers to reply to them for you! You still will want to get involved in discussions (and this may actually get you involved more than ever), but it’s still nice to see how strong of a community you will have.

4. Use Your Smart Phone

This is something I can’t believe I never thought of doing before. For many popular smart phone models like the iPhone, Blackberry, Droid and probably many others, you can find an application that will allow you to connect to your blog and manage some things.

Even if there’s no official application for your phone, you can still login to your blog through your phone’s browser and reply that way.

I am starting to do this with my BlackBerry and I find it very efficient since I get an alert every time I get a new comment and I can just reply to it once I see it.

How do You Manage Comments?

Maybe you have a blog that gets a few comments, or maybe you get dozens a post. I want to know, how do you keep up with them all? Even with the tips I suggested, it can still be tough to keep up with all of your blog comments.

So I want to know what you do, because I know I could still be better at it myself!

Related posts:

1. Increase Comment Productivity on Your Blog

2. 6 Plugins to Help You Get More Comments on Your Blog

3. Addressing those who comment: The wrong ways

I find it hard nowadays to actually read through an entire blog post and find something that truly “wows” me. Apart from blogs like Copyblogger, Design Informer, Pearsonified and the Tuts Plus+ network, nothing really seems so useful anymore. And I know it’s not just limited to the blogging tips or making money online niche, but probably any niche out there.

Really, what I am looking for in a great blog post (and I’m sure you too) is authenticity. I don’t care so much what your 10 favorite plugins for WordPress are, or your list of 100 half-assed reasons why Twitter is awesome. Maybe these kinds of posts bring you traffic, but not the kind of traffic that will really benefit you.

Create content that is debatable; that people will actually read and stop to think about what you said. Combine it with a catchy headline and some great opening text and you can get the same results you would with one of those lame list posts.

This is Why There’s So Much Crap in my RSS Reader

It’s probably just not mine, but yours too. When I subscribe to a blog, I subscribe to it because I love the content they put out. It gets me excited and I learn something from it, so I want to go back for more. I bet that’s why you subscribe to blogs too.

But over time, even a few months later, it’s like the quality of that content just goes to hell. The content that a blogger used to put so much time into just isn’t getting all the attention it gets, and instead we see crap like interviews (which, let’s be honest, you heard one and you heard them all), product reviews set to make a blogger money and of course those long, not always so useful: list posts.

So you know, there’s no obligation to subscribe to an RSS feed so once I see things like this at too frequent of a rate I’ll unsubscribe. No biggie, it’s not like I’ll miss much.

What’s Effort to You?

So all in all, it comes down to effort and how much you care for your blog. You can lose interest in a blog for so many different reasons: lack of results, run out of ideas, a new project, etc. When that interest goes downhill, so does the quality of your posts.

A year and six months later, I am still spending 1-2 hours on every single article I write for this blog. I go all out to make sure the posts will not just benefit me and my intentions with this blog, but so they benefit you and you want to come back and see what I have to say at another time.

I took some pretty strong jabs at interviews and product reviews in this article, but it’s because I don’t really see the value in them.

Interviews

Despite the strong point Srinivas Rao made when he said interviews hold tremendous value, I just see them as all the same. Yes, they can get pretty personal but they’re not something you should do with just anyone, and you need to ask the right questions to make it interesting. A lot of interviews I see in this niche just don’t do that.

But because they are so easy to do, a lot of people go to them. All you need for an interview is a set of questions and about a half and hour to talk. Again, depending on the questions you ask you may come up with a great interview.

Product Reviews

I think this one speaks for itself, but these posts are just done for nothing more than to make money. If you rush too fast into trying to make money with these types of posts, you probably won’t make much money at all. It’s just like selling banner ads, it’s kind of a failed money making tactic unless you have an extremely high trafficked blog.

And if you’ve learned anything from Blogussion’s free From Planning to Earning course, things like this only bring harm to your blog.

Do You Miss the Value?

The point I’m trying to make is that quality isn’t always put first anymore. Basically, anything that takes up space seems to please many bloggers, but isn’t always the most acceptable to the reader.

Do you agree with me that more time and effort could be put into a lot of the blogs we see today? Maybe even look at your past posts, have you always gave it your all?

Related posts:

1. 30 Real Ways to Make Money Blogging

2. Tips For Being At the Top of “Top Commentator” Lists Almost Every Time

3. 100+ Lists To Help You Become a Better Blogger

The weekend is finally here, and I hope you all have some great plans for it! In this issue of Wired Weekend, I just want you to really do some self-reflection and look back at your work. We are always trying to constantly improve our blog with new things, but when was the last time we looked back at the things that got us to where we are today?

It’s not easy to keep your blog constantly updated, and it drives many bloggers crazy when they don’t update their blog and stress themselves out over writing a post. We write to our blogs everyday, but when’s the last time you just sat back, looked at your blog posts and just felt proud at all of the work you have done?

You may seem this post as something that is just here to take up space for the weekend, but there is actually some significant value in what I’m trying to do here. I want you guys to look at the dashboard of your admin panel, run through the archives of your blog and just look at everything you have achieved over the lifespan of your blog.

I do this from time to time here, and am absolutely amazed at all I have done. It really inspires me to get into a working mood and I am surprised I don’t do it more.

As I write this post, the dashboard of Blogussion looks like this:

Just take 10-15 minutes out of your work/relax time this weekend and go through your blog. Appreciate what you have done, as it can really get you inspired to get going and make it all even better.

So Tell Me This…
After you looked over your blog, what did you see? Are you happy with what you have done, or are you yearning for more? Show me the same statistics I have shared with you about your blog – how many posts you have published, how many comments, etc.

Related posts:

1. Wired Weekend #5: The Best Blogging Tips from Around the Web

2. The Best Blogging Tips From Around the Community – Wired Weekend

3. What are the best methods for marketing blog articles? – Wired Weekend

We want everything to be easy. Things are nice when they’re handed to us, aren’t they? The more handouts, easy breaks and close calls we experience, the more we want. All of these things have to do with luck, and the people you interact with on your blog.

The “simple life” I’m talking about above is not created by you. In fact, nothing is easily accomplished if you’re the only person in the picture. It’s the people who are around you, and interact with that help make things easier for you. In the world of blogging, those people are your readers.

A blog is nothing without readers, and generally without any readership – a failure. Since readers play such a massive role on your blog, it is often that we turn to them to do things for us that will help us achieve success.

But you can’t rely on other people to do everything for you. That’s not what blogging is about, and that’s certainly not how life in general works.

Because of that need for simplification and a goal for an easy life, some of us start depending far too much on others to do the things we need to get done. A blogger usually wants the following things from their community:

• Content – Nearly every blogger accepts guest posts from their community.
• Conversions – Affiliate sign ups, product purchases, etc. Generally anything that makes a blogger money.
• Marketing – Share articles on social media sites, and help bring traffic to the blog in any way possible.
• React – To comment on a post and start discussions with others.

Now, doesn’t that sound like just about everything there is to do on a blog? Look at it this way:

I would breakdown the time I spend working with 50% of it for writing content, 20% marketing, 10% monetizing and 10% participating in community discussions. That leaves out a 10% gap where I can be spending my time on something else, related to or unrelated to my blog.

Now, all of that work is work that can be done by my community members. If I had my readers doing all of those things for me, those numbers would look a lot different. The idea of having other people working for us and writing our content and giving us their money is any bloggers dream. But, it’s a dream that is also self-destructive, if put on the mind too early.

It All Comes Down to You

It’s possible, and smart to rely on others to do things for you, don’t get the wrong idea. But becoming too dependent on that help is something that will ultimately lead to failure. Because what happens where people don’t show up to make things easier and do work for you?

You have to pick up on their slack, and if you became too reliant on that help, you will never get the job done. I learned this the hard way, and it’s not a very comforting thing to admit to yourself that you’re lazy. But, it’s also step one to getting yourself back on track.

When we have other people do those important things I mentioned earlier in this article, we start doing less of them ourselves. When it’s time for us to start doing them again, we have to know how to get ourselves back into gear.

I have broken down those things yet again, and this should hopefully help you figure out what you need to do to start depending on your own self to get things done.

1. Writing Content

Run out of guest posts? Sick of editing poorly written guest posts? It happens, and when it does – it means you have to write again. But, writing a good, quality article is not meant for the lazy! Try following these writing tips to get you back on track:

• It’s important to make your writing process easy to make writing less stressful.
• Know where to find sources of fresh ideas so coming up with new ideas for content takes less time.
• If you just can’t find the time to write an entire article – recycle it.
• You may want to incorporate some new writing habits into your writing style. You may find an increase in content production by making tweaks like these.

2. Marketing your blog

Marketing is not a strong point for many bloggers. Trying to get back into marketing habits is not much fun, and most will be hesitant to do it. However, it’s vital that you can get back in the game as swiftly as possible. Your brand depends on it.

• Remember, you want to try to get as much help as possible. Ensuring your blog can market itself is a great way to find that much-needed help.
• Start off with easy tactics like blog commenting and tweeting older posts. Methods like that are great to send in some traffic, then work your way up to guest posting and maybe even purchasing ad space.
• If you need an extra push to get yourself into a marketing mood, look at your blog statistics. Compare traffic levels of the current month to last month. You may not like what you see, so you need to let things like that motivate you to get back into gear.

3. Making money blogging

This is a tough thing to keep working at, even if you are motivated to do so. Say for example you launched a product, and it did really well at first. You just let it sit around and enjoy all of that income. Then, sales started slowing down, and because you were so used to just sitting around and making passive income, you forgot that you still had work to do. I went through this in the beginning of the year, actually.

• There are millions of ways to earn millions online. You just need to get out there and learn all of the different ways to make money blogging.
• Never forget that your community should always come first. That means, just because you went through a bit of a lazy period, don’t throw out sloppy money-making schemes.
• Making any decent amount of income online isn’t something that just happens overnight. You have to work hard at it, and chances are, work without money on your mind.

4. Keeping up with user engagement

Talking with people on Twitter, replying to blog comments and just interacting with your community in any way can get tough. After all, it’s just you communicating with anyone who visits your blog.

• Make it a practice to reply to comments as soon as they are published on your blog. People will appreciate it more than you may think, and some will even come back to talk to you more.
• The more you communicate with your fans, the more motivated they will make you feel. So, if you are feeling lazy, you need to look back at some of the things people have complimented you on and use them to get back to work.
• Dedicate a certain part of your schedule to focus in on just interaction. Set a whole day for it, a few hours a day, anything that will get you focusing on just talking to other people. Don’t be shy!

Relying on others to do the work for you when it comes to blogging is only really possible for those of us with thousands and thousands of readers and hundreds of thousands visitors a year. You want to do the best job you can to get others to pitch in and help you with the main things I highlighted in the article, but you are still the one who needs to take the initiative and the majority of the work. Remember:

Success achieved with others is rewarding, but when achieved by yourself – defining.

Related posts:

1. #1 Traffic Tip You Are Not Ready For

2. How to Tweet the Life Back into Old Posts

3. Wired Weekend #5: The Best Blogging Tips from Around the Web

Like anything else, a guest post needs to be perfectly planned if success is to be achieved through it. Ann Smarty has written out what a successful guest post plan would look like, and does so in great detail. Want to write for us too?

Guest posting is probably one of the most unappreciated forms of marketing that I can think of. If you can use the proper strategies and have your mind set towards creating a quality guest post – you will be rewarded for it.

Because really, only the passionate bloggers guest post. The benefits are plenty and lack of time is no excuse, however, it is something that many bloggers just can’t get around to doing.

Some of the most important benefits of guest posting that I value the most are:

• Get inspired by exposing your content to new audience and getting new comments, fresh insight, etc
• Get more readers and subscribers, more promoters who will tweet and stumble your content.
• Build your authority and reputation of the real expert in your niche;
• You will be building new contacts with the blog owner, and the people in their community.

I hope that was enough to convince you to keep reading about how useful one simple guest post can be to your blog.

Finding blogs that accept guest posts

1. Start by contributing to your friends’ blogs. This way you will learn to “feel” another blog atmosphere and adapt to it.

The first place to start with is to look around your contacts. Your current blogging friends will be glad to accept your guest post and will help promote it. Besides, it’s a good way to remember your old contacts and remind them of yourself.

2. Search Google
If you are a new blogger (who doesn’t have a lot of friends who blog on the same topic) or if you have already blogged for most of your friends, head over to Google. I did a detailed post on finding guest post opportunities using Google. Read it thoroughly and try to apply the tips you’ll find there. Search queries you want to start with include:

• “Submit a guest post” / “Submit post” / “Submit blog post”
• “Add blog post”
• “Submit an article”
• “Suggest a guest post”
• “Send a guest post”
• “Write for us”;
• “Become an author”, etc

3. Check (guest) blogging forums and communitie
Blogging forums that can be used for hunting guest posting opportunities are plenty. Some of them are general: Authority Blogger is one community to consider: it was started by a guest posting guru Chris Garret.

Another two places to be aware of are BlogHer (uniting blogging women) and 20sb.net (which unites bloggers aged between 20 and 30 years). Speaking of the latter, they regularly run guest posting events that encourage members to exchange guest posts.

Another place to find guest blogging opportunities is MyBlogGuest.com. That’s a forum (started by yours truly) that is meant to connect bloggers interested in fresh content to authors who would like to promote it.

2. Act now: write a killer pitch

Once you have found a couple of great guest posting opportunities, you may want to contact them and offer your guest post. Here’s how the process should look like step by step (also be sure to check this post by Alex on preparing a guest post in 5 steps):

1. Read the blog carefully. Think what type of a guest post might be interesting to the blogger and his readership;
2. Brainstorm a few great post ideas;
3. Search through the blog to see if there are any overlapping posts already;
4. Write the post (if nothing similar has been published yet). Don’t forget to link to related articles you found in step 3;
5. Contact the blogger and attach the post.

Note: there may be some intermediate steps. Some people prefer to discuss the post ideas with the blogger before submitting the post. It is really up to you. I can do either way from case to case.

Now to the ethics:

• Spend some time on writing a good, personalized pitch: start with the blogger’s name and mention why you think the post is a good fit for his blog
• Don’t send one and the same article to multiple bloggers. Send it to just one. This is very important. Don’t turn your guest blogging into article distribution. This is just plain wrong.

3. Now wait. Be patient

High-profile bloggers are very, very busy. Don’t be offended if they don’t respond to you for a week or so. I usually wait a week and then write a follow-up message and wait one more week. If I do not hear a response even after that, I will send them an email one last time to ask if they every plan on using the post. If there is still no response, I will submit it elsewhere.

Once your post is published, be sure to check back often, subscribe to comments and reply to everyone who comments. This is important, because writing the post is only about half of the job. Replying to comments and really engaging is the second part many do not take seriously.

Something else that can be useful to you is to track any Twitter mentions of the posts. Three tools I recommend you can use to help you track tweets around the post are:

• BackTweets is a popular tool that tracks and aggregates Tweets linking to a particular page. It supports a number of URL-shorteners which makes the tool one of the most complete.
• Twitter Reactions (for Google Chrome): shows the Twitter juice about the current page;
• Topsy displays recent tweets for any given URL:

How do you do it all?

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, guest posting is a very powerful, but often overlooked form of marketing. The benefits it brings in can be immense, but at the cost of a lot of hard work.

So, how do you do it? What drives you to write an entire article for someone else? Are you in it for the traffic? Or are you looking for something greater than that?

Related posts:

1. A day full of guest posting

2. Becoming a recurring guest poster: Things you should keep in mind

3. Tips for making a mark in the community with guest posts

Are you someone who keeps to themselves a lot and doesn’t like to really communicate with others? Would you rather wait for someone to start a conversation with you, or are you a person who likes to start conversations? I guess what I’m trying to ask is, are you a networker?

The way you interact and communicate with others is a very important thing for you to take a hold of in your life for many reasons. To find love, to have those special moments with your friends, to improve you as a person, and a whole lot of other things. But, let’s try to apply these social skills you have to networking online.

See, “networking” is just the nerdy term we use to describe “socializing” and other types of interactions we have online. It’s about meeting people and connecting with them. You can do it in a variety of ways, and it is just so important for your blog:

• Connect with others on social media sites, like Twitter for instance
• Through a blog’s comment section
• Email and instant messaging
• Chatting with others on discussion forums

There are many types of services on the internet that were really created for you to socialize. There are a lot of different ways to socialize online, and there are always breakthrough services that further enhance the way we chat online.

Web forums were quite popular a few years back. They’re still around today, but services like Twitter started popping up and they started losing popularity. Sure, you most likely have different intentions when viewing a discussion forum and visiting Twitter as the two are very different format wise. But, you will see more people “networking” on Twitter than you will on a forum nowadays because it’s easier.

The 3 B’s of Networking

I’m not trying to teach you how to socialize, I’m trying to teach you the value of doing it for your blog. As I said, there are many different forms of networking available online that can be quite beneficial to you and your blog.

Now, the 3 B’s of networking are simply laid out to help you better understand the importance of networking and forming relationships with your peers online. This will of course, help you build a better blog.

Brand

The first B is brand. Your brand is really what you are recognized for, and the thing that your name is associated for. So, when you hear of Blogussion, and you know us – you think about the blogging tips we provide. That’s our brand, and we have some things about us that we use to strengthen that brand.

Networking with others is really the only way to brand your blog if you think about it broadly enough. The brand of your blog is really dependent on what people see and think of when they hear the name of your blog. So, it’s the people you reach out to and connect with that make the brand of your blog.

Buzz

The “buzz” you gain from networking is really all of the commotion and reactions you hear about your blog. The more people you reach out to when you network with them, the more opinions and feedback you will hear from them about your blog.

The “buzz” are the people who really take any interest in your blog. They are the people who share your articles on Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, or even take the time to link back to your post on their blog. The more buzz you can create, the more traffic, readership, customers, commentators and friends you can make.

Buddies

The final “B” is for the friends you make while networking. You can’t network alone, you need others to do it! When you have conversations with other people, you tend to become friends with them. Especially if you have something in common. Like blogging.

The friends you make online, simply put, you cannot have enough of. When you talk to your friends about blogging, you will be intaking a ton of different information. When I talk to my “blogging buddies,” I can usually walk away with a new perspective on something or a new idea on how I want to approach something with my blogs.

But having these friends can really change the face of your blog. If you bring it up enough, there’s no reason why one of your friends shouldn’t be reading your blog, so long as they have some sort of need for your content. Now, you have all of these people reading your blog that you are connected to on a personal level, and anything can really happen from there. You never know who you may be introduced to and become friends with. Maybe an “A-list” blogger? It’s not impossible, just network.

Tying the B’s Together

Brand, Buzz and Buddies are all things you can build by networking. When you start your blog, these are usually the three things that you do not have. So, as you build your blog along, you have to build up the 3 B’s along with it.

When you think about it, all three of these things can really tie together. They all depend on one another for a lot of the success they can bring to your blog.

• The brand of your blog will be responsible for the buzz that is created by being shared by your buddies.
• The buzz your blog gets will reflect the brand of your blog, which will create fans and some new blogging buddies.
• The buddies you make are usually a result of the buzz your blog gets, which can have an effect on the brand and face of your blog as your community starts developing.

Do you network?

How active in the discussions are you? Do you join in on any conversation you see amongst other bloggers, or do you just wait until you are made the center of discussion? The 3 B’s of networking are not achieved by just sitting around, so you need to go out and do just that – network!

Related posts:

1. Social Marketing: Bloggers Networking with Facebook

2. Five Points to a Successful Blogging Event

3. Why Ego is Your New Best Friend

Today, Chris Palmer of Angle of Attack Blog briefly, but powerfully speaks about taking a better leadership role in the community of your blog and what taking command of that position can bring to you. Want to write for us too?

As pilot-in-command during my flights, I am responsible for the souls on board my aircraft. I am also liable for whatever happens while that aircraft is in movement.

Your blog is no different. You are the P.I.C. of Your blog.

We’ve all been in the situation. Stuck in the terminal with grumpy and smelly passengers all around… and the news isn’t good. “Best case scenario…”, the gate agent explains, “…is the weather will clear and your aircraft can get in in about 4 hours. We apologize…blah blah blah.”

As a blogger, you face the same situation every day. No one said blogging was easy. But it is worth it.

What happens if you are “under the weather,” so to speak, when it comes to blogging? What has you delayed?

This could happen in several ways:

• Full time job takes much of your time
• Can’t come up with post ideas
• Feel disconnected and distant from users
• There just isn’t a whole lot of interaction with content
• Distraction
• Lack of motivation

The list goes on.

Do you really believe your readers will forgive you for these weather delays? Do you believe they’ll be cool if you say, “better luck tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be clear skies.”

Unless you already have a stellar reputation and you can afford a get-out-of-jail-free card, I doubt it.

For the rest of us, it’s a bit more cut and dry.

The truth is that this blogging thing, although a great passion, also takes a lot of hard work, determination, perseverance and patience. If you really live from a space as a blogger where you envelope these traits in your strategy and mindset, your success as a blogger is inevitable.

You are the P.I.C. of Your blog

The internet as we know it is growing more every day. There is someone out there that deserves your message. Someone that can learn from your experiences and knowledge. Are you really going to deny them that opportunity because your priorities aren’t set up right?

I respect that fact that we all have responsibilities. I do as well. But I certainly can’t expect my businesses and blogs to succeed if they aren’t given some sort of priority. They are only given priority because they are a part of my larger plan for the future.

One thing I’ve learned early on in my blogging career is that by working hard, being determined and possessing perseverance and patience, I always turn a corner.

I treat my blog like a job.

In Hugh MacLeod’s book “Ignore Everybody” he says;

Eventually the fish will start biting. Just remember that it doesn’t happen overnight. It usually takes a couple of years of continual posting to build up enough trust to where people are willing to invest in you financially.

At the end of the day, the financial part of this all is easy to achieve.

As the pilot-in-command, I’m seeking out happy passengers. In other words, I strive more to have my readers become believers and members of my tribe than I do for fiscal gains. Are gains important? Sure! But if your purpose is to make money and that’s it, you’re missing a larger picture.

And maybe that’s why you can’t push through the weather.

Let’s be slightly negative for a moment and list some consequences of not pushing through the weather:

• Losing Loyal Readers
• Poor Reputation
• Stagnant Growth

Wouldn’t you rather?

• Gain Readers and Keep Them Loyal?
• Develop a reputation as a leader in your Niche?
• Have measurable growth?

The answers are obvious.

As the pilot-in-command of your blog, you are in the leadership position. You lead your readers to inspiration within your niche. You lead your readers through difficult times, rough topics, and personal problems.

It’s no longer acceptable to do things half cocked. It’s all or nothing, throttles to the firewall. It’s time to push through the weather.

How are you going to be a better P.I.C. for your blog?

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Without readership on your blog, what exactly is the point of running a successful, money-making blog? Have you ever heard bloggers say “It’s not my blog, but yours”? Well, whoever came up with that is exactly right.

Okay, so we both know that since you own the domain, have access to the sites internal files that technically the blog is yours. But that saying has a deeper meaning to it.

My interpretation is that as a blogger, you write for an audience and are giving them knowledge within blog posts. Since content is king and content is what makes a blog go round, your readers also have a certain degree of ownership. It’s really a saying that can have many sides to it.

Since your readers are what make your blog, don’t they deserve something more than just great knowledge? Sure they do, they deserve acknowledgment.

If there is one thing I can say that I am good about in terms of blogging, it’s the fact that I keep up to date with the people who visit my blog and leave comments about my articles. It’s not just me, anyone who has ever written for this blog has always given back to the community, in more ways than just sharing an article with them.

Because I feel I am so good with the community on my blog, I am going to go over with you a few of the things I do to better connect with you as my blog reader.

1. Reply to comments

I figured I would just get this out-of-the-way early as this is a given. It is very important that you respond to the comments your readers take the time to write out. Seriously, you may not understand how lucky you are to be getting any comments on your blog. Many bloggers have difficulties with this, so be courteous and don’t take the fact that someone has spent their time to talk to you for granted!

I have been replying to the comments on this blog ever since the beginning, and I have to tell you that getting comments like this really makes me feel like I am on the right track in communicating with my community:

…I read a lot of articles about but never comment on them. The reason I commented on yours was because I noticed that you responded to EVERY comment someone left on your article. Your attention to detail really stood out to me and motivated me to do the same thing when I start mine.

This was posted by a very cool graphics designer, Raven Bedenfield in a past article where I explained how you can kick start your freelance business through blogging. Comments I get just like that just keep motivating me farther and farther to get more involved within my community.

2. User of the Week

This is a fun idea I took from a forum, and we are planning on doing this in our upcoming newsletter. This will be a great way to really make certain members of your community stand out, and I am going to explain why right after this little plug:

If you want to sign up for our new blogging tips newsletter, you can do so in the sidebar. Our first newsletter goes out this Sunday, November 1st. Don’t miss it guys!

So the idea behind this “user of the week” thing is to basically find someone who has made some kind of contribution to Blogussion in the past week. As I explained in our recent redesign announcements, the things we look for are:

• Participates in the comment sections of the posts, even with other users
• Writes constructive comments and advice
• Guest posting for the blog helps too
• Interacting in older posts on the blog
• Sharing posts on social media sites (Twitter, Digg, etc.)

And after we select our user of the week, we will be writing a little about them and their contributions, as well as putting a link to their blog in it.

This is a really great way to start making more connections within your community. Don’t you think if you did this week after week, building your list of dedicated readers one by one, you could have a very solid community in the works?

This is an idea that we are sure to write a post about in the future as we start announcing our users of the week. Stay tuned, and don’t be afraid to sign-up to our newsletter!

3. Getting Involved in their community

This may be a little tedious at first, and if you have a lot of people who comment on your blog – a little hard. But, it’s incredibly valuable if you can get yourself involved in some of your reader’s community just as they have done for you. There are a three major ways we get involved in our friends communities here:

1. Commenting

A good comment every once in a while on our friends blogs really can make a difference in your relationship. If you leave your blog URL behind, there’s a great chance that the author will comment back.

2. Guest Posting

We are guest posting nuts here, and we have built much of our readership that is here today through guest posting. Take for example, Nick from SiteSketch 101. Seth being the friendly guy he is decided to write a great guest post on Nick’s blog about friendly competition. The community over at Nick’s blog appreciated it, just as we’re sure Nick did.

3. Link Loving

I have linked out to two bloggers so far in this article and it’s really a great way to show that I appreciate their contributions to my blog. It never hurts to link out to others, especially if you link to content that can support your ideas and beliefs.

Have you ever contributed to someone else’s community? Have you commented on their posts, guest written for them, linked out or done something else?

4. Connect on Social Networks

Everyone uses Twitter now right? I can guarantee you that the majority of bloggers you find in your community will have a link to their Twitter account on their blog.

Chatting on Twitter for example is easy and doesn’t take much effort. But you aren’t limited to just interacting on Twitter. You can send sites you want your friends to stumble on StumbleUpon, make friends with other people on Digg and a lot more.

A while back on Blogussion, I posted an article where the readers in my community could post their Twitter accounts. I have closed that topic for new comments, but I think it may be interesting to reopen it and try it again with our now much larger readership. See it here.

5. Ask Readers Questions, Get Feedback

This is an idea just built off of the whole “this is your blog, not mine” concept. At the end of many posts I write here, I always ask a question regarding the topic. For example, if I were to write about how to increase traffic from Digg, I would ask something like What have you done to improve your social media presence? at the end.

Also, if you have noticed I have been asking questions at the end of a few paragraphs in this post. It can get you more involved with the idea of this article, which in return will help you learn more from it.

When I wrote the tutorial about how to recreate the subscribe box on Blogussion, I asked for your opinion on the hierarchy of it. As a result, I found out that many people who read the post followed it with no problem and came out with a great result. I also learned that I misspelled a few words, but that made my article better by two words!

How do you get involved with your community?

So I am asking you now – what do you do to create better relationships with your readers? I just told you things that we do here to get involved, and now we have about 4,000 Twitter followers, and a strong community where each post gets over 25 or more comments on average. That’s all earned through a little dedication and friendliness.

Don’t be afraid to share your thoughts no matter how much effort (or how little) it takes!

Photo by Baratunde Thurston

Related posts:

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2. What does it mean to really connect with your readers?

3. Build Your Community, Stop Begging for One

A technique for building the readership on my blogs that I have started working at is the power of releasing things for free. I have been preparing many things over the past weeks to start releasing on my blogs, in hopes of building a stronger and more loyal community.

Of course, the keyword in that first paragraph, the most important word in that short summary is the word “free.” I have discussed this before here about doing more work than you will be rewarded for, is just one of those great perks of doing a freebie!

Sure, “free” has a lot of benefits to a blog. You can get oodles of traffic (did I just say oodles?), RSS subscribers, newsletter signups, and much more buzz around your blog.

Using “Free” to Build a Blog

As I said, “free” is the way to go to kick start any blog, new or old. You can go from no traffic to hundreds, even thousands of visitors if you play your cards right and release the right stuff.

But to be honest with you, people are lazy. Why should they have to do something for themselves when it’s already done for them free? You can release crap, and people will still go crazy over it because, well – it’s FREE. Not to say you should go around releasing garbage, though.

Traffic Effects

Like I said, free stuff can make your blog go nuts. Maybe it goes viral on Twitter, or gets stumbled enough to bring in a crazy flow of stumblers to your blog. Whatever it is, there is something you should know about this traffic.

It may not be the ideal traffic you want.

Sure, any publicity is good publicity, but is any traffic good traffic? The thing with freebies is that the traffic it can bring in will die over time. You will always have some people who stick around onto your blog because they like what you have to offer on your blog. But, there will also be the ones who only come around for the free things and leave.

Take Olivia who has just recently has a guest post on ProBlogger about giveaways. She had a giveaway on her blog that had some different effects on her traffic statistics. This is a quote from her post about the changes in her RSS count:

Anytime you’re doing a giveaway, you’re going to get more traffic, followers, subscribers etc, but when the giveaway is over some of them are inevitably going to drop you like third period French. Fortunately, there will still be some entrants who saw enough value in your blog to stick around. The day my giveaway ended, I had 6x the RSS subscribers and followers on Twitter than what I had started with. Within a few days though, 10% of them unsubscribed/unfollowed – which to me was an acceptable attrition rate and I was stoked to see that I was creating enough value after the giveaway for the 90% of my new “friends” who stayed.

What “Free” Isn’t

Free is a lot of things for you. It can start something amazing within your blog, and even reinforce what you already have going for you. But, some people don’t know the real value of what “free” actually is.

Here are a few things that you should know if you want to release something for free on your blog.

1. Not Supported

If you release something like a theme, or plugin, then you need to support it! Treat people who download your products like your blog readers, as someone you are always trying to help. You help people my writing articles all of the time right? So it shouldn’t phase you much to take a moment to write an email helping someone with something.

Take my other blog Asnio for example. I released a footer code snippet for a 3 column, beautiful widgetized footer. On some blogs it causes funky errors, and I reply to emails from these people and help them. I encourage them to do so, and as a result, I better my reputation.

2. Something you don’t use

They say this for affiliate marketing: “If you don’t use it, don’t endorse it.” I really believe this logic applies to free stuff. Usually the freebies I release are code snippets that I pull off my blog. Everyone sees them, and I get plenty of requests for them. Here are a few examples:

• Asnio Footer Mod
• Archives Mod
• Code Snippets from the Blogussion theme
3. Not Premium Quality

It’s true, things you release for free on your blog should all be premium quality, which means people would pay for them, but you’re such a nice person you aren’t charging anything. Take ebooks for example – dozens and dozens of pages revealing secrets to making $40,000 a month blogging are out there for free (courtesy of Mr. John Chow). Can you imagine how much he would have made off one of his ebooks? Instead of having a product, he gave it for free to strengthen his community.

4. It’s not updated

Free things can be updated. Free themes, hell, even ebooks! This one is really only targeted at themes and plugins you release. Some of these things you release on your blog can be very vital to one person. If it’s not updated for them, then they won’t be able to keep using it if something breaks when the update their CMS. Here’s a little scenario for you:

You release an amazing theme on your blog that gets 1,000 hits a day and 3,000 downloads for three months on your blog. WordPress 2.9 comes out, and your theme breaks. You have gotten all of this traffic from releasing the 2.8 compatible version, so imagine if all these people came back to your blog for the updated version.

“Free” is your future

Think of your blog months, or a year or two into the future if you keep releasing free things. Your blog can be huge, and have a large audience because you gave for free, did more work than you’d be rewarded for, and you follow some of the tips posted here today.

What do you think free will turn into over time? It’s a nice word, everyone loves to hear it – money.

You will have the audience on your blog to start all kinds of monetization techniques. Premium products, affiliate marketing, maybe a few of those dreaded banner ads.

What does “free” tell you?

Have you looked into this “free” thing yet? If you have, what was your experience with being free? Is the effort you put out for it worth it, or would you rather build your community a different way? Whatever it is, let’s chat about it in the comments!

Photo by Karrie Amelia

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