You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Cultivating a Blog Community in 10 Steps – Part 1”.
Cultivating a Blog Community in 10 Steps – Part 1
New to the Search Marketing Standard Blog?
Subscribe to our blog via our RSS feed and receive updates and tips.
WHAT’S NEXT?
- Read more Blog articles.
- Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for practical how-to, industry stats and expert advice.
- All articles are available for republishing as long as you provide a link back to the original article.
- Become a premium member to get the print and digital magazine and premium content.
About the Author
Joe Whyte (35 Posts)
Joe Whyte has been developing, managing and implementing successful, innovative, bleeding edge digital marketing strategies for Fortune 500 companies for over 7 years.
15 Comments
Share Your Thoughts
GET PUBLISHED
Looking to promote your business and grow your industry credibility? Come write for us!
SIGN UP
Great article Joe! It seems so hard to get a good blog going, and attract/retain visitors in the age of MySpace, where everyone it seems has a blog. Your steps are sure to help on my way to total dominance of the blogosphere!
Good article but I have had good experience with paperpost, blogexplosion and other forms of traffic generating.
Nice post Joe, I think point 4 is key, you have to be in it for the long term!
Networking is key for anyone starting out. Become a regular in participant in groups who share the same interests. People who know you will eventually want to read your blog just because they know you, and will share any good information they find to others.
Great post, Joe. I am looking forward to Part 2
Hey Sarah,
I have used pay per post before and the results have been just “ok”. I have seen some companies use pay per post and they have been really successful and they found success in “how” they marketed their pay per posts.
How large your budget is will come into play with something like pay per post. Instead of doing pay per post I would suggest giving Stumbleupon.com/ads a try. Very cheap and very targeted ads.
As for the other traffic generators like Blogexplosion.com I think its a nice idea and it could increase your traffic but its a traffic scheme and is less likely to convert to rss subscribers and viable traffic.
Thats just in my experience. I would love to hear if other bloggers have been able to figure out how to capitalize on sites like blog explosion.
Good stuff here, Joe – nice to meet you, too. With so many people blogging for professional reasons now, it’s imperative to focus on building personal relationships. If you want to stay ahead of the game, you’ve got to *focus on building personal relationships*.
Great article – I am just starting a blog so this is very timely advice – looking forward to part II
wow! I love how you’ve pulled together all the disparate parts Joe – excellent article.
I especially appreciate your comment about building community on Digg through participation.
The main question I’m left with is scalability… all this hand-crafted work (what I’m currently doing) doesn’t seem to scale well. I guess that’s a little of my agency background thinking… what are your thoughts?
G
Some of my points I mentioned are definitely projects that take management. Some of them take full time dedication and development like networking, link baiting and PPC campaigns but if we are only talking about applying these topics to a blog then it is important to point out that the client (blog owner) needs to put forth an effort. Weather that means taking an active roll in networking, hiring people to post or gaining contributors to the blog that have a fundamental knowledge on whatever topic the blog is about. If they want to outsource everything then they need to pick a firm that has the resources to handle their needs.
If you have a agency that specializes in cultivating blog communties and traffic then it would behoove them to departmentalize these topics and assign specific tasks to certain departments. I think this could be scalable with some work and integration. I would like to hear what people think about your question. It’s a really interesting take on this post.
From my experience, scalability is the biggest concern for many businesses when it comes to running a blog, forum or any other community cultivation effort. And that’s a legitimate concern. As Joe pointed out, without serious effort, your blog won’t succeed.
I guess each business would have to look at the costs and benefits of running a blog and see if it makes sense in their specific case.
Hi Guys
To me blogs work like an early version of Social Media Networks. With a rising infulence of SMO (social media optimization) and SMM (social media marketing) on Search Engines especially Google, blogs have once again have a bigger role to play in coming months. It is absolutely depands on a Search Engine Marketer that how he / she design a SEM campaign by involving and integrating influentinal online marketing channels, including Blogs!
Cheers
Nawaz Shahzad
Seo Consultant
Very good read thanks for the info,i am just a beinner at blogging, i found your blog to b very helpfull thanks.
Great article. I just launched my blog in January 2009, and now trying to build content and readers is difficult as stated. Many of these ideas are extremely useful and I can’t wait to start putting these things into practice.
Thanks for the great information.
I’ve checked out MyBlogLog in the past, but it didn’t seem to generate any real traffic for me. How are you using it exactly?