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- Tactical Tips for Building an Online Community
This guest post is by Jim Nelson of Tripawds.com.
With all the wonderful feedback on my guest post about how we utilize WordPress multisite and discussion forums to build community for our rather niche market, I thought I might offer some detail about specific tactics and network plugins we use to keep members informed, active and increasing in number.
Here are just a few social media nuts and bolts that keep the Tripawds Blogs community together. These methods work for us, as proven by growing membership and increased traffic to featured blogs and archived content.
My recommendations are by no means the only solutions for generating measurable success, though. Please do comment below with your own recommendations for encouraging social interaction on membership sites.
How to build community on membership sites
- The freemium model: Make it free, with perks for paid members. Offer free blogs and use a Supporter plugin to enable enhanced features, or set membership levels for accessing premium content.
- Create featured blogs: Post regularly to a set of sites targeting specific topics. Example: Tripawds followers will find weekly posts in separate blogs for Gear, Gifts, Nutrition, Downloads, and Amazon Reviews.
- Install Recent Global Posts widgets: Display recent posts from all blogs across your network, and bump your featured blog posts to pin them throughout the day.
- Update topics for featured blogs: Create specific forum topics for each of your sites and reply whenever your blog posts get kicked out of recent posts widgets. Encourage subscribing to topics for notification of new blog posts.
- Include member and blog directories: Provide searchable directories of all users and blogs. Edit directory pages to include descriptions and avatars of featured blogs and site administrators.
- Provide global site search: The WordPress admin bar only allows searching of the blog being viewed. Use a plugin that enables searching of all blogs and provide instructions for searching discussion forums and member or blog directories.
- Create a blog ring: Show network-wide global content in the headers and footers of all blogs across your network. Include links to your forums and directories or featured blogs. Here’s how we did it.
- Create a default New Blog template: Install a plugin that lets you activate a default theme for all new blogs complete with with settings, blogroll links, and text widgets, and use a Supporter plugin that lets you enable premium themes for paid subscribers.
- Welcome all new bloggers: In addition to customizing the default first “Hello World” comment from your WordPress settings, reply to the first real post published on new blogs. Also create a forum discussion for welcoming new bloggers, and update the topic after first posts get published. Encourage members to subscribe to topic for notification of new blogs.
- Thank paying members: If you offer paid premium accounts, create a forum topic for announcing all new Supporter blogs.
- Encourage commenting on blogs: Create global RSS feeds for all blogs and comments to facilitate the following of member activities.
- Display recent posts in the Dashboard: Use the Multisite Dashboard Feed Widget to show recent posts from all blogs in every user dashboard.
- Create a custom menu: Use a theme that supports custom menus and link to featured blogs and specific forums to make network navigation easy.
- Foster friendships: A Friends plugin can be used to help members connect and show their support of others with widgets on their blogs.
- Provide technical support: Create a forum dedicated to answering tech support questions, and have a featured blog for posting announcements of new features and how to videos.
- Use a discreet pop-up: Direct new visitors from external sites to valuable content or welcome them with encouragment to join using a Popover plugin.
- Branch out: Offer podcasts of interviews with community members or discussions about pertinent topics with the tools available at BlogTalkRadio. Direct traffic to a dedicated forum or featured blog for all show archives and the upcoming program schedule.
- Keep it fun: Start an “Anything Goes” forum for allowing members to rant and rave about whatever they wish. And consider creating a fun blog offering some sort of comic relief. Tripawds has the KillBarney blog which follows the travels of our dog Jerry’s favorite toy as it visits members and their dogs.
- Teach members to help: Encouage members to engage in all aspects of the community by showing them how to post in forums or publish a blog. Provide information about RSS feeds and how to use a reader, tell them how to subscribe or watch forum topics, and provide them with links to popular posts that should be shared with all new members.
Most importantly, engage with your community. Maintaining a multisite network for any cause can be time consuming. The more passionate you are about your work the easier it will be. Lack of passion is easily identified by members—especially paying ones—and can result in quick burnout. I have certain boilerplate comments with links to our most frequently recommended content, but I rarely use them and always edit them when I do to avoid appearing disingenuous.
Epilogue
Examples for all of the above tactics in use can be seen at my blog. The BuddyPress plugin is also available for building community among WordPress multisite members, complete with groups, forums and activity streams.
For those like me who have never played around with BuddyPress, however, I hope the tips above help you make the most of your multisite network. The vast majority of plugins I use to accomplish everything I’ve discussed come from WPMU Dev. If others have suggestions for different plugins or arguments for using BuddyPress, please share them in the comments.
Jim Nelson is co-founder of the Tripawds Blogs community and an active member of the WPMU Dev discussion forums. He and his wife Rene were featured in “Nature, Why We love Cats and Dogs” on PBS with their three-legged dog Jerry.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Tactical Tips for Building an Online Community
Переслать - You Have to Write about Making Money Blogging to Make Money Blogging [Misconceptions New Bloggers Have #3]
This post is the third in a series examining misconceptions and myths about blogging that many new (and some experienced) bloggers have about blogging.
We’ve already discussed the misconceptions that blogging takes super-human effort (or is easy!) and that you must post every day on your blog.
Today’s misconception is all about money. It’s one I hear every day as I observe what people say about making money from blogging.
- Only people who sell make money blogging resources make money blogging.
- The most profitable topics to blog about are blogging tips or making money blogging.
- It’s impossible to make money blogging on “normal,” everyday topics.
Why this myth exists
The reality is that most people who talk about making money blogging are those trying to create a name for themselves in that very niche. I guess part of creating authority and credibility is to show what you do, so bloggers in this niche are often not averse to sharing their earnings.
On the flip-side, many bloggers who are making a living from blogging in other niches either don’t have an avenue through which to talk about it, or don’t want to (for privacy reasons or because they don’t want to alert the competition to their success).
As a result, the impression that new bloggers often get is that nobody is making money blogging except for those writing about it.
The reality of the Make Money Blogging/Blog Tips niche
Lets look at a few of the realities of working in this niche.
- You can make good money blogging about blogging. It’s true—there is money to be made in this space. Teaching others to blog and to make a living from it can be profitable. I make enough to live (and some) on from ProBlogger each month, and know of at least five or six other bloggers in the niche who would be at a similar level. As with any topic that has anything to do with money, this can be a lucrative niche.
- It is a crowded niche when it comes to finding readers. As a result of the success of some (and the public broadcasting of the results), many others have joined the hunt for market share in this space. I’ve not seen figures on it, but I suspect the result of this is that it’s one of the more crowded niches. As a result, breaking into the niche and making a name for yourself can be tough.
- It is a crowded niche when it comes to products. If you want to monetize in the Make Money Blogging niche by releasing a product, there are not only a lot of other blogs, but a lot of products you’ll need to compete with. Not a day goes by when I’m not approached by another blogger wanting me to promote their ebook, course, or tool… Again, it’s hard to stand out, and I suspect that many bloggers have simply bought enough products already, and are not that interested in buying more.
- There’s a lot of suspicion about the topic. Due to the nature of the topic, there’s rightly a lot of suspicion about it. Unfortunately over the years, this niche has attracted its fair share of dubious characters and those who have used less-than-ethical-and-transparent tactics to make a name for themselves. This has created a lot of suspicion among the general public about the niche. I’m kind of happy about this suspicion, as I’ve seen a lot of people ripped off, but it does make this a tricky space to operate in. My recent banning (and then reinstatement) from YouTube seems to have occurred because many in the niche were tarred with the same brush (most of the accounts terminated had videos including the words “make money online”).
- Bloggers are perhaps more reluctant to spend money than other audiences. Let’s be clear: I’m not calling you cheap! But one of the factors to consider in this niche is that the barriers to entry for the blogosphere (as opposed to other pastimes) are extremely low. You can set up a blog for free, there are thousands of blogging themes, tools, and how-to instructions out there for free, and there’s plenty of free help within the niche. As a result, many bloggers don’t come to their blogs with the expectation of having to spend much money. This can impact the bottom line for those trying to operate in this niche (I’ll touch on this more below).
The reality of other niches
I’m not going to pretend that all other niches are lucrative. I know a lot of bloggers with decent readerships who struggle to monetize, since their topics don’t lend themselves to monetization. However, my experience shows me that there is certainly a lot of opportunity in other niches, and that, in many ways, they can be easier to monetize than the blogging tips niche.
Personally, I’ve found it a lot easier to build significantly larger audiences and higher profits in other niches. My photography blog has around five to six times the readership of ProBlogger, and is more than five to six times as profitable.
The photography niche is very competitive, but there are some other upsides including:
- The market place is bigger: There are a lot more people around who own cameras than have blogs.
- The audience is more of a spending audience: I mentioned above that because blogging has low barriers to entry, bloggers are often less likely to spend money. Photography is a little different. People increasingly are spending thousands of dollars on cameras, they buy photography magazines and books, they enrol in courses … there’s just more of a willingness to spend in that niche.
- The audience isn’t as suspicious: While people still have a healthy suspicion of online marketers in this space, there are fewer barriers on this front.
This assessment isn’t just relevant to the photography space—plenty of other niches are similarly larger and have audiences that are more used to spending.
What should you blog about?
This probably isn’t the place for a full exploration of how to choose a niche for your blog (I’ll include some links below for more on that). However, my general advice on this is to choose a topic on which there’s a healthy demand for content (it’s hard to have a successful blog on a topic that nobody but you is interested in), and which you know something about (and preferably have a passion or interest in).
My co-author on the ProBlogger Book, Chris Garrett, presented last year at the ProBlogger training day in Melbourne, and used a slide which I think is a great visual on this point:
Further reading on choosing a niche to blog about
- How to Choose a Niche Topic for Your Blog: written in 2006 but still pretty much how I’d do it
- Make Money Online Blogs – Should You Start One and How to Choose a Profitable Niche: a handy video post
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Переслать - Is Collaboration the Key to Blogging Success?
This guest post is by Onibalusi from YoungPrePro.com.
I was looking up to the skies a few days ago and what I saw made me see how organized even animals can be. I saw around 50 birds flying from one tree to another and by the time they returned, each had a stick in its mouth—they were working on building a house.
This taught me a very important lesson about blogging, and made me realize that every single thing around us can teach us to be a better blogger.
If those birds could work in groups just to be able to build their house, then what about us bloggers? Why can’t we effectively use the power of collaboration to build our blogs?
The truth is that the number of new bloggers trying to build a successful blog single-handedly nowadays is stunning. We know that there are over 152 million blogs in the blogosphere, but we just can’t figure out how many are successes—as far as we’re concerned, the majority of blogs online are failures.
How do we then stand out as bloggers? What can we do to boost our blogs’ success rates, and differentiate our blogs from the 152 million other blogs in the blogosphere? The truth is we’ve heard the answer to this puzzle a gazillion times, but we’ve really never considered it to be that important.
The key is collaboration.
The importance of collaboration
You’ve probably heard that you should collaborate to build a successful blog at least once, but why on earth should you even try that? After all, you can claim all the credit for building a great blog alone!
Build a successful blog with super-human power
That power could be speed, strength, or everything else that’s involved. If you take a look at the case of the 50 birds I was talking about, you’ll notice how easily these birds can build whatever house they want to build in a much shorter period of time than if the work was done only by one of them.
It might be difficult for you to kickstart your blog, but the strength, cooperation, and wisdom of 50 additional bloggers can’t be compared. I know it is almost impossible to get that many bloggers to support you, especially if you’re very new. But the truth is that you don’t need 50 bloggers to support you to build a successful blog—three bloggers working with you towards the success of your blog will make a whole lot of difference.
Increase your reputation overnight
A lot of people will have told you it takes a lifetime to build a reputation, but do you know you can build a great reputation in a matter of years with the right tactics?
By associating with the right groups of bloggers at the right time, you can easily build a successful blog without moving an inch. Sometimes, all you need is just the endorsement of a highly successful blogger in your niche. Even if you don’t get the endorsement of an A-list blogger, getting the endorsement of two or three bloggers who are at the same level as you will make a whole lot of difference.
Social proof
The funny thing about getting people to endorse you is that you don’t need hundred people to endorse you before you succeed. You only need one or two targeted people.
We human beings are made in such a way that we are easily influenced by things and people around us, and you can use this to your advantage. If you can get the support and endorsement of two to three other bloggers in your niche, you can easily use that as social proof to get more bloggers to endorse you, and that endorsement from those two bloggers might mean the difference between readers thinking you’re cool, or that you don’t know what you’re talking
Ways to collaborate with other bloggers to achieve success
When people hear about collaborating with other bloggers in their niche, the first thing they try to do is send an email to a few bloggers asking them to be friends or asking the blogger to set up a regular link exchange campaign with them. If that’s what you’re about to do, then you might as well forget it. Below are a few ways you can collaborate with other bloggers in your niche.
Be there for them
We bloggers are one of the smartest people (okay, I’m a blogger and I’m baised—but my point is we also have common sense), so we take notice when people do something for us.
If you tell me to link to you today, and you tell me to tweet your post tomorrow, and you tell me to review your product next week, but I haven’t seen you share my posts or do me any favor in the past two months, do you think I will do that for you? The next thing I will tell you is, “No thanks, that’s a great offer but I don’t think it will work with my audience”—even if it will. But when you’re “always” spreading the word about me and telling people how awesome I am, even if I have a million followers and you only have one, I will be happy to spread the word to my followers about you.
Appreciate their work
When was the last time you sent an email to a blogger thanking them for their blog post? Just try to do it once or twice and you will notice that you will be able to get the attention of that favorite blogger of yours.
We bloggers love it if people say good things about us. We love to be appreciated, and some of us even love to be flattered. Giving us what we want will only put you on our radars.
I’m not trying to say that you should email a blogger and start telling him or her that they’re your god—that will only raise an extra flag and put you on the “beware-of list” for that blogger. The best thing to do is to send a simple and polite email, perhaps highlighting interesting points in one of their articles so as to show the blogger that you really read their posts.
Even though there are media like Twitter and Facebook, I still think the best medium to use for this kind of contact is email. I know that Twitter might be the easiest way to get in touch with your favorite blogger, but that is also its weakness. A lot of people use it, but very few people use email to send heartfelt thank you messages to bloggers (or at least, few compared to Twitter). The end result is that it might take sometime for the blogger to get to your email, but since you don’t really need a reply, it’s okay. And it’s enough to get the blogger to notice you.
Beware of this!
Those birds were helping each other.
We must do the same as a blogger.
You won’t go far by trying to exploit your fellow bloggers for attention, or links, or anything else, so don’t even try to go that route. It might work in the beginning, but it will end up biting you.
The best way to succeed in your endeavors as a blogger is doing everything you’re doing genuinely. When you focus your efforts not only on contributing value to your readers, but also to your fellow bloggers, you will end up getting great results for it.
Onibalusi Bamidele is the founder of YoungPrePro.com, a blog where he teaches people how to write for traffic and money. Get his free 7 series eCourse on How to Build a Successful Online Writing Business
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Is Collaboration the Key to Blogging Success?
Переслать - Dancing Naked Down the Street
This guest post is by Carol White Llewellyn of Family, by Choice.
On July 7, Going Gonzo, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Blog, by Enzo F. Cesario, struck a chord with me.
His post reminded me of a creative writing course I took with the indomitable Dr. Abraham Rothberg, who passed away earlier this year. Dr. Rothberg was a wise man who advised, “when you write well, you’ll know it. You’ll feel more naked than if you walked nude down Fifth Avenue in New York City.” The Bronx native went on to assert that few New Yorkers would even notice. I’d add that writing well is really more like dancing naked down the street. When you do that, people do notice.
Copyright Sergey Peterman - Fotolia.com
Cesario speaks about the importance of writing honestly … writing uncensored … writing naked. I admit that I have a hard time doing this. It’s only in rare and unguarded moments that my writing dances naked. But I always feel it when it happens.
Sometimes writing naked means voicing criticism. For those of us indoctrinated with the adage “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” criticism may never become integral to our writing. I like to think that’s okay. I can’t help but feel that if one writer doesn’t feel comfortable in critique mode, there’s probably all too many who relish it.
Sometimes it means sharing personal information and feelings. Like mine, your family mantra may scream, “It’s nobody else’s business what happens in our family.” To write “the truest sentence you know,” as Ernest Hemingway always advised, you have to overcome this.
Often, it means breaching your own privacy. I had my online identity stolen a year ago by hacks trying to scam funds from friends and followers, so I fear opening myself to more of the same. Jump the fear.
As for editing, sorry Enzo, I disagree. Less is more. It polishes the diamond. There was one adoption post on my blog, Family, by Choice that I rewrote three times before I felt okay to share it.
There are some topics, and some posts, that lend themselves more to openness. It’s the very rare writer whose words are an open door to their soul. At best, most good writers have to be satisfied with a swinging door.
Be prepared for the sting. You can’t dance naked without running into some hornets. The very first post I wrote on adoption was slammed by an anti-adoption advocate. She’d been adopted by an abusive family and she was vehemently opposed to the institution. After I got over the shock, I was delighted that she’d taken the time to write. I invited her to offer a counter-view. She didn’t. At least I knew the post hadn’t been met with apathy.
All you can do, day after day, week after week, is put yourself out there, warts and all. And on occasion, when the weather’s right and there’s a song in your esprit, your words will dance naked down the street. You’ll be surprised how many will notice.
Does your writing dance naked down the street?
Carol White Llewellyn writes the blog Family, by Choice for which she also produces a cable and online TV program, and The Finger Lakes Travel Maven (travelmaven.wordpress.com), which incorporates occasional video and for which she has begun producing cable TV specials.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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