PB060: Why You Should Make Building Community a Priority in Your Blogging

Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes. How to Make Your Blog Stronger by Interacting With Your Readers Today's episode is about how to deepen relationships with your readers on your blog. One of the most common questions I get from my readers is "how do I get my readers to interact with me?" Not all bloggers spend a lot of time trying to build community but most of the successful bloggers I know of do. This is the first of a two-part episode. Today is about why building engagement with your readers matters so much. In This Episode You can listen to today's episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we'd also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today's episode: Why blogging is more than just producing content Why you might want to encourage interaction from your readers My personal story about what has and hasn't worked for me in growing community on my blogs How building community makes your blog more useful for your readers How building community builds social proof for your blog How building community makes your blog more attractive to advertisers How having a community can make it easier to create and sell products How having a community can make your blog more attractive to sell How having a community can create an army of advocates and evangelists How having a community can help you generate new content How building community can improve your personal blogging satisfaction The costs you might encounter in building a community around your blog Further Reading and Resources for How to Make Your Blog Stronger by Interacting With Your Readers Episode 35: How to Turn Surfers into Blog Readers by Building a Sticky Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 60 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and today I want to talk about building community on your blog, deepening reader engagement with your readers, and particularly I want to focus on some reasons why this is important. This is a two part podcast series. I'm going to follow it up with some really practical tips on how to build community, but I think it's really important first to address some of those mind shift paradigms around building community on your blog. You can find today's show notes at problogger.com/podcast/60. Creating great content, finding an audience, building engagement, monetizing your blog. This is ProBlogger. Do you ever feel as a blogger like you're talking to an empty room? I know I have. Day after day we publish our blog posts only to have them greeted by [bird sounds]. If that's how you feel, you can relate to that, then I want you to know that you are not alone. In fact, one of the most common questions that I get from readers is how do I get my readers to interact with me? How do I get them to leave a comment, to acknowledge that I've even written something? In the next couple of episodes, I want to talk a little bit about how to build community on your blog. Before I do it, I want to talk a little bit about why it's so important to deepen reader engagement because not all bloggers actually spend a whole heap of time on this. There are different approaches to this, I'll say that right up front. I know someone like Seth Godin on his blog, doesn't have comments, doesn't respond to comments, and doesn't engage on Twitter. In an engaging way, I think his only social media presence is broadcasting and he's got his own good reasons for that. I think for most bloggers, there's a really good case for building community on your blog. There's no one way to do it, but in most cases, I think most of the successful bloggers that I've come across have invested time and energy into building community on their blogs.