Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Blogs are great, that we know. They organize information and personal stories chronologically and in categories. They are relatively easy to develop. You really don’t have to know anything about the Internet or about coding to even get one started. Heck you can set one up, throw some ads on it, write your life story, and make money, for free! (Minus of course the painstaking hours it takes building content, and even that you can find for free at places like wikipedia and article sites.)

But blogs can be so much more than just a place to easily organize your life story that people may or may not want to read. If your building a news resource, unlike newspapers, your readers have the opportunity to comment right on your article in real-time. There’s essentially not waiting for the “write to the editor” editing process. Those people that write on your blog post in real-time can become your community.

But what are you doing for your community in return?

First off, hopefully you’re providing some sort of useful writing, be it inspirational or entertaining, or just providing some inside knowledge you have to help them build a skill they’ve always wanted to build. This is the first step to giving back to a community that may or may not be giving back to you.

But you can do so much more than just providing useful content.

I was recently tipped off to a great idea over at Flee The Cube about showing off your top commentors and letting their html links, if they choose to provide one, be linked through their names. Although I couldn’t get the widget he used to work on my blog I was able to track one down via Google that does essentially the same showing of top commentors.

What this does is encourage your readers to leave feedback and comments and build a dialogue after your posts by providing them with great Google juice from the link and also traffic juice if you receive enough hits on your site.

Of course at first you’ll need to have some commentable posts that people care to read and leave feedback on. However, once you get going, and enough people are inclined to leave feedback on your blog and read your posts, and leave more feedback, you’ll begin to see conversations within your post comments that may or may not pertain directly to the post. Either way, it allows thoughts to flow and it provides your readers a service.

And you can do even more for your readers….

Not only can you show off your top commentors by giving them good visible link spots, you can also join a service that is really beginning to take off in the blogosphere. It’s called My Blog Log and it helps you automagically build a community around your blog.

Some of you may have noticed recently in the far right sidebar I’ve added a box that displays pictures of people who are “Recent Readers” of Board Shorts and Business Suits. Those pictures are of people who also have My Blog Log accounts and profiles. Every time they visit my blog their picture gets moved to the top. If they view it enough times they are automagically added to my My Blog Log community of readers.

Or, even better, they can join my community by going to my profile at My Blog Log and joining right away. Something I encourage all of you to do.

By having people join my community they’ll then have it noted on their profiles that they are in my blogs community giving me just one more opportunity to attract a visitor to my blog. In return my readers get their profile and thus a link to their profile in the top every time they visit.

Lastly, don’t be a spectator!

What I mean is don’t sit around and watch your readers leave comments. If you do they won’t stick around very long leaving comments. They’ll read what they want and peace out. Of course if you have a massive amount of traffic your readers will just leave comments to get a free link back to their own site. If this was the case you probably wouldn’t be reading a post about building a community.

So comment back. Even if the comments aren’t directed towards you. Join the banter. The great thing about blogs is there’s a relatively easy to get a hold of person on the other end of all the writing and if you make an appearance in your comments section people will feel a connection, no matter how small it is, and want to come back. They’ll feel you care, and you should care!

Blogs are expanding from just an easy way to organize and publish content to a way to build a community on the web. You don’t want to get left behind so help build your community by using the free tools that people make available to you. You’ll be happy you did.