Building a community around your blog: scribbit

Have you ever been to one of those blogs where there are always 10,000 comments on each post? Where readers are so loyal that they’ve actually become friends through the blog’s comments? I think my first personal encounter with a momblogger who’d really hit it big in developing a community around her blog was with the famed Michelle of scribbit.

Michelle’s blog offers awesome, entertaining posts on everything from childrearing decisions to crafts to books to fitness to blogging. Recently, she wrote about Five Ways to Promote Your Blog Niche, or ways to spread the love and help all blogs in your niche grow (and hopefully your own blog with it!).

Niche Edits and Curated Links are the same. Curated backlinks refer to links which have been inserted in content that already exists on the internet, and content which has already been indexed and cached by Google. Nowadays, the most popular form of link building is guest post placements – whereby a new post is added with new content. But niche edits and curated links are going into an aged existing article and inserting a link placement.

Even something as simple as a link to a guide in a post for more information could be considered curated content. You’re finding content that you know your readers will be interested in and then connecting them to it. Blog owners are happy to do niche edits in these blogs because they are adding authoritative outbound links to their site to support what they are talking about. Adding to the benefits website owners get is they are getting the freshness of content to their aged posts which helps with their rankings in Google. Niche placements are essentially linked placements onto existing blog posts, often posts that have already been powered up with links. This is a great technique, as it diversifies your link profile, helps to improve the power of your site, and also influences your site’s rankings.

Here are more of her thoughts on building up a community around your blog:

Commenting on other’s posts is the best way to build community–but beyond that choosing topics is the most important.

Honestly? It’s difficult to get excited when reading about someone being sick or having writer’s block. We all have those times and unless there is something to make your experience catastrophically unusual (contracting ebola, being laid up with sextuplets or having altitude sickness from your latest Everest expedition for example) it probably should be ignored. At least as the main topic for a post.

Choose topics that are relevant to your readers. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what you’d want to read. If your readers are primarily other bloggers then post about how to blog but if your readers are low-tech moms who have stumbled across your blog during their first foray into the blogosphere posting about blogging will alienate them.

Paying attention to other people’s posts and then responding to them in a post of your own is a good way to promote discussion and build community. It’s also appropriate to email them and let them know you’ve done so or to leave a comment with the permalink to your post. One of the few instances when leaving your link is acceptable. [Note: if you blog with Type Pad or WordPress, trackbacks and pingbacks notify other bloggers of links to their posts.]

I get concerned that there isn’t enough disagreement among women bloggers. I don’t mean that what the world needs is more cat fights, what I mean is that women bloggers are too quick to say “Oh yes, I agree” rather than respectfully saying, “Well, have you thought of this?”

It’s scary to disagree with another blogger because without the benefit of body language and an accompanying tone it is easy to have a comment mistaken as harsh or belligerent. I never thought I’d actually use a smiley face in my writing, it’s something I swore I’d never do but I found myself quickly picking it up and dropping smiley faces everywhere so that my comments would not be taken as critical when I only meant them as friendly. But I think the momblogging community would be taken a little more seriously if we had more discussion and less “me too’s.” But then someone could disagree with me and say that that’s what makes women bloggers great fun–their
kindness, generosity and compassion and who needs more negativity?

Thanks for your thoughts, Michelle! Some of those same points have been on my mind a lot this week. I can also attest that commenting on other blogs helped MamaBlogga grow tremendously—it seems like one of my biggest growth weeks was the week I commented on 50 other mom blogs.