Understanding communities

If you’re a blogger, then you already know a bit about community building. The people who read your blog are your community of readers! However, one of the things that I’ve learned from my studies of successful blogs and internet marketers are that most heavy hitting websites contain multiple communities. Here is an account of the different kinds of communities you may find at your site or other sites that you visit.

Community One - Your readers

Like I said before, the people who visit your site are your community of readers. Of course, readers are a very important community… without an audience, you’d be writing to yourself! Readers are interested in the topic that you write about, and, based on the strength of your writing and your connection with the reading community, they may be attached enough to your particular brand that they’ll visit you over and over again. Readers may not necessarily participate any more than visiting your site, but your goal as a writer and webmaster is to inspire your readers to participate as much as possible.

Community Two - Your commentators

Commentators are people who are interested in the topic of your site and who are willing to participate in the commentating community by leaving feedback on your articles or interacting with the other commentators on your articles. The topics of conversation generally don’t stray far from the topic of the article. You can recognize frequent commentators by installing a plugin that displays their names in your side bar, or perhaps by inviting them to submit content for your website.

Community Three - Forums

Forum readers have a high level of interest in the topic of the particular forums that they frequent. Forums are like an open discussion on the web. Forum members can introduce new topics, and other members can chime in to the topic with their own questions or opinions. In case you don’t know, you have the ability to host a forum on your own site! This is a great way to stimulate cross-topics of conversation that are related to the topic or niche of your site, but not necessarily limited to the content of your articles (although if you host your own forum, you may run across some great content ideas!) For ideas and more information on hosting your own forum, check out VBulletin.

Community Four - Your email list

The people who subscribe to your website’s email list are generally extremely interested in your thoughts and ideas on the topic or niche that you cover. You may find that some members of your email list also participate in your forum, or actively leave comments on your articles, making them members of multiple communities on your website. However, there’s a critical element involved with being an email list member that you may not find in the other communities… an extremely high level of trust. When someone entrusts you with their email address, here’s what they’re saying:

I’m so interested in what you have to write about that I’ll allow you to email your thoughts and ideas directly to me, and I trust that you won’t abuse the privilege of having such an intimate and personal way to connect with me.

Email list members can be the most responsive of all of the communities you manage. You can inspire readers to join your list by incentivizing them with extra content and special access to material that they wouldn’t normally get as a regular reader. It’s always a good idea to keep the trust of your email list members by being careful to only email with appropriate, well thought-out messages and by not sharing or selling your list to other marketers. For more ideas and information on managing an email list, check out AWeber, an autoresponder and email list building program.

Community Five - Your social networks

This one is sort of a bonus, since so many people are members of social networks such as MySpace, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, and others. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the visitors at your site in particular, but any network or community that you belong to is one that you can potentially leverage for traffic.

The members of your social network most likely know you personally in some way. They may or may not be interested in the topic of your website… but they may trust you enough based on your social interactions to potentially support your site by becoming a reader. There are lots of articles that offer more advanced advice on how to leverage social networks for traffic, but the main thing to remember is that it’s always a good idea to be careful to not abuse the trust of your personal relationships by being too aggressive in promoting your website.

Bringing it all together

Ultimately, you’ll need to find a balance in working with all of these communities to bring success to your website. You’ve got to have a skill to meet people where they’re at. Not all of your readers want to comment on your articles. Not all of your email list members will visit your site every day. Hopefully, though, understanding each community will help you to find the best way to work with them to achieve the kind of participation that you need at your website.