According to White (2006), an ‘online community’ refers to a community who interact online with some bounded set of technologies. Thus, a blogging community consists of bloggers whose blogs are interconnected and they interact with one another, forming a social network.
There are several ways in which one can build a blogging community. The following guidelines are tips and tricks on how to create one and increase traffic/readership at the same time.
ü Comments: This is the first place to start off and leaving a comment in other blogs is a good way to get interactivity. Ask a question and interact with other readers to get the ball rolling (Rowse, 2009).
ü Link: Linking out to other blogs is the essence of the spirit of generosity that is needed to have a vibrant online blog community (Bauer, 2006). This can be done by adding other blogs to your own blog roll and they will most likely return the favour.
ü Reader centred/entertaining posts: Publishing posts about the readers can be done via answering their burning questions and inviting or posting up questions for discussion. This allows for more feedback. Also, entertaining posts will keep them coming back for more.
ü Interactive tools: Posting quizzes, surveys, and weekly polls will allow readers to feel more connected as they are able to participate in the interactive projects.
ü Promote: One’s blog can be promoted via other media forms such as Twitter. This is useful to increase followers and traffic.
Besides that, there are numerous blogging communities which exist in the blogosphere today. White (2006) provides three main types of blogging communities which posses their own individual pattern.
The Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community
Figure 1.1 Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community
(Source: White, 2006)
This community revolves around one main blogger or organization in which its readers recognize and revisit to comment and get to know the blogger and commentors better.
The Central Connecting Topic Community
Figure 1.2 Topic Centric Community
(Source: White, 2006)
The network of blogs in this community is linked by a common passion or topic, be it food, travel, fashion, or politics. Thus, these bloggers are linked together via hyperlinks, blog rolls, tags, comments and so on.
The Boundaried Community
Figure 1.3 Boundaried Community
(Source: White, 2006)
The boundaried community consists of a collection of blogs and readers hosted on a single website or platform. One can join this community simply by signing up. Once a blog is created, he/she can get access to other built-in tools such as discussion boards, instant messaging, etc.
(Source: tumblr.com)
The boundaried community that I am familiar with is Tumblr. Tumblr is a tumbleblog, a short-form blog. Users are able to post texts, images, videos, links, quotes, and audio to their site. They can also follow other members and reblog images or quotes, as well as ‘like’ other users’ posts.
References:
Bauer, E 2006, How to build blog traffic – community, BlogHer, 25 July, viewed 30 September 2010,<http://www.blogher.com/node/8128>
Rowse, D 2009, 8 Tips for building community on your blog, Problogger, 28 February, viewed 30 Spetember 2010,<http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/28/8-tips-for-building-community-on-your-blog/>
White, N 2006, Blogs and community – launching a new paradigm for online community?, The knowledge tree, viewed 30 September 2010, <http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community>
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