Your main aim is to transform silent spectators (also known as lurkers) into active participants of your community. Users who interact with your site and feel like they’re part of a community are far more likely to contribute and promote your site (as they feel it’s their community).
Below I’ve listed a variety of effective ways to achieve a greater level of active participation from your readers. You are not expected to do these activities
all at once. Instead, try some and, as usual, measure the response from your community. Then iterate. Each blog is a unique snowflake, so you need to verify what actually works for you and your site.
Also keep in mind that your time is limited, so you may not be able to carry out many of these activities on an ongoing basis, even if they’ve proven to be effective for you. Prioritize and aim for tasks that have a great reward-to-effort ratio.
• Write great content. Remember how it’s all about your content? Com- pelling, interesting, unique, useful, and/or controversial content will always attract comments, engage readers, and help you build a commu- nity. For a good example of how unique, noteworthy content helps you build a community, check out LessWrong,1 a blog that attracts a large community of people who are interested in rationality.
• Ask for comments. As we’ve touched on before, calls to action are a very powerful tool. In your posts, explicitly ask your readers to share their opinions or ideas in the comments section. Some folks will do just that, simply because you suggested it. The sole inclusion of the word comment or comments in your post will statistically increase your blog’s commenting rate.
• Reply to questions. If you receive questions or requests for clarification in your comments section, try to be helpful and reply to those queries with a comment of your own. Nobody likes to be ignored.
• Credit updates and corrections. We have discussed this before, but always credit commenters when updating or correcting a post thanks to their suggestions.
• Praise insightful comments. Don’t just reply to commenters who ask you a question. Instead, take the time to publicly thank insightful commenters for their participation and contribution by replying to them. Acknowledging those who share valuable information will encourage them to continue contributing (and others to join in). Positive reinforcement can do wonders for your community.
• Don’t provide all the answers. In your posts, leave some space for people to add more to the discussion.
• Ask questions in your posts. Get people to interact with you by letting them answer questions you may have. These can be generic ones, such 160
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Chapter 9. Building a Community Around Your Blogas, “What do you think about this?” or specific ones, such as, “And that’s my story. At what age did you start programming?”
• Ask for feedback. This tip has been mentioned before in the book, but it warrants repeating. Engage your readers by asking them for feedback about how you are doing and what sort of material they’d like to see more of. Don’t do this weekly, just every once in a while, as it can help bring out lurkers that you haven’t heard from before. Don’t forget surveys either. • Poll your readers. Along the same train of thought, you can poll your readers about topics that they’re interested in on a fairly frequent basis. Just remember to share the results of such polls with your community in a new post, adding your own reflections on the results and inviting readers to share theirs.
• Answer commenters’ questions in new posts. If a particularly good question has been posted by someone in the comment section, you may want to provide an extensive answer in a new post. Always credit the commenter with the original question and thank him or her for the question in your post. This will make the commenter feel special, and you may be rewarded with a backlink (if the commenter also has a blog).
• Showcase commenters. Check to see if your blogging engine has a plugin or feature to showcase your top—and more recent—commenters on your home page or sidebar. People may try to game this for a backlink, but overall you’ll still get an increased level of participation.
• Promote commenters to bloggers. Publicly or privately invite your best regulars to become guest bloggers or to contribute as coauthors for an article on a topic they have shown expertise in.
• Post a collection of the best comments your site has received. Once your blog is well established, consider periodically publishing a digest of the most insightful and informative comments you’ve received on your blog. Credit the authors and link back to their blogs or sites, if provided. • Comment on your commenters’ blogs. This can be time consuming, but
you can greatly increase the chances that commenters will be back if you visit their own blogs and leave comments there (assuming their blogs are in the same niche). The concept of reciprocity is practically hardwired in the human brain.
• Reply to emails. Fans of your blog will feel a personal connection to you. Much like a celebrity, you may not know your fans, but they know you.
So do not ignore their emails. Instead, try to be kind, friendly, and appreciative of their enthusiasm for your work.
• Create a serene environment. Use comment moderation and reminders to keep discourse civil so as to keep any form of harassment at bay. If your blogging engine doesn’t support comment moderation and you are not opposed to it, you can always remove harassing comments immedi- ately after they are posted. (More on these types of comments in Section 9.3, Forms of Criticism, on page 164.)
• Help your commenters. If a commenter of yours has a site or product that is particularly relevant to your audience, feel free to mention or review it as a means of showcasing the commenter’s work to your readers. Acknowledge that you are mentioning/reviewing—unsolicited—a site or product you found by checking out a commenter and that you will contin- ue to do so in the future. The commenter will no doubt feel appreciated, you may gain a business connection, and this generous act may motivate more people to stop by and comment.
• Challenge your readers. Ask your readers engaging, difficult questions or puzzles for which you have devised an interesting solution. Make such questions relevant to your niche, and they will no doubt generate a series of responses on your blog and elsewhere. (Your readers may also show you a much better solution than the one you came up with initially.) • Organize contests and giveaways. Readers love these kinds of posts, as
they provide them with a chance to benefit directly from your blog. As you’ll learn in Chapter 12, Taking Full Advantage of Your Blog, on page 215, these are easier to organize when the product you’re giving away is provided to you for free. Regardless of how you obtain the goods, you can further engage your commenters by selecting judges for your contests from among your best commenters.
• Highlight your commenters’ expertise. Organize an Ask Me Anything (AMA) or Ask an Expert series of posts with the most insightful experts who hang out on your blog. Once a month, you could solicit questions from your readers on a specific topic that will then be answered in a post by an expert you picked from your commenters. This encourages commenting all around, but it’s best done when you already have a decent following. • Go where the comments are. By following the promotional workflow
described in the previous chapters, you will sometimes end up attracting more comments on social news sites like Reddit and Hacker News than 162
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Chapter 9. Building a Community Around Your Blogfour hundred comments on Reddit but only thirty or so on my blog. That’s OK. Those are huge communities whose members may have higher loyalty to fellow members than to you. Read those offsite comments and, if nec- essary, feel free to occasionally engage commenters on such sites too. (Just keep in mind that you are now playing an away game.)
• Tell readers that they are part of a community. Use words like we, this
community, participants on this site, and so on. This will help readers
identify more with the inevitable community that will form around your blog. Then lead the community by organizing events that help participants bond and feel like they’re a part of something meaningful.