Increase Your Traffic by Contributing to Other Communities
Summary: I suggest you don’t start building community around your blog from the scratch. Instead, there are better alternatives, like becoming a member of another community and by gaining credibility, laying foundations of your own community faster.
Driving traffic to your blog isn’t easy and it takes much harder work when you are trying to build a brand new community around your work. However, there are ways to increase the traffic from the beginning of your blogging career. As Amber Naslund likes to say, “it’s all about a community.”
You know the feeling when you’re staring at the Google Analytics screen and thinking “I worked my butt off to get this post right and it brought me only 12 new unique visitors! Yeah, 12, not 1,200 or 12,000, just 12! What’s wrong with this?” Then you delve into the analysis of those 12 new leads you managed to attract and work out a plan how to keep them around for as long as possible with your next post.
That’s the scenario you are intimately familiar with when you have a blog on your own domain, less so when you are blogging on servers like WordPress.com or Blogger.com. Quite a few self-made bloggers start like that utilising with this exquisitely wrong approach. What is wrong with it? It’s killing your time and the effort you use up to break through the clutter could be used somewhere else for maximum efficiency.
What should you do then? Think about it for a second. As a blogger, you are after influence and reach. To be an influential blogger, you need to have readers, just like leaders need followers. How do you get them? Turning them over from competition would be a great idea, right? There is one simple advice that I can give when it comes to attracting readership. Go where your prospective readers are instead of forcing them away from their communities to read your blog.
Oh, you were expecting something more profound? Sorry to disappoint. You wouldn’t believe how many authors get this simple rule wrong. They start their own blog on their domain and hope for a miracle instead of determining their target audience first and starting their presence where the readers are. Let’s charge on how it should be done step by step.
Determine who your readers are
Critically important, this one. If you don’t know who you are writing for, don’t bother at all. Try to find out about your target audience as much as you can – what they like, how they think, where they go on the Internet, what are their browsing habits and what do they like for breakfast. Focus on behavioral targeting and the VALS (Values and Lifestyle) instead of the classic demographic-based targeting.
Find out what communities your readers belong to
When you know who they are, you have to find out where the members of your audience spend their time. Statistics tracking visitor counts at various servers and blogs help a lot and media kits from the big media are also quite helpful. If you’re not sure how to approach this analysis when it comes to bloggers, the most direct route is to ask them about their readership straight away. Besides, this data will come in handy when you will want to advertise on their sites.
Contribute to the community
The next step is to start participating in conversation – commenting and reacting to various issues the community has set on to discuss. It’s good to have your own blog (your own domain or not) at this point and extend there on the issues the members of the community care about. It’s also good to disagree with some of the authors because controversy and polarisation create interest. On the other hand, make sure you oppose others based on merit and attack only their arguments. Ad hominem arguments are a no-no!
Lure the readers to your site
There is, in my opinion, nothing with wrong with starting in a community A and then converting it to a community B. As long as the readers care about your blog and you are somehow adding value to their lives, both communities can only enrich their audiences. If the content is good, the readers would be happy, no matter where the discourse is taking place. For the record, I welcome discussion about ethics at this point.
Endure
Once you start getting traffic from other servers and your little community starts building up around you, the most difficult task is still ahead of you. Sustaining the interest of your readers is very important in the later stages. Voila, you have a full-time job as a community manager. Don’t worry, as long as you keep the content interesting, the traffic will keep steadily increasing.
Short case study: Pavel Hacker
Let me share a case study about Pavel Hacker’s social media strategy. When Pavel started blogging, he became a member of the community at respekt.cz, space widely populated by people who consider themselves as intellectuals. The upside is that this community has only a handful of trolls, so the tedious process of reacting on slurry comments is reduced to bare minimum. Given that the respekt.cz is an established media outlet with a steady influx of traffic and that Pavel wrote quality content and investigative analysis, the number of visitors went up steadily.
At the point of time when the number of visitors had reached a plateau, the author analysed the situation and decided to make a switch to his own blog – dvojblog.cz. The basis for the reasoning was simple. The community he was able to attract with his writing has reached a critical mass. So off he went. The question is what did he do to sustain readers’ interest from then on? He keeps supplying us with relevant data about the market and also gives his opinion on the state of affairs of the Czech digital marketing landscape. I wonder how the absolute unique visitors count and his credibility reflected this switch.
Why bother?
The most common objections against starting a blog under the heading of a big media outlet revolve around freedom of choice and control of the visual elements and coding. Perhaps there is a bit of usability ranting involved as well. Notice that none of the objections does not involve content, which is the only thing that can help to attain a bit of credibility and recognition.
Benefits of this strategy, on the other hand, are numerous – large media outlets have a well-established community around them. This creates potential for your content to shine and your voice to be heard. You are also saving time and effort by not having to build the community all by yourself. Another clear benefit is under the heading of quick wins and instant feedback. When the readers find out that you are producing content they care about, they will be active and comment, giving you more ideas for improvement.
All in all, if convenience is your focus, I deem it a good idea to start as a blogger under the heading of a major media outlet and making a switch later. However, if you are a self-made blogger desiring freedom to choose your own visual style and have control over everything from A to Z, then it’s better to download WordPress and start installing.
Image credit: pict_u_re, elvis_payne
