How to "Communitize" a Blog

[anand84]

One of the websites I own is an entertainment and gossip blog. Now since I am getting decent traffic on this(primarily search engine and a sizeable loyal readers too), I am looking to take it one step forward and make the search traffickers into loyal visitors by offering them some more value.

One constraint I have is that I do not too much of resources in terms of people and capital. In this limited capacity, how do you suggest I take about achieving my plan.

Thanks

[anand84]

any ideas? :O

[Yoshimi]

What sort of value would your users appreciate? There are so many things that you could do, but only a small proportion of these would be valuable for your audience, and only you know your audience.

If you already have a quantity of loyal readers why not send them an email asking for their suggestions, something simple such as

Thank you for your continued support over the last X months, we at Examplesite.com have been thinking of different ways for us to provide you with the best and most up to the minute gossip, but we know that there are plenty of things that you would like to see from us over the coming year, so we're giving you the chance to offer suggestions on what we should be doing to improve the site.

Please complete the attached questionnaire, or reply to this email with your suggestions & ideas (or do both if you would prefer). The best suggestion will be implemented on the site and the person who suggested it will be sent *prize here*

Additionally we are looking for additional authors to the site. If you would like to contribute to Examplesite.com please email us at the following address

[rogerd]

A really simple start would be to focus on growing your comment community by making commenting easy and visible, and offering the option of email notification for new comments. I find the latter quite effective in drawing me back to a blog where I have posted a comment and sometimes eliciting more participation.

Blog comments are still a limited form of community, so a simple forum install might be the next level, particularly if you can use the blog posts as seeds for forum discussions.

[JS_Harris]

Check out your immediate competition, do it one step better, rinse and repeat. Simple enough?

[jbinbpt]

I agree with rogerd but would make it into an opt-in newsletter format detailing the new topics.

[anand84]

I was just browsing through the Buddypress homepage. Does anyone here have any idea about whether I could integrate Buddypress with the WP blog and thus making a community out of the blog?

[nealrodriguez]

you'll require wordpress mu

[wangjianshuo]

Good question, anand84. I think you should think about it when the blog is already big. I have some experience regarding it.

1. To have a blog and a forum sit side by side is not a good idea. Maybe it is just me, but I tried, and people only comment on blog, and I have no time to moderate the BBS. This is a problem

2. Blog readers and community users are two type of people. You need to think carefully about how to change them from one type to another.