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Day 37 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Setting the tone of your site early can be essential to long term success of your blog.  The atmosphere of your blog will help determine the nature of your readers.  And the nature of your readers will determine whether you build a viable supportive blog community or not.

Positive Posts

One thing you can do to improve your community is to set a positive tone on your blog.  If you write more content about opportunities and the better aspects of something it will induce a more positive tone in reader comments.  A post about “10 Great Google Secrets That Can Save You Time” will encourage your readers to include some tips of their own, benefiting everyone.   A post that says “10 Reasons Why Google Sucks” will do little more than inspire rants from your readers about their own bad Google experiences.  And no one wants to read that.

Stop The Spam Early

To build a positive community, you need to do a good job of policing your site.  Even a little spam or blatant self promotion from a couple readers can really turn off the rest of them.   How can you deal with it without spending all your time deleting from your Akisment que?   Well Chris over at Blog-Op recently posted about 4 Great Spam Stopping Tools.  After reading his post I implemented all of those tools and have seen my spam drop from 40 a day to 5 a week.

Ask For Input

People who comment on a blog are much more involved in it.  They often go back to see if there are any responses to their comments.  They may even subscribe to the comment threads in order to keep up with all the feedback.   So make sure you are getting the most out of each of your posts.  End your posts with a question or a sentence which invites discussion. This serves to retain new readers, and draw some of your RSS subscribers to your site.  Even 4 or 5 comments on a particular post is much better than zero.   As your readership grows, your comments will as well.

 Using Threaded Comments is a great way to encourage reader interaction with each other.  I know I enjoy it on the blogs I read, and will soon be implementing it on this site.

So how about yourself?  What do you do to build your community on your site?  Any tips for ensuring it is supportive and a good long term community?