Tips For Community

1. Be an active participant in the blogging community! Find some blogs on your topic that you enjoy and read them regularly. Comment when you feel you have something valuable to add to the conversation. This can inspire others to find you--and they are the kind of targeted traffic you really crave.
2. Engage your readers! When you find comments on your blog, respond to them. Keep the dialog going. Blogs are loved by many because of their interactive nature. If you can make your comment sections lively and interesting it will make for a better blog--and more traffic.

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Allowing Comments

In most cases, a blogger is well-advised to allow comments from others. This inspires the sense of interactivity and community that makes blogging so attractive.
 

You may have to deal with blog comment spam as a result of your willingness to accept comments. This can be a hassle, but most providers offer tools to help you combat the comment spam. If you can do a word or code verification, it will filter out most comment spam. You can also choose to moderate your comments, which means you will have to personally approve them in order for them to appear. This may sound like a good idea, but it can be a really time-consuming process if your blog develops a “talkative” readership. It can also slow down the commenting conversation, which runs contrary to your objectives.
 

Keep your blog an open forum. Allow as much interaction as possible. This makes your blog more interesting and gives you a great chance to interact with your readership. You can learn a lot about what people are interested in and how to improve your blog by reading the comments left by others.

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Blogrolling

A blogroll is a list of links to other blogs. They can often be found on the sidebars of some blogs and are a way of telling readers what other blogs they may find of interest. Bloggers are notoriously generous about putting other bloggers on their blogrolls and it can be a great way of increasing the links to your blog and direct traffic, too.
 

Not all blogging platforms support a blogroll, per se. However, any blogger can add links to other blogs and sites of interest on their own blog. Sometimes this is done as a link exchange, sometimes it is simply done because one writer finds another’s site valuable.
 

Feel free to add other legitimately interesting blogs to your blogroll. If you add a blog, you might want to notify the other blogger. In many cases, they will reciprocate. You don’t want to minimize the value of your blogroll or to direct your readers to poor sites, so don’t pollute your list with a series of sub-par blogs simply in hopes of generating backlinks.

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Commenting

One of the best ways to get others to find your blog is by visiting theirs and leaving comments about their posts and observations. Blogs are often something akin to mini-online communities and comments play a large role in the communicative function of blogs. Bloggers tend to check the blogs of those who have visited and you can develop some regular readers simply by making comments on other blogs.
In many cases, you can leave the URL of your blog in the comments, making it easy for all of that blog’s readers to find you, too.
 

Trackbacks, which are means by which one blog notifies another of a visit and or comment, can also be used for this purpose. Not all blogging platforms support track backs, but if yours does, you should avail yourself of the opportunity to use them.
 

The fact that links could be left behind in blog comments led some people to use this is a strategy for increasing their total number of backlinks in order to help with search engine placement. They would leave comments of a suspect nature (or even, in some cases, complete gibberish) along with an address simply to claim the backlink. Blogging services recognized this growing comment spam problem and have taken actions to minimize its effectiveness.
 

These safeguards include a “no follow” HTML tag that makes the link meaningless in terms of search engines. Some bloggers and services also require users to manually type in a code when commenting, freezing out automated blog spamming attempts and making the process of comment spamming less attractive.
 

Comment spam still exists, and it is a hated commodity in the blogging community. Thus, if you are commenting on other blogs, please make sure your contribution is legitimate and thoughtful. Feel free to provide your URL, but don’t turn your comment into mere advertising for your blog.

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Community

Blogs are a magnet for traffic, in many ways. Initially, their very structure and layout tend to be conducive to good results in the search engines. The constantly-updating nature of a blog intensifies that effect. Blogs have another traffic advantage that traditional sites are largely lacking. There is a vibrant and active blogging community that can also help you spur traffic.

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