Would you like to know how I discovered the community engagement breakthrough in my personal blogging experience?
Well, if you read Part 1 in the previous post you would realize that my first step into online community had hit a wall. I experienced great traffic but no engagement!
Here is a brief description as to how I discovered the online community engagement solution.
One day, I took a surf on the internet and came across the blog of a gentleman situated in the deep south of America.
We will name him "The Sage" for the benefit of discretion in this post.
The Sage had a neat little blog, nothing special, but what made him stand out was the fact that he had online community taped!
This Johnny Reb had online community down to a fine art!
It would be best to describe his online community as a cult following! They loved The Sage..
I took the bold step to email him and tell him all about my blog, and the fact that I was trying to break into real online community, but that I was struggling to get meaningful engagement..
I asked the wise ole man for a few simple tips as to how to get my blog community going, and what should I do..
I never really expected an answer from The Sage, but he surely replied.
The answers were a revelation! Here they are:
The Keys To Online Community Engagement
• Get over yourself.
• Get over your neat little blog.
• Blogging and Online Community is a verb.
• Blogging is about engagement.
• Blogging is 80% about others.
• Blogging is 20% about your site.
He gave some more insight into building online community...
• Start your online community with some basic good quality optimized seed posts to begin with. Ten to fifteen posts should be fine, and ensure your one or two primary keywords are used.
• Post a quality well structured post for your online community on a Monday morning.
Prepare this post the previous week. Make the post interesting, informative, and thought provoking for the community.
• Switch into an "outbound giving of yourself" mode, serve the the online community, and get "outbound."
• Find bloggers in the general online community space that have the same or similar interests as your blog or social media posts or projects.
• Select blogs to comment at, and only comment at blogs that have frequent commenting and actual commenting banter.
• Click on the Avatar Links of active commenters! These folks are addicted to commenting, they are already outbound!
These commenters must be visited at their own online community channels and engaged with, by you commenting at their site!
• Read their latest post, and leave a meaningful comment. A meaningful comment is from the heart, and at least three lines.
When commenting do not ask them to come and see your sweet little blog!
This is a breach in etiquette and likened to prostitution!
• Form friendships with the bloggers that you have selected, and comment on their sites regularly.
Make a Link List of the bloggers that you have chosen to comment at.
Use this Link List as a reference and an easy way to click through to visit them.
These friendships soon grow into a sense of online community.
An immediate sign that you are growing as part of the greater online community is that your comments get answered, and that some bloggers start to visit your blog!
Viola!
• Spend 20% of your time writing posts and content, and 80% on actual engagement.
This principles above are applicable to all forms of online community and social media!
You may need to adapt them slightly depending on the online community channel.
Some channels such as Facebook do not allow business pages to go outbound and chatting up a storm.
We realize this, but time can be well spent on quality engagement with the folks that do engage on your page. This favors brands that already have momentum. New brands are advised to harness the power of Blogging and Twitter.
We further suggest a Multi Channel approach, where businesses and brands meet and engage with customers in the online channel of where the customer is.
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