Comments on: Developing Community

By: Nathan Hull

Nathan Hull — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 21:47:15 +0000

Guess you know your stuff because this post has gotten quite a few comments. Good article keep up the good work.

By: lee

lee — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 04:04:18 +0000

i feel that deleting comments is just silly as it is part of the community feeling. people wont like things all the time and they should tell you.

By: AndrewE

AndrewE — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:58:41 +0000

I really enjoyed reading this post and the one on building traffic. Your experience in manageing websites clearly shows here. I have bookmarked these pages for future reference.

One question that has been touched on but not fully addressed, is what do you do once you have traffic and a community? Where do you go from there? Does it just become a matter of how long you are willing to sustain the existence of a site? Or are there strategies for diversification, expansion, opening it up to new authors and developers? How ‘organic’ can a blog/website be?

By: David Krug

David Krug — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 20:55:18 +0000

Devin,
You just responded to a year old comment. Just an fyi.

By: Devin

Devin — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 14:29:48 +0000

@Christian: I used to send emails to people with my reply for their convenience. Luckily, WordPress has a simple plugin called ‘Subscribe to Comments’ which will allow visitors to get emails every time a new comment is posted. I’ve found it helps with the conversation..

By: Developing Traffic » Wisdump

Developing Traffic » Wisdump — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 09:21:34 +0000

[...] Once you have the traffic you can begin to work on developing a community within your site. [...]

By: Larry

Larry — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 13:49:57 +0000

Great suggestions.

The community aspect of blogs is often lost. I think we have too many blogs out there for post and forget type of writing.

A suggestion is to develop a blog that is very niche and can generate a lot of buzz around that niche. For instance, don’t write a blog just about “computers” but create a blog about “computer help support” or specific computer hardware reviews, or the like.

By: Jane

Jane — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 06:23:03 +0000

Interesting ideas and comments. Ivan (Raszl), I totally agree with yours.

By: Scrivs

Scrivs — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 21:15:24 +0000

I am glad everyone is finding this article so useful.

By: Andrew Schamess

Andrew Schamess — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 21:04:55 +0000

The distinction you make between building traffic and building community seems obvious now that you’ve made it but it had never occured to me. Traffic is kind of a commercial concept I guess. Those of us who are trying to speak with others about politics or religion or topics we think are important should be more interested in community.

The suggestions you offer are great – I would add one more: simply, “be nice”. For a lot of new visitors, it means a lot to have some encouragement, as in, “great comment, would like to hear more” (rather than someone disagreeing right away as so often happens).

Also to keep an eye out for new bloggers and link to their sites, help to spread the word.

I use Drupal, which has a built-in rss aggregator. I’ve tried to use that to foster a community of bloggers with similar interests, i.e. by aggregating their feeds all on one page.

Anyhow thanks very much for the insight – and for this great site. Will check in often.