Blogging is essentially building relationships between you and your readers. That’s why it is essential for any blogger to continuously find ways to increase blog traffic and attract a wider audience.
You have to have a substantial number of regular visitors or subscribers to your blog in order for the knowledge you share to gain relevance and authority.
Doing so can be a struggle, especially when you’re barely just starting a blog for the first time.
Don’t you fret. If blogging is about building relationships and sharing knowledge, joining blogging communities wil, help make the job easier for you.
Here are 9 blogging communities you can join to build your network and attract more traffic to your blog
1. Medium
This Twitter-created blogging community lets you connect with like-minded writers and industry professionals. If your blogging style is less formal and less business-like, this is a place that you just might feel comfortable in.
Medium also gives you contributor profiles where you can include links to your website. People can follow you and get updates for every post you make.
2. Blog Engage
Blog Engage is a premium blogging community and social network. Despite the £4.99 monthly fee, the site still continues to grow with almost 3500 members to date.
As a member, once you submit a blog post, your content will be open for votes from all other members. The post that garners the most upvotes gets featured on the site’s homepage.
You can also add friends and join groups for greater community involvement.
3. Kingged
Why join Kingged? Well, there’s the friendly and extremely helpful community members, for one thing. Then, there’s more! Three words, actually. Giveaways, contests and rewards!!! Still need more motivation to join? Here you go:
You can submit fresh or already existing blog posts under any topic of your choice. Great feedback from members regarding immediate results after submitting a post. Plus, you can choose to subscribe to paid packages where your content can be distributed across huge sources such as Mashable, The Huffington Post, CNN, etc.
4. Triberr
Access an endless stream of fresh content from other influencers in your niche. Share your own content with them. If you need fresh ideas for your next blog post, you’ll find a lot of sources for inspiration on Triberr.
With Triberr, you can lookup and join Tribes of your choice via categories on their drop-down menu. Prior to joining, you’ll be able to see the number of members the tribe has and how far their reach is, based on where and how far their posts are being shared.
It’s a great platform to build relationships with because you can tell who shares your posts and how frequently they do. Users can view and share your posts directly to Twitter from the website.
5. DoSplash
Fast-growing and free to use, DoSplash is another blogging community where you can get upvotes upon submitting your content.
The most upvotes your blog post gets, the more natural exposure they receive. With DoSplash, it’s easy to get more engagement for your blog.
6. Google+ Communities
Maybe you don’t find Google+ that enticing as a social media platform compared to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. But as a blogger, you’ll definitely feel the advantages of joining Google+ communities.
It’s the best blogging community you can use to build millions of audiences. For one thing, almost everyone has a Google account these days.
I’m willing to wager 100% of people who have both android phones and internet access have a Gmail account. That’s potentially millions of people you can reach by joining different communities on Google+ and sharing your content!
7. Inbound
Newbie bloggers rejoice! Inbound.org is a community that you can go to if you want to do more than just connect and build relationships with other bloggers and writers.
Especially if Internet Marketing is what got you interested in creating a blog in the first place, Inbound.org is the place for you. It’s the community where you can learn at the same time as your content gets promoted. Aside from internet and content marketing knowledge, you’ll also be able to exchange other useful information, like suggestions for the best social media marketing software, for example. More traffic to your blog + more high-value internet marketing info for you = win-win!
8. BizSugar
One of the top recommended blogging communities, BizSugar is a meeting place for active small-business administrators and owners. But no worries, membership is still free even if you don’t have a business.
There’s no end to the things you can do with BizSugar. Submit your own posts and blog content, vote, and comment on what other members share, exchange business news and marketing tips.
With a bit of effort, you can make getting into BizSugar’s weekly Top 10 members your goal to maximize the potential for content promotion and engagement.
9. LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn has continuously evolved throughout the years. It’s not just your online, ever-ready resume anymore.
Unlike the thousands of groups you can find on Facebook, LinkedIn Groups allows you to build a more professional and targeted network.
Share valuable insights in the group forums and share your content with thousands of members. Explore other topics of interest, like the qualities of successful bloggers, for example. That’s a good starting point for conversations and/or posts.
Your blog posts might even make it to LinkedIn Pulse. LinkedIn editors will then promote these for wider visibility and circulation.
Conclusion
There are three basic reasons why you’ll want to join blogging communities:
- build friendships and relationships
- get support whenever you need a boost
- get honest opinions, critiques and helpful suggestions that will go a long way into helping you become the blogger that you dream of becoming
Being a member of a blogging community is a rewarding experience. If you’re not yet one, try and join any of the communities listed above and find out for yourself exactly how beneficial being connected can be.