When it comes to making money online or just by blogging, it is very essential to establish your own community. Having a blog community is equivalent to an affiliate marketer having a long active list or network. So, I thought I would share with you guys a series of ways or things you can and should do to establish your own community. Do subscribe to my RSS Feed if you do not have time check back daily and I am sure you do not want to miss anything out.

Don’t misread me… While I may not be a make money blogging guru like John Chow, Yaro Starak or Andy Beard as many have heard of (well, someday I will!), what I have done to improve my blog has brought me significant results and thus having the strong urge to share with my readers. It is a skill that requires constant reading, learning, trial and making errors and upgrading! Now that I have spent my time doing those, I am saving your time by telling you what works.

Part 1 - Do You Twitter?
We will be focusing on building your readership and blog community using Twitter. Before I start, I would like to encourage you to watch a video on how to drive free traffic to your blog with Twitter that I have previously posted on this blog. Twitter has become a very essential element in weighing the value of your blog and it is a very good networking tool.

First of all, what is Twitter? Twitter is a social networking medium that allows you to keep your community updated in real time of what you have done, are doing or going to do. You can also keep track of other users’ movements by following them on Twitter. Simple as that!

You can sign up for Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com (It’s free!)

Now you may ask, “Ok Ben, I have signed up for Twitter. But why isn’t anyone following me? How do I build up my community or readership from there?”

Before I answer the question, I need you to ask yourself, have you followed other people? Have you gotten yourself inside the community in the first place? If your answer is no, then why would anyone follow you? I was stuck with zero followers for a few weeks and I was quite bothered by it. Until one day I decided to follow what others are doing, so I randomly followed some people related to my niche hoping to learn something as well. Then I received an e-mail saying someone is following me the very same night. Then I repeated this process and BOOM! Now I am getting people following me constantly and I got from zero followers to 387 in 1 week. Now, how many would that be in a month? My main point here is that you got to put your name in the community before others are willing to put theirs in yours! You can click here to join my Twitter Community

Secondly, you may want to consider place a mini call-to action at the end of your posts for your money making blog.

Here is an example:
Would You Like To Find Out What Am I Doing? Click Here To Follow Me On Twitter!

This should give you a good increase in number of followers if they enjoyed reading your articles. But do not be over obsessive with your call-to action because it might just turn your readers away.

Here are two wordpress plugins that you can use on your blog:

1) TwitterCounter - Displays the number of followers you have on Twitter.

2) Twitter Tools - Post a tweet update automatically when you write a new blog post.

Well, I hope you have benefitted from this and may you succeed with Twitter! Let me know what are you views and suggestions by commenting below.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Blogging Tips, Make Money Online, Social Media, Traffic Secrets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.