Blog beyond Your Own Site and Invite Guest Bloggers In

If you want to build a community around your blog, participate in others' blogs — and be on the lookout for bloggers who you'd like to invite to make an appearance in your own blogosphere as a guest.

Start out by finding blogs that are related to the topic areas of your blog. Jump into the conversation by offering a different perspective or feedback to the blogger or to the folks who leave comments.

Mentioning your site on other blogs is fine, as long as you make sure that your comments relate to the subject at hand and add to the conversation.

Also, don’t just write and leave. Keep active in the communities in which you are a member and use that time to connect with others. Take what you can from the community, but also give back what you think will benefit everyone as a whole. Remember that participating in these communities might even give you ideas for your own blog, so you’re likely to benefit in several ways from the time you spend on these blogs.

You can also share links between your blog community and related blogs that you want to support. Offer to set up a type of network where you can share content between sites. Anything is possible; all you need to do is ask.

If your blog is attracting a significant number of daily readers, you can request members of your community to help you out by guest-blogging on your site. Depending on the software you’re using, you can either set up private sub-blogs or allow them to post to the main page of your site. Being able to provide other insight and information from your community “experts” is incredibly cool, and you might be able to build a series of posts from other bloggers into your site.

This kind of blogging trade off is a great way to have multiple voices filling out the content on your site and providing a richer experience overall for your readers.

These relationships are great to have when you get sick or want to take a vacation — tap your guest-blogging community for help covering your blog while you aren’t around to do it.