Mom Bloggers Create a Sense of Community

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

Many of the most successful mom bloggers have created a sense of community with their readers. Your community starts with the very first interactions you have with your readers. As your readers interact with each other, your community grows.

They will let you know when what you write resonates with them, and may not respond at all when you produce content they aren’t interested in. They are absolutely a part of your blog and how it develops over time.

Amusingly, just a few years ago, some people and companies thought that social media was just a fad and would soon be gone. If you told that to the more than 500 million Facebook users, they would disagree. Forrester estimates that by 2014, 3.1 billion dollars will be spent annually on social media marketing campaigns. The power of the Internet to connect people and form communities is not going away.

In fact, 79 percent of moms with kids under 18 are active in social media, and 57 percent of Facebook users are women. Studies have proved that women lead the pack when it comes to participating in online communities — it is very natural for women to want to connect with other women.

Blogs are natural community builders, but here are some more ways you can foster the establishment of a thriving community around your blog:

Encourage your readers to talk to each other. You need not be the only source of information on your blog — your readers will love asking each other for advice, inspiration, and information that you might not be able to provide.
Make your readers famous. This is some of the best advice that Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has ever given. Link to your readers, invite them to guest post and showcase their talents. You’ll be creating connections for others and increasing your own reader loyalty at the same time.
Be active in social media. Create a Facebook page so your readers can connect with each other in their own social circles. Interacting with your readers on Facebook and Twitter is important because you want to go to where the conversations are already happening.
Host regular linking events. You can do this by posting weekly links to readers’ submissions, or you can use a linking tool like Linky Tools, which allows readers to create links themselves. This gets people coming back on a regular basis to get their content noticed and to meet new people.
Respond to reader comments. While this is an extremely effective way to get to know your readers, it can also quickly become time-consuming. At some point, it can also become downright impossible. But to the extent that you can respond to comments, it will always be highly appreciated by those who take the time to comment on your blog posts.