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In this episode of the GradBlogger podcast we talk about important steps to build a community around your blog. We discuss why building a community is important including some stories and give three steps you can use to build your community. We also discuss creating an expert roundup post, give some advanced tips and exercises and talk about how all this fits in with building a personal branding in general.
Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you.
Introduction
[00:00:01] Welcome to Episode #2 of the GradBlogger podcast, where we help academics build businesses and change the world through blogging, podcasting and video!
I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney, and in today’s episode we’re talking about three steps to build a community around your blog.
Those of you that are coming in from the previous episode will know that these first three episodes of the podcast are about the key elements that you need to to build a blog that’s sustainable, that can cause change in your industry, and that can eventually become a business and something that you work towards from a monetization aspect.
These three key elements are:
- Content
- Community
- Change
In the previous podcast episode, Content creation strategies for your research blog we covered the first of these, content; How to create content, what kind of stuff you should be writing about and some tips, tricks and tools you can use along the way.
In the current episode we are covering the second element, building a community around your blog. And in the next episode we are covering the third element, Creating the change you want to see in the world.
Why is building a community important?
[00:00:51] This episode is about how to build a community around your blog. This is really a critical element to take it from just a hobby or something that you’re doing just to practice writing, to something that can build authority in this field that you’re working in.
In today’s episode, we will talk about why building a community is important and I’ll actually share a story with you about that. We’ll talk about three steps I used to build a community around my blog. We will talk about advanced tips on engaging the community. And I’ll end with what I call a word of caution, or at least something to be ready for and thinking about during this process.
Leading a Tribe with Seth Godin…
[00:01:36] To introduce why I think building a community is so important, I want to share a story. This story is from the book [Affiliate] Tribes, by Seth Godin. The book describes how he sees people becoming a leader in their field and motivating groups to act. He calls this inciting a movement or causing a ruckus!
So I am going to read a bit starting on Page 28, where Seth has a section called “Leading from the bottom (with a newsletter)”. In 1984, when Seth was 24, he joined a small software company called Spinnaker, based out of Cambridge. His assigned task was to take science fiction stories and turn them into literary adventure games. So this was really a software organization and he had a development team leadership role.
The biggest struggle was that Seth had no real staff or engineering team within the company. The company had 40 software engineers but none were assigned to him. Because he had no direct authority other them, he had no way to influence their work and move the project forward.
So his solution and the solution they talked about at the beginning of this book, Tribes, was to start a newsletter. Twice a week he’d send out the newsletter highlighting the different members of the company, what they were doing and celebrate their successes. He would talk about his own project a little bit but the content was mostly around the engineers.
He found that within a month, six engineers had defected to what he called his tribe for this video games project he was working on. Over time and in a couple months, he found that almost every engineer of the 40 in the company were either working directly on his project, had requested to work on his project, or were moonlighting for his project.
Seth stated that this community wanted to be part of something. He provided the narrative through his newsletter and highlighted the journey they were on together. This was something that people resonated with and wanted to be involved in. 20 years later, he says, those same engineers still talk about being part of that project. It was an exceptional part of their work history with that company. To illustrate his role (and your role in building your blogging platform) I want to share the last paragraph from this small section:
“Is that all I did, was just launch a newsletter? Of course not. I did difficult things. I pushed obstacles out of the way, lived and breathed the project, injected it with soul. Thirty of us slept in the office every night for a month to make the ship date. Twenty nine highly skilled technical people and me. Everyone had a job to do that month and my role was helping everyone else communicate. Everything I did was for us, not for me. I didn’t manage. I led!”
That story really resonated me with me when I read Tribes, and it kind of resonated with me when I developed my blog and started to build this community around it. And that’s why communities are important. Sure, you can put this material into the world when you start creating content and shipping it, but it is the community that is going to push it forward and amplify your message!
Amplify your message
[00:04:42] You are the leader of this community and as Seth says, your role is to create the message, breath and sleep the project, and help people communicate. However, without the community, you will not be able to amplify that message to a point where it can change the world. Seth talks about having 30 people sleep overnight in order to make the project ship date in his case. For your case, it may be having people behind you to back you, maybe financially, but more in a general sense, to back you philosophically or with the processes that you want to put in place to see the change that you want in the world.
Three Steps to Building a Community
[00:05:05] So that’s why I think that the community building step is really important. And today I want to share with you some things that you need to do, some steps you should follow to build that community. Again, these are really tactile steps, the type of things you should be able to do now with your blog.
Step 1 – The Expert Roundup Post
[00:05:21] This first step is something, I kind of fell into from looking at online marketing material and blogging in general, not necessarily academic blogging like we’re talking about today.
This is the “Expert Roundup Post”. If you listen to online marketing podcasts long enough, eventually you will come across this term. Normally this is where you send a question to a whole bunch of people that own blogs and they’ll send back a response. It won’t take long to realize that these experts aren’t actually experts in their field, but they’re just people that have done the next steps above and beyond the current audience.
However, what if the people in the roundup were actually experts in their field? I had this question in March of 2017. My blog was 5 or 6 months old and I decided to do the world’s first expert roundup post for my topic, industrial safety in industries handling powdered and dusty materials.
In the end, the roundup post included 30 experts from around the world and had something like 12 different countries involved. About half of the people involved had a PhD in their respective fields. The other half had 20 and 30 years experience in industry. I think our person with the longest time in the field was 50 years and altogether there was over 900 years of experience contained in the roundup post.
In this roundup post I had each person answer two questions:
- What is the number one problem facing industries handling combustible dust?
- What is the number one difficulty and dust fire and explosion research?
The resulting post, 30 Experts Share Largest Problems Facing the Combustible Dust Community, was 8000 words long, contained a tremendous amount of value and has been a cornerstone of my work ever since.
What were the results?
[00:07:11] Since I released the post in March, two years ago, it has had over 2,680 views. That is 119 views per month or on average four per day since I released it. All on a website about dust explosions! Obviously, the readership was high at the start, but now it is still getting views on my site every day and we can get a big bump to the website whenever we share it on social.
Furthermore, the expert roundup was a really a big key to me starting to develop a community around my website because all of the experts shared it. They shared it with their friends and colleagues which started bringing a lot of people back to my blog.
So I’m gonna give you a really quick overview of how you can do this sort of roundup post. We will probably do a further podcast on the whole thing but I wanted get us started here today.
How to create the template email?
[00:08:18] The first step is to create a template of the email you will be sending to the experts. This email should be short, but explain fully the process. So in my case, I mentioned:
- I was putting together a web article on the opinions of industry leaders and academic experts around combustible dust fire and explosion.
- Then I stated my two questions.
- Then I said I was sending it to 20 experts around the world, collecting the responses, and putting it on my research blog
- And with each response I would also include a two sentence bio, a headshot, and links to the websites affiliated with the respondent.
- Then state the time you are collecting responses until and thank them for potentially being involved.
If you want to see the actual email template I used for my roundup post you can have it delivered to your email through this link here. As we continue to build out GradBlogger we will include many of the swipe and template files I used to build my research company so that you can use them as well!
Why limit personalization?
[00:08:58] An important point to emphasise is that you should limit personalization in the template email. In my template, I only had the name personalized. This is important because otherwise, you will eventually mess up filling in the personal fields (I ended up sending 60 emails) and mix the wrong company with the wrong person when you send it out. That can be embarrassing and not doing this is more important than personalizing a bunch of the email. It will also save you time sending out the emails.
Why you need to follow up?
[00:09:52] The next most important thing is that you follow up on the email – I do this two days later. Two days after you send the original email, you need to follow up with a reminder. Over half of the responses from my roundup came from this follow up email and people were very thankful to be reminded. Most people feel like they are being intrusive by doing this, but that is simply not the case!
Step 2 – Create your own newsletter
[00:11:44] Step number two to building a community is to create your own newsletter. You heard it in the excerpts I read from Seth Godin’s book, but having that newsletter to set the tone of your common narrative is really important. And more than that, starting to collect emails is really important as well.
All you need is to add a form on your web site using [Affiliate] MailChimp. You can use more sophisticated methods down the road, but my advice would be to start simple today. My first month and a half of newsletters, there were three people on the list: my mother, my wife and my aunt; but I treated it like they were a real audience because it actually gave me practice. I got that practice when the stakes weren’t so high. Then once I got my first real person that signed. I had already had some experience of what I’ve been doing in my newsletter and I felt a lot more comfortable with it. Now we have over 1500 people on my newsletter just on combustible dust fires and explosions!
Using other people’s content to start out
[00:12:57] As I mentioned in the previous podcast episode, you need to be creating your own content but it is important to note that you can also share links to other people’s material to fill out your newsletter. And I mentioned this in the last podcast episode about using Google Alerts to pull that material so you can do review post about it, but you can actually use Google alerts to get information for your newsletter as well.
For my newsletter, each weekend I’d received Google alerts with a list of things going on in my field. I took the top five of those and include these in a section of the newsletter to make it valuable to my audience. This took maybe 10 minutes to look through the articles, but is still something I do today (although we rewrite the material from a technical perspective now to add even more value to the audience and draw them back to DustSafetyScience).
Step 3 – Allow guest posts on your website
[00:13:48] The third step to building a community is to allow guest posts on your website. I know you’re thinking that we already covered this in the content generation episode but
How to find guest posters?
[00:14:11] A good place to find guest post authors is through social media by asking the people who follow you. It is fine to say, hey, I’m taking guest posts on these topics. They are really specific to your field, would you like to contribute? Also another good place to find guest authors is from your newsletter.
Have a defined process
[00:14:27] The biggest tip for guest posts is that you need a defined process to take these guest posts in, to edit them, and to get them onto your website. I call this process a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). In this document you define how you do it and what instructions you will send to each contributor. If you redesign the process each time, ad-hoc, it will take much longer to do.
Stack and reuse guest post content
[00:15:02] The final tip with
Advanced community building tips and exercises
[00:16:14] So now I want to turn my attention to some advanced tips for community building. These are kind of next level things you can be doing to help build out your community more. I’m going to give you three tips. It feels like today is the podcast of threes. Three steps. And now we’re into three advanced tips!
Tip #1 – Social proof on your website
[00:16:28] So the first one is to use what’s called “Social Proof” on your Web site. This includes things like testimonials. When people come to your website and see that there are other people watching or listening to you already, it makes them want to be engaged.
A good way to do this is to contact people that are already on your newsletter, you otherwise know, or are following and just say, hey, can you say something nice about my website or what do you think about what I’m doing? I guess that’s probably a better question. If you say, what do you think of what I’m doing? And when they say something nice ask if you can feature it on your website.
What I did was slightly different because my blog is very industrial focused. I emailed companies directly and asked if they would you like to include their logo on a community section of my website. I think I had up to 30 or 40 logo’s at one point and then companies were actually calling and emailing me saying how do I get my logo up on your website? How much do I need to pay to do that? And I would tell them it’s free, but this also gave me an idea who might pay for advertising later.
Tip #2 – Make people famous
[00:17:35] A second advanced tip is what I’ve heard other people call “Making People Famous”. So in this case, in an academic blog, famous is probably too big of a word, but it’s giving people shoutouts and being very liberal and kind for what you’re doing for them. So in my case, if anyone in my field received an award, did anything that I saw online that was important (for example, publish their own blog post or create helpful educational material), I would share that with my newsletter or on social media.
This made those that I included feel kind of special and had a big impact on them being part of my community. It works best best when you know the person and the person knows you, and the community you’re building also knows both of you. I do this very often in presentations as well. I’ll bring up an example of something that someone in my field did. We’ll talk with that example in a very favorable fashion and really highlight what they did well. And then that kind of gets back to them at some point, or maybe they’re at that conference. And that’s a really great way to make people feel special and included in your community.
Tip #3 -Track your progress
[00:18:35] The third advanced tip I want to say is to track your progress as you go. So I literally did this when we had 25 people on my newsletter. I put it in the newsletter, saying “This is amazing. We hit 25 people. Here’s the countries that they’re from”. If you track your progress publicly, this is a really great way to start and continue to strengthen those bonds and tighten that community.
A word of caution – you are a personal brand!
[00:19:03] So now we’ve talked about the three steps that I suggest using to build this community some advanced tips on how to tighten it, how to make it more accessible and how to make people want to be involved. Now, I want to talk about a word of caution – note that this is actually a positive thing but something to be aware of.
As an example, I want to share a quote from a book I was reading this morning but before that, when you’re doing this, when you’re creating this newsletter and community, you are moving into the world of personal branding, whether you like it or not. And this is a really scary thing for a lot of people. I know I was really nervous about it, but it’s also a really interesting process and gives you the power to create change and add value in the world.
The quote I want to share is from a book in my field called [Affiliate] By Accident A Life Preventing Them in Industry, by the late Trevor Kletz who is a big name in industrial safety. In this book, he mentions that a safety newsletter that he wrote for companies he worked with in the UK got him into publishing and writing books in the first place, which eventually landed him as the top safety advisor in his company. The quote that he says in this book (his autobiography) is:
“Once you become a recognized expert, you may find that your tentative proposals become calved in tablets of stone.”
So just by putting yourself out there, creating content growing a community, you will start to be seen as the leader. And it gets really scary because when you say something, if it’s a tentative proposal, it’s almost like it’s carved in stone because you’re building this personal brand.
I would agree that this is scary, but also encourage you to embrace it, because with the community you are building, you can actually do something truly remarkable in the world. In my case, we’re looking to see at least one year with zero fatalities world-wide from dust explosion over the next 20 year period from the work of my research company. With your business and with the power of the community you build behind you, what kind of change would you like to see in the world?
Conclusion
[00:21:36] So that’s it for this episode of GradBlogger. We talked about how to build a community around your blog including creating an Expert Roundup post, creating your own newsletter, and allowing guest posts on your website.
And we talked about some advance tips and some of the mental game you will run into when building out your personal brand. We will definitely cover that more wholly and fully as we get further along the podcast and future episodes.
Download our expert roundup template email
[00:22:01] For the Expert Roundup post, I want to mention a resource you can get to help you get started. You can use the signup below to get the email templates I used in my Expert Roundup post and other swipe files we have created for growing your blog!
Rate & Review the podcast!
[00:22:50] So that is it for this episode. In the next episode I’ll be introducing a concept called “Research Pays Me”, which is sort of a bold statement, but one that I’ve seen used in other areas and I’ll explain that more in the podcast episode.
If you want to help the podcast, please go to iTunes or whichever place you’re listening to this on and rate and review so others can find it as well!
Leave a Comment
What tips do you have for building a community around your blog? Share them in the comments below and let us know how you enjoyed this episode!
