The What Small Sites Can Learn from Big Online Communities panel was led by four talented and inspiring women (Heather Armstrong, Nora Abousteit, Lili Zarghami, and Sarah Bryden-Brown) who had some interesting stories to share. Here are a few tips that I picked up from this session.
* Life stages make great stories. A good example of this Erin Loechner’s contributions to the HGTV blog. She and her husband Ken have been renovating their first home and you can follow their story at HGTV.
* Build on personality, not just pretty pictures. People want to get to know you and your stories.
* Use your voice honestly.
* Check out Daily Delight on HGTV. Lili and Briana share very personal tastes as if they are talking to friends.
* Take it offline. Help readers make connections in the physical world (e.g., meetups, etc.).
* Having a terms of service/comment policy is a helpful tool to direct readers to when you decide not to publish/delete their comments.
* You might be surprised to learn this, but the Facebook community is more engaged than Twitter. Consider posting additional Facebook content that you don’t feature on your blog. Use your blog to direct readers to the content and encourage them to interact.
Do you guys have any tips or ideas about building and nurturing an online community around your blog that you could share? Have you written a blog post about this topic? If so, please post your thoughts/links here or on my Facebook page. It would be awesome to talk more about this!