Over the last week here on ProBlogger we’ve been digging deeper into the topic of ‘building community’ on a blog. See the series at:
- 9 Benefits [and 3 Costs] Of Building Community On Your Blog
- The 5 Stages of Building a Culture of Community on a Blog [A Case Study]
- 7 Strategies for Growing Community on Your Blog
- How to Build Community on a Blog: 24 Must Read Articles
Today it’s time for an opportunity for you to do something practical to actually build community on your blog – to create a discussion post as part of this weeks ‘Group Writing Project’.
What is a Group Writing Project?
These projects are quite simple – I name a type of blog post to write and ProBlogger readers all go and write a post on their blogs that fits into that theme and then come back here to let us know about the post.
The aim is to give you the chance to practice writing a different type of blog post but also for readers of ProBlogger to discover one another and to drive some traffic to your blog!
I’ll outline how to participate below.
What is a ‘Discussion Post’
This weeks series of posts has been about building community and deepening reader engagement on blogs. One of the techniques I described was something I do at Digital Photography School where on a semi-regular basis I write a post that is simply a question for readers to discuss.
The post doesn’t teach anything, express any opinion and is usually pretty short – it simply asks a question and allows readers to have their say.
Here are a few examples from dPS:
- If you had to discuss your camera kit…[Discuss]
- Discuss: Learning Photography is Easy. Becoming a Photographer… that’s a Different Story
- Tell us a Story of that missed shot
- Have You Ever Taken a Photography Class or Course? POLL
Feel free to take that approach or to take the challenge in another direction.
For example you might like to
- start a debate
- run a poll
- give readers a chance to write a tip
- take a reader question and post it for the community to answer
Really anything that is primarily aimed at getting readers discussing and commenting upon the post.
What if I don’t Have Any Readers to Discuss
The challenge with writing a ‘discussion post’ is that you may not feel you have enough readers to get discussion.
Please don’t let this stop you – hopefully by
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