Now that you have been blogging for a while you have an established reader base, your blog is now making some money and your blogging is running smoothly. Do you have room for growth?
This post is for someone that has extra time on their hands and want to expand the community they have created on their blog. By expanding your blogging operations it could be that you just want to create an additional blog in another niche with a different domain and completely separate from what you already have established. But what about expanding your existing niche and blog? Using different web applications to create other resources for your readers can yet again give you a bit of a boost to achieve the next level of blogging. Here are a few ideas of things you can implement with little or no programming language needed.
Forums- When you write a post on your blog you are essentially starting a conversation with you readers. With message boards you allow your readers to start conversations and take a bit of control in the content of your blog. This is a great way to build community. There are several free forum platforms out there. Here are a few I have used phpbb and vBulletin
Directory- A directory is a great way to get links back to your site. In exchange for a listing in the directory you ask that the site owner places a link on the front page of their blog to help promote your directory. If you build the ultimate resource directory for your niche then you have a real winner. On the flip side a directory is not always a good fit for a niche and it does take a bit of moderation to keep spammy links out of it. For directory software I like eSyndicat
Job Board- Another app you can add is a job board but this one really depends on the audience you cater to. ProBlogger has a job board for bloggers and since it doesn’t matter where you reside to blog it works well on his site. I have not tried or used any job board apps in the past so if you want to share one leave a comment.
Social News Site- Everyone wishes they owned digg. And if they don’t well then they don’t know the success digg is experiencing. Well now you can have your own digg (success not included) with a free application called pligg. Here are a couple of the more successful social news sites using this software. hugg and sphinn
classifieds- Classified ads are also a nice way to generate some community in a niche. For example if you had a collectibles site your readers could buy and sell their collectibles to others that are interested in the same things. Noah’s classifieds is a fairly nice classifieds system
any other resource that caters to your audience- This is where you get creative and come up with your own ideas about what your readers would really latch on to and run with.
Before adding any other resources or services to your existing blog you have to ask yourself a few questions. If I add this will it add value to my readers and my blog? Is my blog ready for expansion? and finally, can you andle the extra workload brought on by the addition.