Building a Blog Community

by Sapphire (January 9, 2006)

Miss me?

I’ve been very, very busy lately with something unexpected. You may recall the site I nicknamed “The B-2 Bomber” - a blog I started ten months ago about a personal interest of mine, which took off unexpectedly thanks to people recommending it to friends, with very little SEO? Well, for the past ten months, I’ve been getting to know some of the people who recommended it to others, finding out where they hang out, and generally making friends who are interested in the site’s issue. A couple of weeks ago, I asked on a personal site for volunteers willing to post a certain type of article on the site.

The response took me by surprise. I had several volunteers by the next morning, and a few more by the day after that. Considering this is still very much a niche site without a huge readership, that’s decent numbers.

Several of my volunteers were unfamiliar with the blogging system, so I wrote a quick guide to posting, keeping the steps as simple as I could, then adding an advanced section for once they got more comfortable. There were some tech issues - I’d never set up a site for multiple authors, so I had things to learn, too. Then I got some feedback about additional features people wanted on the comments box, and in the post window, so I implemented those.

The blog’s load time got so long, you could go get some tea while you waited for it on a T1 connection.

So I had to find different plugins to achieve the same stuff. I got smart, finally, and deactivated all my plugins, then activated them one by one and checked the load speed. I found that one plugin in particular caused slow loads, but I only need it when I’m actually posting, so I can just turn it on/off when I do that, and it’ll only slow down the site for a few seconds.

Hunting down the best plugins for the job took about 20 hours over 2-3 days, and I still have one glitch to work out with a programmer (fingers crossed). But while I was hunting plugins, I realized there was a lot of funky code in the theme I was using. I tried another theme, and not only did that improve performance even more, it was really good-looking. So I modified the theme, which involved a lot of customizations for plugins, and then I realized I needed to make changes on my static pages.

Then I realized we needed some way to communicate as a group aside from email (where people forget to hit “reply for all”, and besides, who wants tons of email?). So I set up a private blog, then I also set up another type of private community site for people who had requested it.

Oy! Vey! But it’s almost completely done now - just need to sort that one little glitch.

I got strangely depressed over the weekend and couldn’t figure it out. Then I realized I’d somehow put in about 80 hours on that sucker over the week. I can see how that might kinda sorta mess with one’s mental health. (I’m fine now - once I realized it was just exhaustion, I went to bed early and all is well. Moral of the story: there is such a thing as working too hard!)

So now I’ve got a community of several interested, passionate writers generating articles for this site. The site isn’t even monetized at the moment, because I’m going to build up readership for a while before I bother. I did monetize the Feedburner feed, though I don’t think I have more than a couple of subscribers on it.

I think this is going to lead to really good things, and my role may change from writer to webmaster on the site (which would be great by me - I don’t get off on hearing myself talk). Traffic’s growing slowly but steadily, and if it can attract several volunteer writers, then it must be of interest to plenty of readers - I just have to find them. But every day, I rank a bit higher on various search terms mentioned in articles in the site.

Posted in Blogging, Traffic Tags: Project B-2 Bomber
Subscribe to the feed or email updates