Not all blogs are designed to be social. Blogs created solely for Adsense or to sell products to search engine visitors often do much better by remaining out of the reaches of Stumblers, RSS subsribers and the like.
However, blogs are an ideal platform for communication, for the blogger to share his or her thoughts with others, or to promote their business online. This is why so many blogs are still very much social entities.
The best social bloggers are also the best communicators. They find their audience and gear their posts towards them with content designed to produce empathy and provoke response. Successful social bloggers are so confident of their reader's participation, they produce many of their posts specifically to get a response. They pose questions, which, whilst displaying an opinion, demonstrate they are open to a range of possibilities. And, in case the odd reader doesn't 'get' the requirement to comment, the blog writers end their posts by asking their readers "What do you think?"
One of the most skilled bloggers of this type is Leo Babauta, writer of the hugely successful Zen Habits, whose blog is "about setting and achieving goals", thus finding its place perfectly within the Wellness, Self-Improvement and Productivity niches, which in themselves are great places to build a community of like-minded and positive individuals.
Having a strong reader and commentator base is a boon to many bloggers. Not only does this provide their blogs with authority, the copious thought-filled comments at the bottom of most of their blog posts also provides extra fodder for the search engines and, if the blog owner can keep the subject on topic (as is usually the case with Leo), the words used by the commentators provide further keywords appropriate to the niche they are writing for.
And when you have nothing much to say or you are unable to blog, but a post is still required, a popular social blogger can get his or her readers to do most of the work for them, via the comments.
Leo Babauta's latest post is very much a case in point. Leo is on honeymoon as I write, so he is ensuring that Zen Habits remains updated with a series of prepared posts, round ups of previous posts, and short blog posts where he asks his readers questions and relies on their comments to keep the community going. Today's post is Ask The Readers: Best Off-the-Wall Productivity Tips? and Leo's readers are very happy to oblige because they feel an important part of his community.
You can visit Zen Habits for a variety of reasons: to get ideas for productivity, organising your life more efficiently, or any number of ways to view life with more positivity.
However, if you are not particularly into becoming more self aware or self-motivated, but are nevertheless interested in setting up a blog with its own community, then I recommend you still visit Zen Habits anyway, to see how a truly popular and well-crafted social blog works.
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