How I Built an Engaged Community Around My Blog
Quality beats quantity.
That’s been my view on life for a long time, and it’s the approach I adopted when I decided to create a new blog called Engaged Marriage about 7 months ago. The mission of my site is to help younger married and engaged couples get more out of their relationships and their family life.
Today, that mission is being achieved not only through my own blog posts, but through an active, engaged and loyal community of readers. As you will see, my readership stats aren’t particularly impressive, but the impact of the site has been meaningful enough to prompt questions from much larger and longer-established bloggers.
The question I get asked most often is: How have you built such a great community at Engaged Marriage?
First a Word on Quantity
Although my focus is always centered on quality content and building cool relationships, I’ve had some decent success in the numbers game for a blog that’s only 7 months old. Most recently, I even met a big goal of mine by having a guest post featured on Problogger.
As of today, my site has around 625 RSS subscribers. While this isn’t a huge number, I think it’s pretty strong given my largely “non-techie” audience. They aren’t necessarily plugged into the online community, and most aren’t familiar with Google Reader. I’ll be launching a newsletter very soon, which I suspect will give a boost to my subscriber count.
As you can see below, this number has grown steadily over time with a lot more momentum the last few months. In fact, I only had 215 subscribers on Christmas Day.
Subscriber History for Engaged Marriage
As far as traffic goes, I’m currently averaging around 13,000 pageviews per month, and I have an average of 210 visitors per day. Again, I’m proud of the traffic and it’s growing all the time. However, it’s certainly not something to brag about.
My Audience is “Engaged”
What makes my site fairly unique is the level of engagement I receive from my readers. This is tough to quantify, but I think a good measure is the quality and number of comments that my posts receive. Again, keep in mind that most readers aren’t bloggers, so there are not a lot of “fluff” comments aimed solely at generating referral traffic to other sites.
As of today, the 111 posts on my site have received a total of 1,962 comments.
That’s an average of 18 comments per post, which is quite good. However, these numbers don’t reflect the fact that most of the site’s early posts received very few comments since not many people were reading them. Recently, it is not uncommon for many posts to receive 30-40 comments. I had one post (introducing a contest) with over 170 comments.
Again, I don’t think the number of comments is all that compelling. However, if you take a few minutes to read through some of the entries, I think you’ll agree that my readers are adding valuable, thoughtful content that means something to them.
On a related note, I have to say that the readers of Engaged Marriage are particularly loyal. In just a few months, the Engaged Marriage Facebook page has 350 fans and our Twitter followers exceed 4,100 folks. And again, these community members are active in social media and enthusiastic about sharing the content.
5 Blog Post Tricks I used for Building a Community Around a Blog
Now that you know the story behind my site and my readership, I wanted to share a few tips about how you can build loyalty and interaction with your own blog. Where appropriate, I’ve include a sample post to show you what I mean. These happen to be mostly financial-related posts (a hot topic), but I get big reaction in other areas too…particularly Sex and Parenting!
1. Be Genuine
I write about having awesome relationships, so it would be easy to give out advice as if I know it all. However, I don’t know it all, and I share many of the same struggles as my readers. You will see that I am upfront about this in the welcome area at the top of the sidebar as well as in my About Page.
My readers often tell me that I seem “real” and they can relate very well to my posts. I also think it’s helpful to include pictures of yourself if your blog is written in the first person. This builds a real connection with the audience.
2. Tell Stories
When I’ve surveyed my readers about their preferences (you should do this for your blog, too), I always receive feedback that they’d like to hear more personal stories. I have recently put an emphasis on this, and the results have been fantastic. I wrote a post about How We Paid Off $54,500 in Debt, and it has 59 comments and climbing. Readers find inspiration in real stories, and it builds your brand unlike anything else.
3. Invite Controversy
I am not advocating doing anything inflammatory or taking personal attacks. While those tactics can get you some attention, they will not build a healthy audience in the long-term. However, it is helpful to write about a topic that invokes passion because you will get A LOT of input with reader reactions.
I recently wrote a post called “Should Married Couples Have Joint or Separate Bank Accounts?” and the reaction was incredible. Not only has it received 68 awesome comments, but it is getting attention for my site. I was actually just interviewed for a book related to money and marriage because of this article, and I’ll be getting a plug for Engaged Marriage in the book!
4. Take a Stand
I have also found it valuable to express my opinions when I feel strongly about a topic. Again, this will invoke a reaction both for and against your stance, but if you steer a healthy dialogue, everyone can learn from each other. I made it clear that I am against the idea of Prenuptial Agreements, and the resulting discussion in the comments was amazing.
5. Be Accessible
Finally, I’ll leave you with what I consider to be the key to my site’s success. I make myself available to my readers, and I think many would consider me a trusted “cyber-friend.” I respond to every comment (I even responded to the insane number of comments on my Problogger post), and I help promote my online friends.
I know this won’t be sustainable to the same degree for the long-term as the numbers continue to grow, but I think it’s vitally important for building an engaged culture around your site. Besides that, I like it. It is the personal emails that I receive from readers who have been touched by my writing that makes it all worthwhile. Oh, that and the fact that the site is starting to generate some money. 
What Tips Do You Have to Share?
I hope you found this post useful. Like I do on many of my posts, I’d like to open things up in the comments to hear from you. What tips for building a community would you add to this list?
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Dustin Riechmann created Engaged Marriage as source of marriage advice for young couples who want to have a happy family life. Please sign up for free updates to become part of a thriving community that is working together to improve everything from their spirituality to their sex lives.
Very inspiring story dustin.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, Mike. I appreciate your kind words.
As always, you wrote another great post
No wonder that your blog has 625 RSS subscribers.
Continue the excellent work and thank for shareing your story with us
Thank you, Kiki! This type of post is different for me and a little outside of my comfort zone. I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed it!
Awesome story, very inspiring to those of use who are relatively new to blogging. Although your blog isn’t necessarily in my “niche”, I am married with two children so I’m sure I can relate on a personal level – will definitely take a look.
Awesome, Antwan. I appreciate you taking a look, and I hope you find something useful to help you in your personal life. I am getting ready (like tomorrow) to launch a newsletter and free mini-course focused on finding and making the best use of TIME in our marriages and family lives. If that’s something that may interest you, I encourage you check back in and pick it up.
Dustin,
I really like your story and how you’re building your blog. I’ve also noticed that people love stories. Sometimes I don’t know how to relate personal stories to my network marketing content. I could incorporate more of my own struggles, just to start, get the practice and see how people respond. I know I love it when marketers share dumb mistakes they’ve made, horrible people they’ve talked to or just how hard it’s been to succeed.
I need to use more photos too. Those are 2 awesome suggestions to improve blog quality, get more loyal readers and increase participation and connection.
Thanks for sharing these with us. My first thought was that building a loyal blog community would be easier in your niche than mine, but these are simple things we can all add and I think they’ll inspire connection and collaboration in any niche.
Thank you for sharing your story. I’m posting today so I’ll put these to work!
Kari Baxter
Thanks, Kari! When I look through the five tips I highlighted above and think about network marketing, I really do think they apply. In your niche, it seems that the “Be Genuine” approach may be the most important to building trust and engagement with your readers.
And I agree that it should generally be easier to build relationships when you’re writing about relationships.
However, most of the people who ask me for tips are actually in related niches, so I think it’s something we all struggle with to some extent.
Justin,
It warms my heart to see a “young person” engaged in the betterment of marriages. In a society that seems to have turned its back on marriage (as well as the children they produce) it is good to see someone doing their part to make the situation better.
Bravo young man, bravo!
Blessings,
James Artre
PS: My wife and I have been happily married for almost 30 years, in spite of having a child born with disabilities, many financial hardships & setbacks, as well as my kidney failure and subsequent transplant 15 years ago. Marriages work, if you’re willing to work at them!
Thank you very much, James! When I got this idea for creating a marriage website that spoke to young couples and encouraged them to be proactive in their lives, I figured it would be a crowded niche. It turns out that there are several great marriage blogs out there, but not many. And I’m the only one taking this specific approach to the topic (to my knowledge).
Congratulations to you and your wife as you approach your 30th anniversary! It sounds like you have been through so much together, and I bet you consider her an invaluable partner for the ride.
And your last line says it all! Thanks again.
This is very inspirting story dustin, thank you very much. I am also a dad who is going to start blogging very soon. I was a web developer earlier. I really think that your 5 tricks will be very useful for me.
Thanks again.
My pleasure, John. Thanks for your kind words and best of luck to you!
nice share, good
article, very usefull for me…thank you