Five Underrated Blogging Communities to Supercharge Your Blog ~ programming info

When you mention blogging communities, are you hearing the same old networks again and again?

It is time to move on! If you want to build your blog readership and get new eyes on your content, the blogging communities listed below are just a few alternative options. While a few have been around for a bit, their capabilities and features have changed so significantly that bloggers can’t afford to ignore them.

Ready? Let’s dive in!

Here are five underrated blogging communities where smart bloggers can share content, build relationships, and supercharge their blog:

Medium

Medium is an up-and-coming blogging community created by Twitter co-founder, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone. If you are looking for an additional way to connect your writing to other writers, like-minded industry professionals, and readers, Medium is a great blogging community.

Since its launch in 2012, Medium has become a go-to destination to share content (even previously published content) and build a new network of fans and followers.

One of the benefits Medium offers to potential readers is the rating of posts in terms of minutes. Each post of the site comes with a label, “X minute read” letting readers know how big a commitment they’re making by clicking a headline. If you’re a short-form writer, this might be your new destination for quick tips.

Getting started is easy; just head over to the site and sign up using either Facebook or Twitter authentication. Then, dive into their writing interface.

Benefits:

• The startup and growth know-how of visionaries like Evan Williams and Biz Stone are sure to keep Medium relevant and growing.
• Top 100 feature allows you to quickly see what content is resonating and learn while you build your Medium audience.
• If you are a colloquial blogger and less business-y, this is the place to share that style.
• Beautiful contributor profiles allow readers to follow you and get all your updates.
• Contributor profile allows link to your website.

Why Medium Might be For You:

• Platform: Very user-friendly interface (like a modern-day Blogspot – but 10x better) that is ideal for beginner bloggers looking to expand their reach. With Medium, you also can follow blogs, as well as be followed, so it serves as a news source as well.  Medium is also a powerful place to post pieces you might feel are off-topic for your blog, but are important messages you want to share, growing your audience in new ways.
• Target audience: Wide.
• Compensation: None except the awesome addition of new people who follow you, who love your writing, and can easily find your website, bringing new readers to your world.

StackStreet

Do you regularly write about topics that would be of interest to millennials? If so, you definitely want to bring your blogging talents over to StackStreet. Unlike Medium, however, this is a by-application-only blogging community. You’ll be asked to complete a painfully short application and from there, the ball is rolling.

The upside to StackStreet is that, while in its beginning stages, they do offer “top contributors” (assuming they mean those with a large number of page views) who will be eligible for paid opportunities in the future. Not too shabby if you’re already writing.

Benefits:

• Clean interface
• Focused audience
• Curated contributors (application-only process)
• Ability to take your existing blog content and hone for a millennial-focused readership
• Beautiful contributor profiles rich with social media links to build your audience

Why StackStreet Might be For You:

• Platform: Brand new. How often do you get the chance to get in on the ground floor of a new site targeting a specific audience you crave to reach?
• Target audience: Narrow, but meaningful. Millennials are targeted to spend $200 billion annually by 2017.
• Compensation: Potential to earn as a top performer with additional editorial opportunities.

Triberr

Not only does Triberr give you the chance to connect your blog with new readers, it gives you an endless stream of new content created by other savvy influencers like yourself to share with your audience. Once you create a free profile, it’s easy to begin the search for Tribes or like-minded bloggers with whom you can connect and begin sharing content.

Here, you can peruse a wide variety of exiting tribes, see how many members they have, and their reach (how widely their posts are shared).

When getting started, you can easily find Tribes by using the drop-down category function:

The basic membership on Triberr is free and they also offer premium options starting at $8.50 per month. These premium accounts allow you to unlock more site features. Compare the paid plans here and see what makes sense for your audience growing goals.

Benefits:

• Direct link with your blog’s RSS feed to import new posts
• Home Page Stream that shows all of your Tribes’ content so you can quickly connect, share, and build relationships
• Ability for users to view your posts and share directly to Twitter from Triberr
• Ability to quickly identify those who share your posts most frequently
• You can create, be invited to join, or ask to join Tribes (groups of bloggers) for deeper connections, and a more personalized Home Page Stream
• A crazy rich overview video explaining the site’s key blogger benefits
• Wild tutorials designed to get you up and running on Triberr in no time

Why Triberr Might be For You:

• Platform: Best for socially inclined bloggers who enjoy joining conversations.
• Target audience: Wide. Ability to reach bloggers both inside and beyond your area of influence who love your content.
• Compensation: If you sell products, imagine the benefits increased blog traffic and subscribers can bring to your bottom line. There are also options for bloggers to connect with brands and become paid brand influencers.

Google+ Communities

Yeah, you keep hearing people talk about Google+, but you’re not sold. Maybe their communities feature will finally sell you. If you are not using it to share your blog posts and connect with new influencers, the joke’s on you.

Head over to your Google+ home page and click the drop down. From there, you can access the Google+ Communities section.

From here, you’ll be brought to the Communities home page where you can immediately see recommended communities and search for other niches where you want to build your audience.

This will bring you inside a world of people sharing content on similar subjects and access to a dedicated space to share your own content. Community members can directly +1 your post (which will update the social sharing buttons on your blog) and increase traffic to your blog from new members who are joining the Community daily.

People do not understand the power of G+ communities.

As an example, our social team recently posted an article on our iPhone card reader site about password security. Then, to give the article some love, we submitted it to the “Tech, Security & Social Networks” Google+ community. This community has over 69,770 members.

So, how did our post go (result highlighted in green)?

8,500+ views, and some decent “ripple effect” with the social shares, too:

The power of Google+ communities can be astronomical. Make it a part of your blogging syndication routine.

Benefits:

• Ability for Community members to +1 and share your blog posts directly from your posts within the Community.
• Rich Google+ profile for content creators and lets fans connect with you easily by sharing your blog URL and various social media profile links.
• Ability to quickly find sharable content for your network from posts by other Community members and build relationships.
• Offers a simple help section to assist bloggers in building or joining a community.

Why Google+ Communities Might be For You:

• Platform: Not often used but highly powerful. If you’re a blogger with visual content, Communities and G+ in general allow for a beautiful sharing of your visual content. G+ users are most often platform devotees and active users.
• Target audience: Wide, yet communities bring focus. G+ is still the wild, wild, west of the social networks, but bloggers can tone down the noise and turn up the meaningful relationships quickly by joining or creating communities that focus on their niche and blog areas of interest.
• Compensation: It’s Google. No compensation, but you’ll enjoy the inflow of +1s and the ability for people to quickly comment on and share your fresh blog posts within the Community.

LinkedIn Groups

If you’re writing about anything in any industry, odds are there’s a LinkedIn Group for that topic. Simply visit LinkedIn Groups and start some keyword targeted searches for groups that focus on your areas of expertise. However, you might find the results overwhelming. I recently published a “How to Start a Blog” guide for newbies, so I went to LinkedIn Groups and searched “blogging” – and found over 886 groups:

Then, I found some active blogging groups (highlighted in green), asked to join, shared some valuable insight in the forum, then shared my post.

Just in those 2 groups alone, (8,000 + 2,000) “bloggers” are exposed to my blogging guide.

You can also take advantage of LinkedIn’s newer publishing platform to share your best blog posts. Posts that are well received can be reviewed by LinkedIn editors and then widely circulated through LinkedIn Pulse for wider visibility. LinkedIn even has a handy guide to help you get more information on their new publishing options to grow your readership and visibility.

As a note, if you see the pencil icon on your status update box , you’re already approved as a LinkedIn Publisher. They’re not currently accepting new applications, but are soon rolling the Publishing feature out to all members.

Benefits:

• LinkedIn’s home page stream puts your shared blog content in front of fellow professionals.
• It is a respected social platform that allows bloggers to share blog content and create content.
• A better quality of leads coming to your site through your blog post shares, as you’re sharing with industry professionals, not just casual hobbyists or fans.

Why LinkedIn Groups Might be For You:

• Platform: Longstanding, but growing richer by the month. If you thought LinkedIn was stodgy, think again.
• Target audience: Professionals. While skill levels on LinkedIn range from green to seasoned industry professionals, this social network assures that you’ll find a readership for content from 101-level to expert industry niche.
• Compensation: None. But LinkedIn Groups offer the chance for conversations on posts you share and to build new connections both for your blog and your professional network. It’s a “one-two punch” content platform, as you may find new guest blogging opportunities through your new relationships as well.

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The Ultimate Guide to Getting Started with Guest Blogging ~ gniithelp

There are over 200 million blogs in the world and it’s increasing day-by-day. Everyone is getting into this blogging world with many purposes like; money, name, branding etc. But majority of blogs won’t survive very long because of the huge competition. It’s quite difficult to Stand out from the crowd. We need lots of plans and out of the box Blogging strategies to rank our blogs or get noticed. We can build and reach our target audience by simple methods like; Advertising, Social Media and Blog commenting. But none of these methods are as effective as  – Guest Blogging.

Guest blogging helps you to build natural links, traffic, recognition, trust and authority. As you know it’s quite difficult to build backlinks to our sites these days because of Google algorithms like penguin, it’s vital to build links naturally. And guest blogging is the best and efficient way to do it.

If you’re a blogger and haven’t written a guest post yet, you can start it today. Before that read this ultimate guide to getting started with guest blogging.

Before we start in, let’s see what are the. . .

Advantages of guest blogging;

Backlinks

There was a time when we used to ask other bloggers to link back to our site, and we would return the favor by linking them back. These types of link exchanging methods used to work couple of years ago, but not anymore. We won’t survive for very long if we make these types of SEO mistakes. You may know how Google recently trashed Lyrics site Rap Genius for using these kind of manipulative link-building methods. That’s why guest blogging is the best strategy to build links without any risk.

Traffic

If your blog is new then you won’t get much traffic from search engines, so initially you had to depend on referral traffic. If you manage to write guest blogs on top blogs, you can drive a good amount of referral traffic. Moreover, the blacklinks from guest blogging will slowly boost your search engine traffic.

Recognition and Authority

Guest blogging on top blogs gives you recognition, trust and Authority in blogosphere. Guest blogging also helps you build your personal brand, showcase your talent, and get clients. I got a couple of new clients after my last guest post on comluv.

As you can notice, guest blogging gives you so much of exposure for your brand. If you write guest posts, you can beat many of your competitors.

Gain Subscribers and Credibility

The problem with search engine Audience is, they are always in a hurry; they usually land to our blog to find particular answer or solution for their doubts. They don’t stick very long, and they don’t have time to subscribe. Whereas, the audience arrived from guest posts are the real audience who will subscribe, engage and Provide credibility to your brand.

Getting started with Guest Blogging

As I know, a lot of newbies hesitate to start guest blogging, there are many reasons for that like; fear, critics, quality guidelines, etc. but they are missing on getting huge exposure to their blogs. If you’re one of them, don’t worry; In this article I’ll share exactly how to get started with guest blogging.

If you want to write guest post for others, first thing you need is confidence. Before you approach guest blogging, make sure to improve your writing skills.

Finding the Blogs

This is the first step of guest blogging, but the easy one. I’m sure you’ll be aware of top blogs of your niche that accept guest blogs. But if you can’t find your niche blogs, you can always use Google to find; you can use keywords like “write for us”, “guest blogging guidelines”, “Submit a guest post” to easily find blogs that accept guest posts.

After you list out the blogs that allow guest posts, you need to find out the below things;

• Check whether the blog has good past reputation
• Find out whether the blog has loyal audience or not
• Make sure to check the author background
• Estimate the average traffic of that blog
• Check whether the blog has readers engagement
• Check the backlinks of that blog

After you decide to write guest post for a particular blog, the next step is Pitching. . .

Before you Pitch

It’s not wise to right-away jump into contacting them, there are certain things you had to do before you bug them. . .

Things to do before you contact the blog author. .

• Start Engagement on that blog: The first step is to get engaged with that blog audience and author; Start commenting on that blog, share their contents on social networks, and get familiar with their members. Make sure you have a Gravatar image attached to your email. Spend a week in engagement before you pitch for guest blogging, this will increase your chances of accepting.
• Research and understand the blog: This is vital step; before you plan to write for them, you need to completely research and understand their blog content. Because you can’t write articles that have already published. Also, figure out who the target audience of that blog; whether the blog is targeting for beginners or pros. Check what type of posts they usually accept.
•  Study the previously published guest posts: To make the most of your guest posts, you need to completely study the previously published guest posts; check what type of guest posts got good readers engagement. My last guest post was on Comluv; I knew that Comluv is a multi-niche blog and has huge community members, so I wrote a guest post that slightly looked like a personal development guide. The result? My post got good readers-engagement with over 50 comments.

Pitching For Guest Posts

Now you have done all the background work, now it’s time to pitch, but before that;

Read the guidelines carefully

This is essential step before you pitch for guest post; read their guest blogging guidelines carefully. This will help you understand what the blog owner is expecting from guest bloggers; what is the minimum length of a guest post? What are the quality guidelines to follow? How many backlinks they provide? Etc.

Due to lot of spamming in recent years, many blog authors won’t allow you to register an account and write guest posts directly. Many ask you to send a post draft through email, so the pitching has to be done properly;

Personalize your Pitch

Many make mistake here; they pitch like robots. Because of recent Google updates, many won’t accept guest post from unknown authors and they hesitate to link back to your site if it looks spammy. So approach them by addressing their name instead of addressing them like “Dear Site owner”, “Dear Webmaster”. Be polite, and make your pitch look professional without making any spelling or grammatical errors. Also, make sure not to look like a link-builder.

Format well before submitting

If you want to increase your chances of getting your guest posts approved, you need to leave no work for blog owner. The blog owners are usually busy, and they might be getting lot of guest post requests. If you don’t format your work yourself, your guest post might end up in trash.

So make sure to do the basic formatting work like adding related images, tags, interlinking, proofreading etc. The less work you give, the chances of getting approved is more.

Give back more than you take

When you get a guest blogging opportunity, you need to make the most of it. The blog owners usually allow guest bloggers because they want quality contents on their blog. That means they expect your best work, so try to add as much value as possible.

It is important to give back more than what you get (backlinks, traffic) from them, so try your best shot and write very detailed quality post. If the blog owner is allowing you to add anchor links in your post, use it properly and never misuse it. And one more thing is don’t advertise or spam.

Wait with Patience

Once you submit your guest post, wait with patience and don’t bug them asking the status of your post, this will definitely piss many blog owners. They will get back to you, but they might take some time. So wait with patience or your post might end up in trash.

Promote and Share

Once your guest post is published, it’s important to share and promote it like your blog. Also make sure to reply all the comments, and lastly try to be the regular contributor. This will help you get more credibility for your brand.

Make Guest posting your habit

Even though I’m not getting enough time, I’m managing to write one or two guest post per month. Try to write guest posts quite often and make it a habit. Apart from so many above mentioned advantages, guest blogging also helps you to hone your writing skills and confidence. Honestly speaking, my writing and confidence in blogging dramatically increased after starting guest blogging.

Over to you

Thinking to start your guest blogging journey? Start it now by following this guide. Take a leap, and promote your brand with one of the efficient method, you’ll enjoy it.

Are you already a guest blogger? Then Share your opinion on your guest blogging experience  in the comment section.

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