If your website gets 100,000 unique visitors each day then someone somewhere will pay you something worthwhile for exposure to your community. So given that a secret to an online income is owning a community then how do you build one from scratch?

Is it Blogging?

It’s no secret that bloggers attract huge communities of readers. Is your writing compelling enough to be one of them? is a question only you and time can tell. If a 13 year old child and a blind artist can then you probably can too.

If Shakespeare was alive today it’s unlikely he would attract the kind of numbers boingboing gets, but his community would have clearly defined interests, and it’s those specific interests that advertisers can use. In Shakey’s case Amazon would find a ready made market for dull poetry (I can here my English Literature testing a few expletives on me right now).

You have to be specific to be terrific

And that is the secret to building an online community, want to know why? Because time waits for no man. If you have been lucky enough to reach your goal or achieve your dream this will be easier to understand. Once you have what you have yearned for you want more, that’s why accessory companies do so well, and why cars come with different models.

Let’s take cars, are you really so practical that you are happy with the base model? Most people buying base models are either emotionally detached from the purchase (such as a fleet buyer) or just can’t afford to get the deluxe model (which actually means they didn’t meet with a real salesman because if they did he’d of shown them how they could afford it!).

But how do I find out what I want? With research, by watching TV, reading magazines and going online to visit those sites that cover subjects that I like.

There maybe a site that covers everything I want but how do I know they are the best? By visiting others that specifically deal with the subject of interest.

Does that mean I need SEO & $1,000’s on promotion?

Heck no! Google offers this advice which is useful if you want to get started on your own. However if your site has a community of regular visitors Google will find you without SEO anyway. I bet you’re thinking “how can I expect to build a busy community of regular visitors without being in Google first?”

Commenting

Another secret might be the answer to that but in truth your product should be good enough to be found on it’s own. Let’s take a gardening blog, chances are you read other blogs and sometimes think about commenting on articles you read. Now is the time to start doing that but adding your link in the web address field. That’s what it’s there for! This isn’t dark-side promotion, this is exactly what the author of the blog wants, he wants you to let him know how well he’s doing and he wants to see what kind of people are reading his blog. Placing your link against your comment helps him find out.

Seek out the Permalink

Keep an eye out for permalinks and use them when you can. A good demonstration of this is commenting on the Official Google Blog using their Permalinks. For example here is a post made boxing day of some great political gotcha’s. If the information is relavent to your post use the permalink. That way visitors to Google can see you commenting on their work and pay your site a visit to check you out.

Don’t worry about nofollow

If you’ve been reading blogs for a while you will know there is something called “nofollow”. This is a feature introduced by Google to reduce link spam across blogs and most blog software makers add it as an option. It has had little effect in reducing link spam and there are plenty of other better measures in place anyway. In fact the only real benefit has been to search engines and server hosts which no longer have to spend cpu time on collecting and visiting links with this attribute.

However it matters not to you. Placing your link on a popular blog as part of a legitimate and relevant comment will attract like minded visitors to your site and it’s that process that will create exposure and in time your community.