After you've had your website up and running for a bit, or once you've been blogging for awhile you'll want to start thinking about your online 'community'. Your community is an important, if not integral, component to the success of your online presence. By building a solid brand, creating great content and interacting with your audience, you're working toward developing a passionate online following that will promote and support you with others.
Build It
Make your blog/site an original, meaning, try to take a fresh approach to the subject that you plan on covering. A great example of an outstanding and custom brand blog is Southwest's Nuts About Southwest. Instead of spewing a mouthful of corporate hum-drum Southwest has assembled a blended blog that reflects the diversity of its audience and they've peppered it with fun and interactive content.
Another super example is the Sharpie blog. Beyond simple blog posts, the Sharpie blog has incorporated a bevy of images and videos that showcase their products in action with everyday folks and artists. The result is a visually entertaining blog that is both inspiring and entertaining.
Take a cue from Southwest and Sharpie and find a unique way to position your blog/site that's right for the audience that you want to capture.
Promote It
Make it easy to pass along and share what you're creating. This means including social share buttons to increase viral opportunities. At a bare minimum, you should feature Tweetmeme and Facebook Share buttons that can be used to attract others to become a part of your online community. People want to be able to send links and information in quick and simple ways. Integrating social share buttons is a near guarantee that they'll be able to do so.
Ask For It
You have to ask people to visit, comment and share. It's a very simple way to remind and ensure your audience that you want them to invite others to take a peek and converse about what you've created. Communities aren't built overnight, but asking others who appreciate your perspective, style and message to find and include others is an ideal way increase growth. Like-minds attract like-minds and you'll discover that asking people to spread the word about your community is as easy to say as it is to do.
Get Involved With It
An online community can't grow on its own. You need to take an active role in fostering relationships with your members. Encourage contributions through commenting and be prepared to seek out potentially interested people to invite to the community. This doesn't mean that you need to launch a spam campaign or make a commitment to stalk anyone into joining. Be yourself, be authentic and tell people that you'd love for them become a part of what you're putting together.
Repeat It
Whether your online community has 50 followers or 15,000, you need to continually work at adding new members. A stagnant community is also a flailing community. By continually adding new members you're increasing the chances that better dialogues will form, more interesting questions will be asked and novel ideas will be exchanged. These actions in themselves make your community more attractive to others, which will increase your subscriber base. The goal isn't to have a blog or site with the largest quantity of followers. It should be to have the best quality of content and relationships with the people who are supporting what you're creating.