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If you run any form of community or networking organization, like a business networking group, church, local community association, network marketing team, etc … then a community blog can be a powerful tool to help you promote, educate and inform people about your organization, as well as to keep your members informed and up-to-date.

I have just finished setting up a blog for Independent Business Network Incorporated, a local, not for profit, small business networking community that I belong to, and I would like to share with you some of the benefits of setting up such a site, as well as some tips on how you can do the same, especially if you have never set up a WordPress blog before.

Tips For Creating A Community Or Shared Blog

The community blog I recently set up for the small businesses networking group allows each member to post articles on topics related to their particular business. If they have a web presence of their own, they can post links back to their own web sites, business blogs, e-commerce stores, etc … in their articles and posts.

For each type of business, I then created a corresponding category (e.g. Travel, Legal Services, Bookkeeping, etc …), so that whenever a member publishes an article to the community blog, they simply assign their post to a category that is relevant to their business. This not only makes it easier for blog readers to find content when they visit the site (i.e. all travel-related articles will appear under the “travel” category), but because the blog has been set up to show categories in the URL using permalinks, each post ends up with their own unique keyword rich page address, which makes it easier for search engines to index.

The next thing to set up, is to make it so only registered members can post to on the community blog. To do this, the group’s administrator simply creates a new user (by clicking on “Users” > “Add New” in the blog’s administration section), and assigns them a role.

According to Wordpress.org, “The WordPress Roles feature is designed to give the blog owner the ability to control and assign what users can and cannot do in the blog. A blog owner must manage and allow access to such functions as writing and editing Posts, creating Pages, defining Links, creating Categories, moderating Comments, managing Plugins, managing Themes, and managing other users. The tool that gives the blog owner that control is the ability to assign a Role to a user.”

The roles that an Administrator or blog owner can assign to a user, are as follows:

• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
• Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive news letters, etc.

Each registered group member also has a profile section they can fill in, which allows them to add a brief description of their business and link back to their own site or business blog.

Wordpress allows you to set up a site to display eiher a fixed page as its home page (i.e. the page that visitors see when they type in yourdomain.com doesn’t change), or you can rotate the latest posts on the home page, so that each time new content gets added to the blog, it displays as the home page content until a new post gets added. This is great for giving blog visitors fresh content each time they visit your blog. (To access these settings, go to “Settings” > “Reading” in your blog admin area)

In the case of a community blog, since various people will be adding content to the site, I recommend that you not only set up the blog to display the latest posts as the home page, but also display the posts as expandable post summaries. In the business community blog I recently set up, for example, I set the blog’s front page to display the most recent 10 posts, then added two really useful free plugins to create the expandable post summaries and then link these to full article pages:

Evermore – As stated on the plugin developer’s site, Evermore is a WordPress plugin that automatically displays short previews of your posts on your home page. Each preview includes a link to the full post. Evermore is simple to use — just install it and it starts working straight away. If you want, you can also customize the length and appearance of the previews.

Seemore – This plugin was created by Bennett McElwee (aka “Thunderguy”), the same person who developed the Evermore plugin described above. Seemore is a WordPress plugin that makes reading posts more intuitive for your blog readers. With this plugin installed and activated, when your blog readers click a (more…) link they will see the full article on the screen, not just the part after the (more…).

Both of the above plugins work really well together. (If you have purchased our business blog ’step-by-step’ video tutorials, you will find information on how to upload and activate plugins inside the members area.)

The next customization I made to the business community blog that will benefit group members, was to add some code inside a text widget that allows the blog administrator or blogmaster/webmaster to insert and display rotating advertising banners to help promote members’ businesses to visitors.

The final modification I made to the setup after installing and configuring the community blog as described above, was to create a private “members-only” area, where those who run the group can post administrative messages and internal announcements, news and updates to group members about the business networking group.

There are several methods and options you can choose to set this up.

One method, is to use membership plugins. Two popular membership plugins for WordPress are a plugin called WP Member Site, and a plugin called WP Membership-Plugin.  Although they both have their differences, both of these Wordpress plugins will enable you to turn your Wordpress blog into a full-featured Membership Site, allowing you to accept one-time or recurring payments, set different membership levels (e.g. free, paid, premium, etc …), make some or all of your content viewable to some people (i.e. members) but not others, etc …

With WP Member Site you can protect content on your Wordpress blog and charge your members a one-time or recurring monthly fee using Paypal. A nice feature of this plugin is that you can set it up so that when you post content to your blog, you can specify which part of the post shows to all blog visitors and which information will only display to your paid members.

WP Membership-Plugin does pretty much all of the above, but it also allows you to create “trial” memberships, offers unlimited membership levels, customize the look of your membership registration page, and a whole lot more.

Another option you can use if you want complete security for your site and to provide individual logins to members, is to install a powerful software script called DLGuard. If you plan on offering a paid or free membership area, DLGuard is very easy to install, and allows you to easily manage your memberships, provide automatic member signups and removals, and protect download links within your membership area. I personally use this software on my own membership sites and it’s brilliant!

Since my clients didn’t need anything so advanced as what the above solutions provide, I opted for a very simple and inexpensive method to set up their members only area instead. I simply installed a new blog inside a subfolder of their main domain called “members”, and then password-protected the entire “members” directory  so that only registered members of the group can access this private, members only blog.

This method is actually very simple to set up, but requires you to manually create usernames and passwords for securing the part of the site you want to password-protect. You can either create one username and password that all members use to access the site (if you do this, I suggest changing the password regularly to prevent any potential abuse, such as people who are no longer members accessing the area), or create a unique username and password for each member. Whichever option you decide will depend on how many members you have in your organization, group or network, and how much work you want the blog administrator to have to do.

To make the group administrator’s job easier when it comes to posting announcements, notices and news to members, I also set up the blog so that whoever is responsible for updating the members section can just post to the blog via email. This avoids them having to log into their blog’s admin area every time they want to make a post. Using this feature, you simply send an email to a specific email address that you set up inside your hosting account, and whatever you write as the email subject becomes the post title, just as the body of the email becomes the body of the blog post.

To set up the post by email feature, I installed the postie plugin. This free WordPress plugin offers many advanced features for posting to your blog via e-mail, including the ability to assign categories by name, include pictures and videos, and automatically strip off signatures.

Benefits Of Setting Up A Community Blog

There are many benefits to setting up a community or shared blog if you run any type of organization, network, group, fellowship or association that you want to promote to members of your local, regional, national, or even global community, either to inform or educate people about what you do, or to recruit new members.

Some of the main benefits of setting up such a blog include:

• Leverage Your Site Building Efforts – You can leverage the process of adding new content to your blog by allowing members of the group to contribute posts to it. This will not only help you to grow your site very quickly, but it will also help keep your site fresh for your blog visitors.
• Business Promotion – If you are setting up your blog for a business group like I did for the small business network, members get an opportunity to cost-effectively promote their businesses via articles, links back to their own sites, profile areas and advertising banners on the blog, as well as develop their marketing, copywriting and promotional skills.
• More Traffic and Better Search Engine Rankings – An effective strategy your members can use is to post an article to the group blog and have an “about the author” paragraph at the end of each post that then links back to their own site or business blog (if you want to set up a blog for promoting your own business, see our “how to set up a business blog” video tutorials). This method not only can help to drive more traffic to your members’ sites, but your/their site or blog also benefits from having more links pointing back to it from a different site, which helps boost your/their search engine rankings.
• Up-To-Date Content – If you run any type of community organization (e.g. a church or fellowship), for example, you can provide up-to-date announcements, news, notices and updates about events for members of the community, and even get other people to contribute their knowledge and expertize to your site, or provide comments and feedback to your posts. Shared blogs are far more dynamic than regular websites and help to foster a community spirit.
• Interact Better With Customers – If you run a larger company or organization, for example, you can assign different members to manage different areas of your company blog (e.g. the marketing manager can write and answer questions about new products, etc …, while the customer service manager can provide information on “how to use the product” and address customer-related issues)
• Better Communication With Your Audience – You can set up an “external” blog for interfacing with and promoting your group to the public and an “internal” blog for communicating with your members.
• Offer Free Or Paid Content – You can set up a membership site in your blog and have free and paid content, with one-time or recurring fees.
• Additional Revenue Streams - You can set up a blog for your local community and offer free or paid exposure to local businesses, schools, organizations, associations, etc …

I hope you have found this information useful. If you are interested in setting up your own community blog, please contact us if you would like us to set one up for you, or, if you want to save money, visit our main site for ’step-by-step’ video tutorials on how to install and setup a blog.

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