Every blogger should read this eBook by Hunter Nuttall, The Zen of Blogging (PDF).  Whether you’re just getting started or you are an experienced blogger looking for a new perspective to kick-start your motivation, I think you’ll enjoy this thoroughly.

Via:  ProBlogger

Duct Tape Marketing asked, so here’s my take…

When building out your website, it’s important to give your community the features it needs to thrive.  Throwing too many features at your users, especially while you’re just starting out, can be more distracting to your community than helpful.

The most common community features found on the web today are blogs and forums.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that every community site needs to have a blog or a forum, or both.  Other sites have more innovative custom features designed specifically for their communities.  For example, GreenHybrid.com’s “real mileage database” lets members log and compare the fuel efficiency of their hybrid cars.  Features like this can really help set apart one community from other similar ones.

So, how do you know which tools are right for your community? 

When creating a new site, I typically start out with a blog.  Every community needs a seed from which it can grow, and a blog is a great tool to get some content out on the web and start driving traffic to your site.  With so many free blog engines available today, it’s very easy to get started.  Some communities never really progress beyond blogs and yet are very successful (see Music Thing, for example).  One might argue that a blog alone does not make a community, but you have to look past the traditional ideas of what a “community” is.  In the blog-only case, the community members provide a lot of comments to the posts and seed the blogger with countless ideas for new content.  They help each other through the blogger as opposed to helping each other directly.  This type of community requires more ongoing work on the community manager’s part (in this case, the blogger), but it can be very successful (i.e. Engadget).

Next, as the user base grows and I see discussions starting to take place in the comment threads (as opposed to one-off comments), I consider adding forums to the site.  Forums give your users an easy way to help themselves, which can be extremely valuable if your time is limited.  Once you have a few “experts” established in your forums, they can usually handle answering questions from new members.  Often, they thrive on it!

Finally, once you have some idea of what your users are looking for in terms of site feature, you can start to add in some customizations.  If you’re not comfortable developing the code yourself, consider asking your community members to help!  You might be surprised to learn that at least some of your members are probably web programming experts too!

For the code-saavy of you out there, ZAP is a very handly tool for generating a basic ASP.NET website including all sorts of abstraction layers, database tables, and behind-the-scenes goo that makes the magic work.

The tool doesn’t yet build out site features such as forums or blogs, but it will still save you immense amounts of time over coding these types of features completely by hand. I’m looking forward to giving it a more thorough trial soon for some of my upcoming projects.

Link: Introducing ZAP: a Tool for Generating ASP.NET Websites Automatically (Via ASP.net)

If you’re looking for a quick and simple way to start a web community without all the hassle of learning to code in ASP.NET, PHP, or some other language, look no further than a hosted solution with CommunityServer.com.  Three levels of service are available currently ranging from $49/month to $299/month.  Each level includes multiple blogs, forums, file and photo galleries, and a generous amount of monthly traffic allowance.  Getting started is as easy as choosing your plan, picking a community site name, and filling out your billing information.  Visit CommunityServer.com to learn more.

Note, with this service, your site will be hosted at http://[yoursitename].communityserver.com.  If you prefer a site using your own domain name, consider installing the non-hosted Community Server v2.1 instead.  More details available at CommunityServer.org.