You now have a stylish, personalized blog with tons of cool features, engaging photos, and perhaps even some posts with video and audio clips. Next, take advantage of the countless resources that the WordPress.com community has to inspire you so that you can continue to publish top-notch content.
One of the best ways to attract new visitors and increase interactivity on your blog is to write high-quality content frequently. If you’re experiencing writer’s block or feeling overwhelmed, keep in mind that you’re not in this alone.
WordPress.com is made up of a huge community of passionate bloggers, and if you’re ever short of an idea, or just want to engage with like minds, there’s no shortage of ways to go about it. The social features on WordPress.com make it easy to find inspiration for your next blog post, and to discover other bloggers that you might get to know, link to, and perhaps even collaborate with in the future.
Likewise, part of the community includes our Forums and Support areas, where people are willing to help you ’round the clock.
Let’s get connected to the community and to people who can help you solve your technical problems.
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.” ~Herman Melville
Stage One: Find your own community of bloggers
Tags are words that you add to a blog post that describe what the post is about. Each tag is linked to our global network of tag pages. Tags help people to find what they’re looking for among the millions of WordPress.com blogs out there.
You can make your content easier for others to find by including a few tags that describe the gist of your post. For example, if you’re posting a recipe for apple pie, you could tag it under “pie,” “dessert,” “apple,” and “recipe.” If someone searched for any of those tags on WordPress.com, they would find your post.
In most cases, there’s no need to assign more than a handful of tags per post. Furthermore, to use the apple pie example, a tag like “sweet” is too vague, and super specific tags like “pan” and “Granny Smiths” aren’t useful. If you’re having trouble choosing tags, try thinking about what tags you would search for if you wanted to find a similar post.
You can add tags before or after you publish a post using the Post Tags box next to your post editor.
You might find that by searching through the tags that you’ve used on your own posts, you find content you never would have otherwise discovered, which can lead to you a new idea for a post. Let’s say you’re interested in graphic design from the 1970s. Following the tag “70sdesign” you might be pleasantly surprised to find that it’s been discussed on quite a few blog posts. This could lead you to discover a designer whose work you’d never encountered before. Feeling inspired, you might link back to the source, do some research of your own, and write a new post all about your newly discovered muse.
Of course this goes both ways, and as other bloggers discover your content, they might react to it in kind, leading to more people discovering your blog, and causing new conversations and relationships to develop over shared interests.
To see what WordPressers are talking about right this second, you can browse through the most popular tags on WordPress.com.
You can also have this information come to you via the Tag Surfer. It’s like an RSS feed for tags. For example, if you want to stay updated on all the posts people are publishing about jazz, go to your Tag Surfer menu in the dashboard panel and enter “jazz.” Now, every time you log in, you can check out all the recent posts that are tagged or categorized as “jazz.”
Additional Resources
WordPress.com’s Blog (yes, we have our own!)
Stage Two: Find a community of help
Want to accomplish something a bit more technically complex, but don’t know how?
Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start, or maybe the exact information you’re looking for just isn’t presenting itself. Luckily, WordPress.com has some of the most comprehensive help, documentation and video tutorials known to this side of Alpha Centauri.
If you’re looking for answers to technical questions, the Support section covers just about everything under the WordPress sun. This should be your first destination.
If you’re still stuck after checking the Support documents, you can post your question to the Forums. The community here is insanely active, and you’ll often find that someone answers your question really quickly.
Finally, if none of that has helped you, we have a 24/7 support team that will do their best to reply to any questions you have about WordPress.com as fast as they can. Bear in mind that this might take a little longer than the other methods above, since the WordPress community spans millions of people worldwide.
