Have you ever had trouble getting people to fall in love with your blog?

If you’re wondering how to get an enthusiastic audience to come to your blog over and over, this simple guide is for you.

Rabid means intensely passionate. A rabid fan is worth 100 casual readers. Maybe even 1,000.

Without rabid fans, your blog will fall short of its potential and your business will suffer as a result.

Building a rabid audience is like building a community: it can be hard work, but it’s well worth the effort.

Step 1: Create a mouth-foaming object.

In my Blog Community Building guide, I call this an “object of adoration.” It’s the centerpiece at the dining table. It’s the campfire at the campfire. It’s the glistening bowl of Toasty Oh’s, milk splashing in from the sky, in the middle of the cereal box.

It’s something to gather around and talk about. Something to focus on.

Something people can get rabid about.

1. Imagine a person.
2. Think of a problem she has that you can solve.
3. Publish the solution at your blog.
4. Invite her to share your solution with others.
5. Reward her for doing so.
6. Repeat steps 1-5 forever.

Step-by-step tips on this topic next week.

Which step is the hardest for you?

Yesterday I answered the question, “Where is your blog community?”

It’s in the mind.

But minds scatter online attention across vast fields of URLs.

Which is why, for example, it’s not uncommon for your Twitter account to sparkle while your blog gathers dust or vice versa.

It’s not enough to just get more “friends” or “followers” or commenters in a dozen different places.

You’ve gotta unify the fragments and make each community member aware of each of them. You’ve gotta bring together the logs so your bonfire can be much bigger and brighter and hotter than any smaller fire could be.

With that in mind, here are 8 ways to unify your blog community so that your blog and social media profiles work together (not just apart) for your business.

Your blog community is at your blog, right?

Duh. That was easy.

Wait a second. No, it’s just centered at your blog, but it has octopus legs at your Twitter account and at your Facebook page and at all your other social media accounts, right?

Um … or maybe your blogging community resides at all those places and in your email inbox and at the blogger conferences you attend? Maybe it’s everywhere?

Actually, it’s nowhere.

I’ve just added another free guide to my growing blog consulting guides area (22 and counting).

It’s called How to Improve Your Blog Community. It includes my best advice from more than three years as a blog network editor, social media event organizer and new media consultant.

Specifically, it covers the following:

• What a blog community is
• Why your blog community matters
• 4 common aspects of all communities
• 10 ways to measure blog community growth
• 5 steps to building your blog community
• How to get “unstuck” in your community-building efforts
• 6 excellent resources for further reading

Grab the printer-friendly PDF version (848 KB).

Let me know what you think! More guides coming soon …

Just wanted to say it. You deserve to hear it!

Thank you to everyone who has helped me get Visionary Blogging off the ground over the past few months.

Thank you for helping me make a successful transition from losing my job to creating a business.

I’ve published a free step-by-step guide on how to become a better blog commentator, based on my three-plus years of making an average of approximately 20-30 blog comments per week around the Web.

My goal is to provide you with nothing but the finest resources on blog improvement anywhere on earth. Please check out my Blog Improvement Checklist (complete) and Blog Improvement Resource List (work in progress) for examples of my work.

I’m actually just fixing up the last part of the commenting guide right now so don’t be surprised if you see a dangling participle or misshapen paragraph. I hope you don’t mind.

You can read it online or download a printer-friendly PDF version.

Thank you to everyone who helped me write it.

Please let me know if you find it useful and how I could make it better!

When you’re looking for the perfect flower to give to your lover, do you want any bent petals?

When you order a meal at your favorite restaurant, of course you don’t want it to come out to your table half-cooked.

But is blogging like that?