Community blogging or self blogging if SEO is concerned?

Hello,

I wanted to help my sister with starting a <TOPIC> blog for her. She will be managing the contents and I will be doing the technical management for it. She has good 2-3 years experience in the <TOPIC> field and also is taking classes for a sub section of the <TOPIC>. So my real question is

Should I go in for a community blog or should I start a blog just for her? If self blogging viable now that there are millions of blogs out there?

It has close to 200,000,000 searches for the main keyword.

My question can be SEO based as well as blogging based.

If you are telling community blogging then should i accept all writers or should I only accept experts in the niche? I will be going in for a revenue sharing system.

How do you feel about the self blogging part?

Should I split the main topic into 5-6 blogs and try to grow all 6 a niche blogs or should I try to grow this one into a single blog?

The topics might be closely related but not closely related enouigh to capture enough attention of everyone.

Interesting thing about community blogs is that you need to build a community first. Do you happen to have one? If I were you I would start with personal blog and extended it to the community blog when I gathered enough readers/posters. At this point you'll be able to filter the most experienced writers basing on their posts and comments.

No community as such now. So building contents and establishing the site is essential before starting a community and it to be a success? Am I right?

See, the community doesn't appears by magic. For instance, the community of SEO Chat has formed because it offers a good selection of tools + articles + forum with SEO pros all over the world. Provide some things of interest to your visitors to make them returning and loyal visitors, then think of changing the format of your resource to the community driven.

Surely, you can make your blog community driven from the start, but the comunity blog without the community looks rather pitiful IMO.

Thanks for your tip. I am also looking for a blog+forum type of site. i know its hard to build a community but I just have to keep trying right? Normally i flip websites but this one i need to build into something really valuable and maybe flip in the range XXXXX$

Hi cgt,

I built a community blog 2 years ago... Actually the "community" was already there (it's a blog about my local community - lol)!
When I started I created all the content myself... Once I had advertised and attracted an online community, I simply added a facility (plug-in) to allow registered users to submit posts and asked for others to contribute.
At the 2 year stage well over 50% of the content has been contributed by users.

I was also thinking of adding a forum but in the end decided that I wanted to "control" the "main subjects" discussed and also to keep all associated subject matter together and - imho - forums are not so good for that, because users repeat questions and commonly post in the wrong place etc and that takes a lot of time and trouble to moderate (btw: I moved your thread to the blog forum)

Good luck

I think it depends on the situation. A personal blog attracts community of the same interest, and I think it is advisable for a starter. But if you already have an existing community before starting a blog, you can start from there and then extend it to a larger community afterwards. Also joining forums like this would help attract readers.