News aggregators aren’t all that new. Aggregator websites have been around for a long time, almost since the dawn of the web. What’s changed is that, now, news aggregators are usually automated, thanks to plugins like WP RSS Aggregator.
Instead of having one person curating an endless stream of news, they can handpick trusted sources. WP RSS Aggregator takes care of the rest, and that leaves you free to focus on building a community.
If you run a news aggregator or hub for a specific topic or niche, you will attract people who want to discuss it. Giving them the tools to do so is a smart way to build loyalty to your website and keep those users coming back for more discussions.
In this article, we’ll discuss how you can build a community around a news aggregator site. We’ll also give you several tips to help you make that community more engaging. Let’s get to it!
1. Design for Interaction: Create a User-Friendly Experience
If you want people to hang around and talk, you need to make it easy for them to do so. Your site’s design plays a huge role in whether users just read and leave or stick around to engage.
When designing for interaction, you need to keep the following in mind:
- Intuitive Navigation. Use clear categories, simple tags, and easy-to-use filters to help visitors find exactly what they’re looking for. If you’re using WordPress, WP RSS Aggregator can automatically sort your incoming content into categories, which makes your job a lot easier.
- Comment sections. This is where the real action happens. Look for plugins that support threaded replies, notifications when someone responds to you, and user profiles that give people a sense of identity. Put these comments front and center—buried comments send the message that you don’t really care about what users have to say.
- Voting systems. Being able to vote on content gives users a voice. You can add simple upvote/downvote buttons to let the community highlight the best content (similar to what Reddit does) or ask users what they want to read about.
Designing for interaction means designing for engagement. If you can keep visitors interested in the news on your site and get them to talk to each other in forums or comments sections, they’re much more likely to keep visiting.
2. Empower Users to Contribute
People love to share their opinions and knowledge. When you give them ways to do this, they stop being passive readers and become active members of your community. An active member is much more likely to engage with new content and discussions. Plus, they might share your site on their socials (if you add sharing buttons to the content).
If you want your users to contribute to the news hub, there are several ways to encourage that participation. These two methods work well with most types of news aggregators:
- Enable guest submissions. Create a simple way for users to submit news tips, their own takes on current events, or even complete articles. Make your guidelines clear but not overwhelming, and if you want to sweeten the deal, offer a backlink for the guest posts you accept (but be careful what sites you link to!).
- Set up forums for discussion. Not everyone might want to submit a guest article. However, niche forums can be amazing sources of information. A lot of times, the discussions that your audience has in these kinds of forums can be a lot more interesting than the news of the day.
When users contribute content, they become invested in your site’s success. They’ll return more often to see reactions to their contributions and will feel a stronger connection to your community.
3. Leverage Social Media to Amplify Engagement
These days, if your website doesn’t have a presence on social media, it can be a red flag for some people. Social media can act as a megaphone for your brand but also as a way to establish trust with people and to let them engage with each other. The Aggregator Twitter account is a great example of this (and one you should consider following):
If you’re interested in using social media to boost your aggregator website, here are some smart ways to get started:
- Use social sharing plugins. Add buttons that let people instantly share articles to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or whichever social media platform you use with a single click. Making sharing easy means your content reaches more people with zero extra work on your part (take that, SEO).
- Use relevant hashtags. When you share your content on social media (which you should be doing), use relevant hashtags. Think about hashtags as keywords. They let users find the type of content they want in very, very crowded social media ecosystems.
- Community groups. You can set up a dedicated Facebook Group, subreddit, or Discord server to talk to your audience anytime you want and let them do the same. These platforms support different kinds of interactions and help keep your community active 24/7.
Social media integration creates a virtuous cycle where your website feeds content to social platforms, which in turn drive traffic back to your site. Even if you’re not the biggest fan of social media, it makes sense to leverage its power for your brand.
4. Personalize the Experience
Nobody wants to wade through content they don’t care about. Personalization gives each visitor their own unique experience based on what actually matters to them.
Here’s how to make your site more personally relevant:
- Custom feeds. With WP RSS Aggregator, you can set up unlimited custom feeds using any combination of the sources you add. If you set up dedicated pages or sections for each feed, it makes it easier for users to find the exact type of content they’re interested in.
- Targeted newsletters. Instead of blasting everyone with the same email, segment your list based on what different groups care about. This makes it more likely for your audience to care about your emails and not ignore them.
- Push notifications. When a big story breaks in a category someone cares about, a quick notification can pull them back to your site. Keep in mind that users need to opt into notifications. If you overdo them, you’re likely to scare people away from the site.
Personalization shows users you value their time and interests. You can automate personalization in many ways, such as with email marketing tools and campaigns.
However, you’ll also want to take the time to get to know at least part of your audience. This will make personalizing content much easier and it can help users gain more trust on your website since they can talk to its leading curator.
5. Gamify Engagement
People love games, points, and getting rewards for their efforts. A lot of your favorite websites probably use some gamification to keep you coming back, and they do it because it works.
Here are some basic gamification strategies that you can implement in WordPress using plugins:
- Badges and rewards. Create special badges for people who comment regularly, share your content, or submit quality news tips. People will do a lot for that little virtual trophy next to their name.
- Leaderboards. You can use leaderboards to spotlight your most valuable community members. That can mean the members who leave the most comments, get the most upvotes, or even answer the most questions. It all depends on what type of communication you offer on your site.
- Quizzes and polls. You can set up fun quizzes where your users can share their results and polls to ask them what kind of content they want to see. Often, the best data you’ll get comes directly from asking your users what they want.
Gamification adds a fun layer to participation that can dramatically increase user engagement. WordPress plugins like myCred and GamiPress are great options if you want to test implementing gamification systems on your website.
6. Foster Community Through Events
Nothing builds relationships like real-time interaction. Live events can transform your site from a place to read news into someplace you visit because they’re hosting an interesting event, like a webinar.
Aside from webinars, here are some other types of live events that work well with news hubs or aggregator websites:
- Live discussions. If you can set up AMAs (Ask Me Anything) sessions with experts or journalists in your niche and let your community ask questions directly, that can be a slam dunk. This can be easier than you think, as a lot of experts are only an email away, and they might love the opportunity to speak in front of an audience.
- Virtual meetups. Schedule webinars, panel discussions, or debates about hot topics that your audience cares about. Even simple video hangouts can strengthen community bonds if you can keep them interesting.
- Community member spotlights. You can feature interviews with your most active community members to recognize contributors and showcase diverse opinions. These spotlights help users see each other as real people with unique perspectives.
If possible, try to host events regularly. While live events can be a lot of work, they send a clear signal to the community that the website is alive and active.
7. Add Value Beyond Aggregation
If all you do is collect other people’s content, you’re not giving visitors a compelling reason to visit your site specifically. To grow your news aggregator, you need to provide some level of additional value.
That value can come in a lot of ways, including:
- Publishing original content. Add your analyses, opinion pieces, or deep dives that complement the news you curate. You don’t need to write a novel; even simple summaries of your published content can go a long way.
- Resource libraries. Create guides, infographics, or reference materials related to your published content. These evergreen materials can help you attract search traffic and position your site as an authority.
- Expert collaborations. Partner with influencers, academics, or industry insiders to create content your audience can’t get anywhere else. As we mentioned earlier, many experts are more than happy to share their knowledge with an audience, so start looking up emails!
The more work you put into offering added value on your website, the faster it can grow. Most people do not lack news sources, so you need to zero in on what you can offer that other websites can’t if you want to keep users interested.
8. Build Trust and Transparency
Trust is everything for news sites. Once your community stops trusting you, it’s nearly impossible to win them back. Moreover, trust can take a long time to build, particularly if you run a faceless news aggregator or website.
The good news is that the basics of building trust are pretty much the same for most websites. Here’s what we recommend for starters:
- Don’t forget to credit sources. Always credit the original publishers and link directly to the source material for everything you aggregate. WP RSS Aggregator makes this easy by automatically maintaining links to the original sources.
- Fact-check all content. In a world full of questionable information, taking a clear stance on accuracy can set you apart. When people see something on your website, you want them to be able to trust that content implicitly.
- Set community guidelines. Create clear, reasonable rules that encourage healthy debate without allowing toxic behavior. Be transparent about these rules and be ready to ban users who ruin the community for others with toxic behavior.
Building trust isn’t just ethical–it offers a competitive advantage for news websites. As we mentioned earlier, most people aren’t lacking sources of news—they’re lacking sources they can trust implicitly.
9. Listen and Adapt to Feedback
The best communities evolve based on what their members want (and your best judgment). If your audience knows that you consider their feedback, they’re likely to trust the content you curate even more.
To get feedback, you need to ask for it, though. The easiest way to do that is to set up a feedback contact form on your website.
That process is fairly straightforward with the right plugin (and there are many contact form plugins to choose from). You can also ask users for their feedback using your email list, which gives you the perfect opportunity to reach out to subscribers.
Listening to user feedback is also a fantastic way to talk to your audience directly. If you’re not on social media or the comments section in your posts all the time, you can easily miss out on some great conversations with your community.
10. Monetize Without Alienating Users
Let’s be honest—running a quality news site costs money. But how you go about generating that revenue makes all the difference in whether your community sticks around.
If your homepage is covered in ads like this, you’re likely going to scare a lot of people away:
Having said that, ads are a reliable way to monetize a website if it gets decent traffic. Let’s talk more about ads and other monetization options.
- Ad-free memberships. Create premium tiers that remove ads and add perks like exclusive content or early access to new features. This approach respects that some users hate ads enough to pay to remove them.
- Affiliate partnerships. Instead of random ads, use curated content to promote tools and services that genuinely help your audience. However, you need to be upfront about affiliate partnerships if you want to keep user trust intact.
- Crowdfunding. Platforms like Patreon or Ko-fi let your users contribute monthly or one-time payments to keep your site going. This model works especially well when you offer small perks or some public recognition in return.
If you want to make money from a news aggregator, you’ll also need to offer additional value. Users can find the same news on other sites, so you need to offer them something that sets your site apart if you want that audience to contribute financially.
Conclusion
Building a community doesn’t happen overnight. It takes consistent effort, the right tools, and genuine interest in what your users have to say. The good news is that a news aggregator provides a constant influx of content that can help you grow that community faster.
With WP RSS Aggregator, you can set up unlimited news feeds on your website. The plugin lets you use any combination of sources you want for each feed, and you get access to powerful moderation tools to control what content gets imported into your website.
What community-building strategies have worked best for your site? Let us know in the comments section below!
