Relationships are key. You’ve heard it a thousand times. But cultivating valuable community takes time. And patience. If you’re a people-person, this will come easy (I think everyone is a people-person, by the way–more on that later). If you’re more of an introvert, you might have to push yourself.

Now we can divide essential communities into two groups. One is the meatspace kind of communities. These are the people you bump into in real life and the ones whose names you keep in your phone. You might meet these people online, but they know what you look like and vice versa. There’s a closer contact than with the people from Myspace. Never take these relationships lightly. I try not to give all my time away, but whenever someone says, “Hey, you should meet this person” or “Can you talk to this person about __________” I make the meeting happen. You never know what will become of it.

The other kind of community is the Myspace, or cyberspace kind. But the friendships are more important than “your top 8.” A lot of significant networking can happen online, believe it or not. I’ve actually met lots of new fans as the result of a remix that someone on myspace did of one of my songs.

But it doesn’t end with connections like that, to really cultivate community, I recommend finding a forum on the topic of your interest. I used to be very involved in kvraudio.com. It was a forum originally created to share audio plug-ins for your computer, but has developed into a real musician hangout. People post music there everydaay and lots of people give you feedback on your songs. As you get to know each other, the value is really significant. The opinions of the community can have a really positive impact on what you’re doing. Trust me, I’ve experienced it.

If you’re not doing this, I encourage you to find a group that you can bounce your creative ideas off of. Go to Flickr and find a design community, join an art group on Etsy, or search the web for an SEO forum to mix up ideas. It can take some time to feel like you really know people with names like “DonkeyTugger” or “Razor” but in the end, you’ll be glad you did.

Not only will you get lots of creative and constructive critique, you’ll find yourself with an instant worldwide fanbase when you release your art to the public. I still see inbound links from friends that I met on KVR and I’ve sold CDs to people in France, Germany and Australia as a direct result of those contacts.

Finally, if for no other reason, sign up for some social networking sites like linkedin.com or virb.com just for the inbound links. There’s always a spot for your home page when you create an online profile and anytime you link to your blog or personal web site, your search engine ranking is going to improve.

If you’d like to see this in action, join mybloglog.com today and become my friend. Trust me, it works.