The key to making really valuable content is to make sure that it serves your target audience immediately. Don't try to sell your community on your product, give them insight into how to use a specific tool or strategy.

Buffer used this strategy to grow to over 100,000 users in 9 months directly from blogging about valuable content and building an engaged community - most of whom eventually became clients as well.

Most really high quality blog posts exceed 2,000 words, but don't limit yourself to just writing blog posts.

Think of your favorite blogs and replicate the writing style they have.

Make high quality slideshows and get them up on Slideshare.

Make amazing infographics with infogr.am, visual.ly, or Piktochart.

One of the most amazing things I took advantage at with Klout was our weekly Twitter chats. Get everyone using the same hashtag and really address a perticular subject and provide them with insights and answers to their questions.

Get lots of people participating in order to make it feel lively. You can track the entire conversation by keeping and eye on the hashtag or a specific group of keywords with the help of some tools like Hootsuite which we'll explore later on.