blog online reach Archives

03 Jul, 2017

7 Surefire Tips to Boost Your Blog’s Online Reach

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As most business owners know, blogging can be a highly effective tool for marketing success. But how to boost your blogs online reach? By creating quality videos, infographics, written posts and other content formats, you can:

Draw attention to your business by offering valuable information to those who search online
Convert readers into customers through high-quality content
Develop customer loyalty and trust
Improve your website’s SEO
Create a competitive edge by establishing your brand as the most trusted source of expertise within your industry

Whether you’ve only recently decided to start a blog or you’ve been managing one for years, one of your most important long-term goals should be reached. Stated more dramatically, you want your content to spread far and wide throughout your audience like a wildfire.

How do you gain a further, wider reach? Here are seven straight-forward tactics you can start executing today.

First things First: Utilize Tools for Growth and Optimization.

One of the most common (and costliest!) blogging mistakes is not utilizing tools that make blog-management easier. If you’re struggling with basic tasks like running analytics, creating forms and doing SEO, you won’t have much time to boost your blog’s reach.

One tool every blogger should consider right at the start is OptinMonster. It’s a lead capture tool for WordPress that lets you quickly and easily create opt-in forms to help gain blog subscribers, with added A/B testing functionality. This is, of course, a crucial element to increasing your blog’s growth.

Also, do yourself a favor and use Google Analytics for your blog. At the very least, you’ll want to use it to determine how much of your content is resonating with your audience.

For SEO, install Yoast SEO into your WordPress blog. This tool helps you write SEO-ready content, manage meta and link elements, helps with social integration, and much more. It’s hard to describe the ways Yoast simplifies technical aspects of SEO, so you’ll just have to try it yourself!

There are many other tools available for making blog-management easier, so always be on the lookout for new resources.

Create more content.

It’s well established that the more content you publish on your blog, the greater the reach it’s likely to earn. Simply stated, people who search Google are likely to find your content if there’s more of your content to find.

This isn’t always easy (actually, it’s never easy,) especially when we consider the vast sea of white noise we call the internet. With so much content already out there, how on earth do you contribute even more – and make it relevant enough to stand out and cut through the nose?

The subject of creating content that stands out has been covered elsewhere – such as this article. But the main point here is that you need to increase your publishing frequency if you want more reach. For proof, just look at some research from HubSpot, who found that:

Companies that published 16 or more blog posts per month earned almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies publishing between 0 and 4 monthly posts.
B2B companies that blog at least 11 times monthly had almost 3 times more traffic than B2B companies blogging 0 to 1 time per month.
Companies that published 401 or more blog posts in total earned about twice as much traffic as companies that published between 301 and 400 blog posts.

Make Your Blog Posts Longer.

This advice obviously doesn’t apply to photo and video blogs. But if you’re predominately a publisher of written blog content and you want more reach for your blog, listen to this:

A large study from Moz and Buzzsumo revealed that blog posts of 3,000 to 10,000 words receive double the shares as posts with shorter word counts.

The importance of a post’s length is indicative of the public’s desire for in-depth content. It also reflects the fact that Google favors comprehensive, longer articles that contain detail and substance. So if you can get really deep into subjects that are relevant to your industry, you’ll set yourself up for more shares that ultimately lead to greater reach.

Connect With Industry Influencers.

Once upon a time, celebrity endorsements were coveted by advertisers aiming for brand awareness. Today, it’s all about influencer marketing – and for good reason. Connecting with influential leaders in your industry has a very powerful way of achieving higher reach for your blog.

For one thing, being endorsed by an influencer can give you and your content more credibility. But more importantly, having an influencer share your content can springboard your posts across the entire social-media landscape.

If you don’t know who the influencers are in your industry, start by using resources such as Klear, BuzzSumo and Ninja Outreach. Next, start building relationships with the influencers you uncovered through these tools.

Although there are many influencer-marketing tactics you could try as a blogger, one practical strategy is to write a case study about an influencer. Maybe they’ve helped a business (or several businesses) become more profitable. Or perhaps they’ve exposed some industry flaws that need to be addressed.

Whatever they’ve accomplished, write about it on your blog and direct them to the link. Consider sharing the post on Twitter and tagging the influencer in it. If the case study is well written, there’s a good chance they’ll share it with their audience – which will bring more reach to your content.

Connect With Other Bloggers.

This tactic is a further extension of the previous one about influencers. In your blog posts, mention or quote other highly-read bloggers in your industry. Then email these bloggers with a link to your post, or tag the bloggers on Twitter. As with influencers, bloggers also tend to share posts that mention them.

Further, spend some time commenting on authoritative blogs in your niche or industry. (Just make sure your comments add value to the conversation and avoid spam at all costs.) The more comments and insights you can contribute to highly-read blogs, the better. Why?

Besides showing your industry that you’re a valuable expert in the field, you’ll also drive traffic to your blog. With WordPress, a link to your blog usually appears along with your comments. This can lead to a significant number of blog readers visiting the link and checking out your blog.

Again, this tactic will only work if your comments provide value. So make sure your thoughts are insightful and perceptive.

Finally, always watch for guest-blogging opportunities. Look for popular, high-readership blogs in your industry, and pitch your blog post idea to the owners of these blogs. The beauty of guest blogging is that such posts usually display your bio and a link to you blog – which, of course, leads to more online reach.

Add Shareability To Your Blog Content.

Even if your blog is bursting at the seams with stellar content, it’s still very important to make the content easy to share. For higher blog reach, integrate social sharing buttons into your posts. AddThis.com is a popular resource for this.

You might also want to consider incorporating “tweetable” quotes into your blog posts. A tweetable quote enables you to highlight a small portion of text that your readers can simply click to tweet. As its name implies, ClickToTweet.com is a great tool for incorporating tweetable content into your blog.

Examples of content that’s perfect for tweetable quotes include surprising facts, useful statistics, main points from your post, and interesting quotes.

Advertise Your Blog On Facebook.

Yes, advertising is still very important in the age of blogging. In fact, it can skyrocket your reach to whole new levels.

Facebook is the best channel for advertising your blog. Why? One of the biggest reasons is that its cost-per-click rates are lower than those of other channels, and you can control the advertising budget you’re willing to allocate. Also, Facebook’s targeting capabilities are, in a word, unbeatable.

First, share a blog post to Facebook. This will (hopefully) generate some likes and shares to add credibility to the post. In other words, you’ll want your target audience to see “proof” of the blog post’s value before you spend money to promote it.

Then, once you’ve generated some likes for the post, configure your budget and “boost” the post shortly after it’s been shared to Facebook.

You’ll also want to consider using “Saved Audience” for your Facebook advertising to target the same people for all your posts. You can select an audience based on important demographics like age, location, interests, education, and others.

Be Open To Discovering More Tactics!

There are always other ways of boosting a blog’s reach – such as podcasting, blog contests, giveaways, and many social media strategies. The key is to constantly look for new and better ways to promote your blog.

As always, remember that your blog’s quality needs to come first. The higher the quality, the more effective your blog-promotion activities will be. But conversely, it’s much harder to promote a mediocre blog. So keep your content valuable, make sure your posts are interesting, and continually ask yourself, “would I read this blog if I were a member of my audience?”

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