5 Ways to Increase Your Blog Reach

Use Other Blogs to Build Your Audience

Are you looking to extend your blog’s audience? One way to accomplish this is to leverage other bloggers’ audiences. At its core, this concept is similar to advertising where you expose an existing audience, with attributes similar to your target market, to your marketing message in hope that they will engage with you in some way.

For bloggers, leveraging other blogs’ audiences is a win-win. You provide content in return for getting exposed to new prospective readers while the blog owner expands his content offering with limited effort. (It’s particularly good if the blogger feels that he needs some time off.) In addition, you can both exchange blog posts for each other’s blogs to cross-pollinate both audiences.

Do your homework before approaching a blogger so that you know how to position yourself and your proposal. This request should be tailored to the blog, not a mass mailing. As you know, bloggers can be very protective of their audiences. Therefore, show that you’re going to provide new, valuable content that will meet their readers’ needs. To this end, assess what you can bring in terms of special knowledge, case studies, research or complementary expertise that readers will want to read.

5 Ways to leverage other people’s audiences

Here are five ways to expand your reach by exposing your content to another blog.

1. Write a guest post. Compose a great post tailored to the blog’s audience. Often, a blog’s biggest fans write the best guest posts. It’s useful if the guest blogger brings a unique perspective or information that the blog doesn’t have otherwise.
2. Give an interview. These can take a variety of formats, text, audio or video. The advantage of an interview is that the questions give the article structure. Done via email, there’s reduced chance of misquoting someone. If you opt for video or audio, include text in your post to support search optimization.
3. Participate in a group round up. Ask a group of bloggers (or experts) for their input on a specific question. The type of article spreads the workload across a group (although it can require additional technical support. (An example is my 31 Definitions of Public Relations.)
4. Take part in an online blog panel. Like a live event, the goal is to get a diverse set of opinions for a consistent set of questions (versus a group roundup where everyone comments on one item.) The drawback is that, unlike a live event, panelists can’t see other respondents’ answers until the article is published. Therefore any discussion must happen in the comment section.
5. Reprint an article. Extend your content to another blog and expose your writing to their audience with limited work on your part. The drawback is that you’re not giving them fresh content. Also, you should wait until your content has been spidered on your site so that search engines don’t think that you’re posting duplicate content.

When considering expanding your audience through one of these methods, it’s a good idea to be present and participate in the conversation on the blog after the content is published. This means responding to comments in a timely fashion to  show that you’re accessible and engaged.

Have you used any of these methods to expand your blog audience? If so, what was your experience? Do you have any other suggestions for expanding a blog audience? If so, please include them in the comments section below.

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen

Here are some related posts to help build your blog.

• Do business blogs chase the wrong metrics?
• 24 Ways to Promote Your Blog With No Budget, No Time & No Resources
• 29 Reasons You Aren’t Getting Blog Traffic

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