Ways to Expand Your Blog’s Reach in 2008

Posted on | January 11, 2008 |

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Dosh Dosh has an interesting article 16 Effective Strategies to Expand Your Blog’s Reach in 2008.

I will excerpt a few methods that I think are doable for the typical blogging small business.

Localize Your Blog. One surefire way to reach a larger audience is to target a local market and correspondingly reach out to the local audience in its original language. This means translating your blog and making it geo-specific. Gizmodo is a good example. Check out the little country flags under the logo. Localization allows you to cover topics which major industry blogs will inevitably fail to cover. This allows you to be comprehensive as a brand.

Not just countries, think regions, state or even city specific. Find the niche that you can own.

Participate in a Social Community. Niche social communities like forums or social networking/news websites are not only a good way to get targeted traffic but an efficient way to brand yourself. Pick a couple of social communities and when you are not blogging, spend time on them to network and establish connections.

This will be a subject of future posts. For now I will drop these factoids on you. Did you know that myspace now has more traffic that Google? How about YouTube having 2x the traffic as Google? Can you see a trend here? Social networking sites are doubling every 6 months.

Optimize For Social Media. Social Media optimization can work in two ways for your blog. The first way focuses on allowing your readers to communicate and interact with each other and yourself away from your blog through channels like Twitter or Facebook. Open up accounts in social websites which your audience might frequent and connect them to your blog. The other method involves marketing your blog through social media communities. To do this, pick a community that is relevant to your site, befriend the influencers and disseminate your content.

Bring in New Writers. New writers = new voices and more consistent posting.

Exactly what we are doing here at the Dinkum blog.

Make Your Blog Mobile. Some readers like to access blogs through mobile devices like PDAs or cellphones so making your blog mobile may help you to reach more people. It’s not too far fetched to imagine someone reading your blog article on a PDA and then showing it or sending it to a couple of friends. Here’s an excellent guide on how to make your blog mobile-friendly.

I am already implementing this for some clients. There is a nice plugin that optimizes web access from the iPhone.

Start Doing Video/Podcasts. Video blogging is an easy way to get some extra traffic, because you’ll allow your blog content to reach a whole new audience. Social video websites like Youtube, Dailymotion and Metacafe are high traffic venues which can bring you not only sales conversions but new readers.

This doesn’t have to a big production. Even one will help. One client had a terrific VHS tape of an interview on local TV. We converted it to mpeg4 and upload to YouTube where it sends a steady stream of visitors to the blog.

Implement these tips and your traffic will go up, guaranteed.