Overlooked Opportunities to Expand Your Business Blog’s Reach

You’ve written a blog post and published it to your website.

Ensured it is optimized for search with keywords in the blog title, page URL and image names.

Promoted it with status updates on all your social media platforms.

Included it in an email digest of your recent posts.

You think you’ve done just about everything you can with that post, right?

Not necessarily.

You may be overlooking these opportunities to expand your blog’s reach even farther with a little outreach of your own.

1. Let others know when you feature them.

While not all blog posts mention other businesses or websites, when your post does, let those people know. This is especially important if they have a strong following of their own.

The styles of blog posts most likely to included references to other companies or sites are list posts or curated collections posts. (Need help writing them? Download templates here.)

For example, if your management consulting business blog publishes a post entitled “5 Podcasts That Will Change How You Think About Hiring,” you have five opportunities for outreach to promote your blog. Contact those podcasts and let them know you’ve featured them. Send them a link. Chances are, they will want to let their listeners (and Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn followers) about your praise for their podcast. When they share the link to your blog, you could gain new readers.

2. Use blog content in PR outreach.

We’ve said many times that marketing and public relations need to work together, not remained walled off and independent of each other. When you collaborate, your combined contacts list can result in expanded reach for your business blog, whether it is written by marketing or PR.

Public relations should think of the blog as a repository of information and proof of leadership and expertise in the industry. Mentioning blog posts in pitches to journalists, bloggers, and reporters will add credibility to the pitch and increase changes of generating media coverage.

Especially compelling may be current blog posts about new trends, posts detailing original research and data, or posts that tell the beginning of a great story you think your media contact would love to share with their larger audience.

In order to truly maximize the blog in media outreach, PR needs to be familiar with the material the blog has covered and should suggest topics that would be useful to them in pitching media coverage. It all goes back to the idea of a companywide content strategy.

What other ways have you found to expand the reach of your blog beyond the basics? We outline a few more in How to Grow & Scale Your Business Blog, but I know our readers have great ideas, too.