Despite the shift toward platforms like Facebook and Twitter, blogging is still a great way to increase search engine ranking and provide informative content to customers.
For any blog, however, getting readers is always a challenge. If your business has a blog, getting mentions from others can bring a big boost to your readership numbers.
As businesses and consumers grow increasingly interested in data and statistics, online outlets have begun to search for ways to provide it.
By including numbers in your own posts, you’ll likely capture the interest of those who are interested in sharing your information with others. Here are a few ways you can increase your blog content’s reach using data.
Visual Content
Research has revealed that visual content makes a longer-lasting impact on today’s readers, who have shorter attention spans than ever. For this reason, many businesses have found a way to wrap data into eye-catching infographics that can then be shared on social media and in online publications. Businesses and websites will write a story to go with the infographic, citing your business as the original source for the piece.
To encourage sharing, businesses should make it as easy as possible to insert the infographic in a variety of ways. Infographics are nothing new, but the important thing here is to stay away from a sales pitch and provide detailed (and authoritative) information about a particular industry that is not widely known. If a user learns something new, they will be more likely to share it.
Citations
Everyone from students to content marketers look for numbers to supplement their writings. When your blog provides insightful in-demand data, you’ll find your blog is cited by multiple sources, increasing its search rankings and helping you reach even more people. Over time, the increase in traffic may even lead to additional sales and online followers.
One great thing about this technique is that the numbers don’t even have to be your own. If you’ve linked to the original source but said something interesting enough to be shared, you may find quite a few sites link to your post instead of the research piece that provided your information. If you choose this route, make sure the data you’re quoting is accurate, coming from verified sources.
Social Shares
As with infographics, businesses should make it easy to share their blog posts. Every blog you post should offer as many social media sharing options as possible, including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google Plus. With one click, a reader can blast a link to your content to thousands of followers. You won’t get click-throughs from all of those followers but if even a few read your content, relate to it, and learn about your brand as a result, you’ll be expanding your reach.
In addition to sharing, you may also want to encourage your readers to follow you on various social media sites. This will allow you to quickly increase your social media followers, which means in the future when you post links to items on your blog, you’ll have a large audience to take action and read or share your posts.
Increase Credibility
Statistics add credibility to a piece and, by association, to the business providing the information on its blog. A business that posts a self-hosted study and includes details about how many people were questioned and how the results were gathered can help establish itself as a highly reliable source on that topic. This is especially true if the study is linked to a wide variety of online sites.
To further establish your business as a thought leader using data, consider crafting a news release and distributing it to popular online news services. Use your own blog post as the original source of the information and link to it in the news release. You’ll likely find you’ll get many backlinks to your site, further improving your SEO efforts.
Conclusion
As hard as a business works to build a great blog and increase its readership, that readership can easily stagnate. By adding valuable statistics and getting the word out about them, your blog can reach a wider audience through social shares and backlinks. Once your information has been shared by one interested reader, it can spread to many other, helping extend your reach and grow your customer base.
