Expanding a Blog’s Reach

TCE has multiple Google search top hits. These are mostly students who are trying to figure out how to do an assignment that a teacher has given them. However, sometimes it is other things.

TCE was originally aimed at folks like me who teach at CCs or SLACs and are interested in a variety of information on the topic because their lives are not focused on a single element.

I love the fact that despite this goal, TCE serves hundreds of students every day, thousands every month, teaching them about how to write literary analyses. My handouts for teachers have become handouts the students search out and use.

I would love for TCE to get more attention, despite the fact that it has a significant amount of folks heading here on a regular basis.

I am also interested in expanding my blogs’ reach because TCE is not the only blog I operate. While my personal blog is fine in obscurity (I use it to keep information I want to be able to search.), my classroom blog and my school blog (where I write as a teacher about my experience) could use some readers.

Inside Higher Ed has an article in Career Advice on expanding your blog’s reach.

Getting other blogs to link to you is incredibly important in building a community of readers. From a search engine’s perspective, when other sites link to your blog these links act like citations. Naturally, the blog with hundreds or thousands of other blogs citing it means that this is a site that people enjoy and find valuable. If you are recognized as an authority in your subject, search engines will promote your site.

This is not something I have ever considered doing, but I guess I should.

Also, if you are trying to use your blog to raise awareness about an issue in higher education, a good tactic is to add an insightful comment on articles in major publications. Authors (even national authors) often keep a close eye on comments, especially right after publication. If you add something insightful and direct other readers back to your blog, this will put you on the author’s radar and could result in them using you as an expert in any follow-up articles. (This strategy personally resulted in my own personal blog being cited twice in national media).

And here is something else I have not done which would be very simple to do.

The Internet is a contextual universe, organized by small networks that connect individual sites to larger groups of sites. A key way to extend the reach of your site is to put content on other sites relevant to your chosen topic. In other words, don’t just post your best stuff on your blog. Pass it around the community.

I am just beginning to do this. I sent a post to From Tweet to Thesis. It will be coming out this weekend.

Dr. Lee Skallerup at College Ready Writing is very good about doing these types of things. Perhaps I should just follow her example, footstep by footstep.