When it comes to digital publications, every click, share, and engagement counts toward expanding your reach. Growing the visibility of your online publication will be one of the most effective ways to achieve your goals in 2024, whether that's seeking to grow readership, subscriptions, or sales.

In this guide, we'll delve into the technical intricacies of boosting your digital publication's visibility.

Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting, these strategies will help you maximise your impact and connect with a wider audience.

Understanding the Importance of Digital Publication Reach

Before we dive into the strategies, let us first understand the importance of a publication's reach - skip this if you're an experienced marketer.

In today's digital age, having a wide reach for your digital publication is crucial for success. The reach of your publication refers to the number of people who can access and engage with your content. A larger reach means more visibility, leading to increased traffic, brand awareness, and potential revenue.

By understanding the importance of digital publication reach, you can effectively strategise and implement techniques to expand your audience. This involves targeting the right demographics, optimising your content for search engines, and utilising various distribution channels.

Without a solid understanding of your publication's reach, you may miss valuable opportunities to grow your audience and achieve your goals. Therefore, it is essential to prioritise and invest in strategies that can help you enhance the reach of your digital publication.

Optimising Your Content for Search Engines

Search engine optimisation (SEO) will continue to be the backbone of digital visibility in 2024. When your content ranks higher in search engine results, it becomes more visible to potential readers and increases the chances of attracting organic traffic.

Here are some key factors in improving the SEO of your digital publication.

• Focus on keyword research and integration. Identify relevant keywords and incorporate them naturally into your headlines, subheadings, and throughout the body of your articles.
• Pay attention to on-page SEO elements, such as meta tags, alt tags for images, and URL structure.
• Smartphones are the main device for surfing the web, so Google implements a mobile-first policy in crawling and ranking websites. Make sure your digital publication is optimised for smartphone devices, specifically in readability, loading times and touch navigation components.
• Consider implementing accelerated mobile pages, a stripped-back additional version of HTML that allows your content to load faster on mobile devices.
• Leverage tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to provide data that will inform your SEO research.
• Regularly update and repurpose content to stay relevant in search results, the freshness of your digital publication will play a role in whether it continues to rank well.

By implementing effective SEO strategies, you can improve the visibility of your digital publication and attract a larger audience who are actively searching for content related to your niche.

Leveraging Social Media Platforms

With billions of active users, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer immense potential to connect with a wide audience. By harnessing the power of social media, you can amplify your digital content and engage with your audience.

Key strategies to grow your digital publication reach through social media include:

• By picking the right platform, your audience is likely to strongly favour one social media platform over all others. For example, if your digital publication is strongly focused on B2B commercial content, you're audience is unlikely to be engaging with or sharing it through Pinterest.
• Spend time and effort crafting your social media posts - visually appealing graphics, a well-structured call to action, and a well-structured headline go a long way to improving click-throughs to your content.
• Research when your audience engages with each social platform, with scheduling tools like Hootsuite you can then time the release of your posts to align with these peak hours.Integrating social sharing
• Integrate social sharing into your content by embedding social sharing buttons directly into your digital content, or by adding them to your navigation toolbar, to allow your readers to easily share your digital publication.
• Additionally, consider collaborating with social media influencers and industry experts with a large following. Their endorsement and promotion of your content can significantly amplify its reach and attract new readers to your digital publication.

Build an Engaged Email Subscriber List

Email marketing remains a powerful tool for reaching and engaging with your audience. Building an engaged email subscriber list allows you to directly connect with your readers, share your latest content, and build brand loyalty.

To build an engaged email subscriber list:

• Offer valuable incentives for visitors to subscribe, such as exclusive content, discounts, or access to a community.
• Use opt-in forms strategically throughout your digital publication to capture email addresses.
• Create email campaigns that are personalised, relevant, and provide value to your subscribers.
• Send your emails at the right time - using historical data, you can discover which day of the week and hour of the day is the best time to send your email. 
• Spend time on your email subject lines - this will be a huge driving force behind whether your audience will even open the email, let alone click through to your digital publications. A few ideas
  • Punctuation makes a difference - consider the use of a question mark or exclamation mark
  • Use personalisation - including their name or company will stand out in a full inbox
  • Be bold
• Consider segmentation of your email list based on user behaviour and preferences - existing customers will have vastly different behaviour from the rest of your audience. 

By nurturing and growing your email subscriber list, you can maintain a loyal readership and increase the reach of your digital publication by directly reaching the inboxes of interested individuals.

Collaborating with Influencers and Industry Experts

Collaborating with influencers and industry experts can be a game-changer when it comes to expanding the reach of your digital publication. Influencers and experts have established credibility and a loyal following within your target niche, making them valuable partners for reaching a wider audience.

• Consider reaching out to influencers and experts in your industry and propose collaborations, such as guest blogging, joint webinars, or interviews. These collaborations not only expose your digital publication to a new audience but also provide valuable insights and perspectives that can enhance the quality of your content.
• When collaborating, ensure that the partnership aligns with your publication's values and goals and that the influencer or expert has a genuine interest in your content. Authenticity and relevance are key to maximising the impact of such collaborations and growing the reach of your digital publication.
• Always make sure to track and analyse the performance of your influencer campaigns. You can glean insights from this data to enhance future campaigns.

Data-Driven Decision Making

By harnessing the power of analytics, you can make informed decisions that will help you refine each strategy that grows the reach of your digital publication.

• Use tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic and user behaviour. This will provide you with detailed data from which you can make informed decisions that can greatly influence each strategy.
• Consider experiments - by running A/B tests you unlock a powerful way to optimise the performance of your campaigns. Different subject lines in emails can improve open rate, the colour of buttons can influence clicks, and using images vs videos in social posts can change engagement.
• Always look at your referred traffic - this is a great way to discover websites where your content is being shared and read. It can be worth reaching out to whoever runs these websites to see if you can build a relationship and grow traffic from these sources.

These strategies only begin to scratch the surface of how data-driven decision-making can grow your digital publication's reach. 

New and alternative strategies to grow Digital Publication reach in 2024

The first part of this guide has focussed on well-established mainstream strategies that can help you grow your reach. In the second part, I'm going to take you off the beaten track as we explore new and alternative strategies.

Don't be fooled, while some of these are niche or still in development, their capacity to grow your audience significantly now or in the future is very real.

Repurpose Content for Audio

As the explosion of podcasts has proven, in an increasingly busy world, more and more people are turning to audio as a medium for consuming content.

In 2024, audio offers a way for readers to consume their favourite content without the need to expend effort reading it. It also provides an alternative channel for those with visual or motor impairments to access your content.

By converting excerpts of your digital publication into an audio format, you can tap into this ever-growing channel and connect with your audience in a whole new way.

• Explore the growing list of AI text-to-voice generators like Synthesia as a scalable way to convert your digital publication into an audio format
• Start small, don't dive in at the deep end and convert your entire publication. Be selective and perhaps focus on releasing content that encompasses your most popular content.
• Find your channel - think about where the best place to host and share this content might be. Platforms like Spotify, SoundCloud, Vimeo and YouTube offer a space with already established audiences to tap into. Hosting the content on your website is another great way, then tap into social media and email as a way to create visibility. 
• Consistency is key, like any new channel, it will take time to build an audience and keep them coming back. Stick at it and maintain a consistent publishing schedule so your audience knows when to check in for fresh content.

Voice Search Optimisation

The explosion of Smart Speakers has fundamentally changed the way many of us search the web. Their in-built voice assistant - Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri - created an entirely new way for us to seek out the content we wanted.

This behavioural trend spilt over into smartphones (where it all started) and gave life to the discipline of voice search optimisation. The need for you to consider optimising your digital publication content so it is more likely to appear in voice-based searches.

This involves:

• Implementing Natural Language Processing (NLP) - this means crafting your content in a way that mirrors natural language, as voice searches are more likely to include natural language queries.
• Create conversational content - consider adopting a conversational tone (if appropriate) in your digital publication. Not only will this align with voice search queries, but it can also create a more enjoyable user experience. This will be aided by the use of pronouns such as "I", "you", and "we" which make your content more relatable in voice search results.
• Consider long-tail keywords - when conducting voice searches, users are more likely to use longer phrases that form part of a more complete sentence. A typical text search like "Local Restaurants" might become something like "Please show me restaurants in my local area".

Add Schema Markup

Schema markup(aka structured data) is a form of HTML markup you can add to your digital publication to help search engines better understand and rank your content. Its benefits include faster content indexing, greater search visibility, higher click-through rates and voice search domination.

Despite its well-documented benefits, over 50% of brands still don't add structured data to their websites and digital publications. For those that do, most are only implementing one or two types of schema.

So, where to start:

• Make Schema.org and Google Search Central your source of truth of implementing structured data.
• Select the types of schema that are most relevant to you - depending on the type of content in your digital publication, not all types of schema markup will be relevant to your content. So, do your homework and choose.
• Use a Schema testing tool to ensure that your markup is configured correctly.

AI Translation Tools

One of the most exciting opportunities for publishers in 2024 is the frontier of automatic language translation. Advancements in AI technology can now provide real-time translation of text into other leading world languages like Spanish, Mandarin and Hindi.

This technology can open your digital publications to the global community. With the click of a button, your content can be translated into alternative languages to unlock all-new audiences. At the cutting edge, AI translation isn't limited to text alone, we're starting to see the emergence of multimodal AI that can seamlessly convert other formats including image, audio and video content.

Focussing your efforts in 2024

Having read the above, you now have a series of workable strategies to focus on to grow your digital publication reach in 2024. Of course, we won't stop here, throughout the year we will be keeping an eye on the latest trends and sharing further expertise.

It's worth checking out our previous blog post on increasing magazine reach which will offer additional strategies beyond the ones we've touched on here. Till next time....