When it comes to online presence, reach matters. Savvy bloggers and companies realize that in order to get in front of audiences they must increase reach. Reach, also known as exposure, is the number of readers that have the opportunity to interact with a website and its content. Increasing reach, simply means that for any given, page, post or comment, the number of places on the web where it can be seen or accessed is increased in quantity.

There are many standard tools for increasing reach. Most notably RSS feeds and readers bring content directly to legions of readers sifting through the news at their morning coffee. A huge exposure mechanism is SEO, get higher on a search engine and get a chance for more clicks. All the various badges for posting to Technoratti, Digg, Sphin, and Reddit are purely meant to increase reach. Even Facebook and Twitter are now part of the standard arsenal of putting content in front of more eyes.

Bloggers try to squeeze every ounce of exposure out of every piece of content. Thats why the web is full of directories, portals, syndication tools, and social networks. Just look at any blog with a few hundred submit me badges. These are all attempts at growing reach, because exposure is the most critical element of gaining an audience.

The quirky thing about reach is that in some special synergetic circumstances it feeds and builds on itself. Silicon valley techies refer to this as viral growth. In the growth of any audience there is a magic moment where critical mass is reached and reach takes on a life of its own. This is due in part to the dreaded echo chamber of the web, but also because at some point the content is deemed popular. This can happen on a vast scale, or within a relatively niche audience. Reaching that critical mass is a matter of pushing a sites reach to the critical point.

Take for example the sites Wine-Girl and WineMedineMeCincinnati. Both sites have performed well, each independently with an average of about 2,000 unique visitors per month. Wine-Girl is wine focused, while WineMedineMeCincinnati is food and restaurant themed, making the sites a natural pairing. In April 2009, two thing happened. First both sites were recommended by Cincinnati.com. This provided a traffic injection into a page on each site.

Then both sites decided to expand their reach by installing Arkayne and cross linking each of their relevant posts. Meaning both bloggers installed Arkayne, and recommended each other. Arkayne placed links to relevant posts at the bottom of each blog’s articles. As a result each sites audience became the others and reach of incoming traffic was increased across their own content as well as each others content. The incoming readers from Cincinnati.com were exposed to more of the great content on both Wine-Girl and WineMedineMeCincinnati partly through Arkayne causing them to stay longer and become fans.

Source: Compete.com

The traffic for each site rose to 4,000 unique visitors a month, an indication that Arkayne had effectively shared the complete audiences between the two blogs as well as leveraged the audience from the referring parent site Cincinnati.com. An interesting thing then happened. Traffic continued to grow to around 8,000 unique visitors per month, larger than the sum of either sites original traffic. So combining two audiences together seems to produce a multiplicative effect where the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. In this case, the two sites combined through Arkayne, offered more value to readers than each one independently. The audiences referred from Cincinnati.com responded by promoting both sites, making them by definition popular together.

The case study of Wine-Girl and WineMedineMeCincinnati is a prime example of how the world of online marketing is changing. Collaboration and leveraging niche audiences can yield tremendous benefits. Having Cincinnati.com injected a niche audience. Having Arkayne cross pollinate audiences of both through relevant links extended the reach of each site. Readers benefited from more comprehensive content and rewarded both sites by promoting them. This is exactly what Arkayne was built for and where the future of online reach is heading.