You’ve spent hours writing a killer blog post, selecting the perfect images, and crafting a powerful headline before hitting publish.
So now your work is done, right?
Nope. Not even close. In fact, it’s only the start. the real online marketing work begins once you hit the publish button, because without proper promotion, your blog post won’t generate enough exposure.
In this post, I’m going to outline the steps you need to take after you hit publish so that you can get exposure, engagement, and traffic you need to create a positive return on investment from your content marketing efforts.
Share it on social media
The first thing you should do after publishing a post is share it on social media. Plugins like Jetpack can automate this, but I don’t recommenced it because you won’t have the same level of control as you do posting manually. This is important because you’ll need to tailor each post to the network you’re sharing it on; for example, Facebook allows 63,206 characters and can automatically include an image when you share a URL, while Twitter allows only 140 characters and you must include images manually.
You’ll should post on each social channel, including:
- Google+
Take it beyond just posting a stream of your posts by including a question or commentary to encourage your audience to engage, and take advantage of groups where available. This is especially effective on Facebook and LinkedIn. Just make sure to check the group rules before posting your links.
If you use a program like Edgar to schedule your social media, you should add your post there at this time also.
Email it to your list
You do have an email list, right? If not, sign up with Aweber and start building one right now. Then, each time you publish a blog post, send out a quick email to your list with a short excerpt and link back to your website.
If you publish more than one blog post each week, it make more sense to include a week’s worth of posts in one email rather than individual emails. Either way, Aweber has a pretty slick tool that allows you to populate emails from your blog’s RSS feed, so that once a predetermined number of posts have been published, an email will automatically be sent.
On a related note: you can also use the open and click-through rates from these emails to evaluate which type of content your audience wants to see more of.
Notify anyone you mentioned/linked to
WordPress has a handy feature to notify other WordPress websites when you link to them, but it’s not foolproof. If the websites you linked to don’t accept notifications or if the owner doesn’t check or hasn’t logged in lately, they won’t know.
All is not lost, though.
Whenever I publish a post, I make a point to manually notify anyone I’ve mentioned and/or linked to. This is important because they are likely to share it since it benefits them, which results in even more exposure for you!
I start with an email, or if I don’t have their email address, the contact form on their website. I also mention them in my post on Twitter. If there are several mentions/links, I’ll tweet my post once without mentioning anyone, then tweet directly to each person/company that I mentioned or linked to. The latter only shows up in Tweets & Replies, but not in your regular Tweets feed.
Call in a favor with other bloggers
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve probably connected with some other bloggers in your industry, and if you’ve cultivated these relationships properly, you should be able to ask them for a favor from time to time. (If you’re brand new to blogging and don’t have relationships with other bloggers, check out my article on How to Stalk Influencers without Being Creepy.)
Reach out to and ask them to share and link to your post. Most will be happy to help, but be sure to return the favor when they ask you to reciprocate.
This is an especially important step because it helps you reach a new audience, builds your authority and trust, and in the case of links, helps improve your organic search ranking.
Engage with commenters
If your website allows visitors to comment, respond to them. Generally, most comments will occur within the first week of publishing, so to simplify management, you can close comments after a week. (This is a setting in WordPress.)
This type of engagement makes visitors feel welcomed and appreciated, which often leads to better engagement on social too.
Post it to aggregator websites
This can be a powerful way to tap into a new, built-in audience, driving more exposure and traffic to your website. Content aggregator websites are a little bit like article directories, but instead of publishing your entire post, they only publish a link to it, and in some cases, a short excerpt, so there is zero risk of harming your organic ranking.
This is a one-time set up, not a step you have to take after publishing each post. Once your site has been submitted, accepted, and configured, most aggregation websites will automatically include each of your future posts.
Repurpose it for other channels
There’s no reason your killer blog post has to hide away like a grumpy old hermit in a dark corner on your blog. Instead, set it free on other channels to reach a new audience and get more leverage from the time you invest in content development.
Some ideas could include:
- Create a video out of it to upload to YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
- Create a podcast episode out of it.
- Publish it on LinkedIn, Medium, Tumblr, and WordPress.com. (Only after Google has crawled and indexed the original on your own blog.)
- Turn it into an ebook to offer visitors in exchange for subscribing to your email list.
- Turn it into an infographic.
- Send it out in future email newsletters. (Make sure enough time has elapsed since the first time you sent it.)