8 Crucial Steps to Take After Publishing a Blog

You’ve spent time researching and writing your blog post. You read over it several times, ensuring it was impeccable. Now, it’s been posted and you’re done…right? Not quite. To increase the blog’s visibility and engagement, it is important that you continue your hard work with a few additional steps that help increase your visibility and reach. Adding these to your content marketing strategy allows you to get the most out of your blogging efforts, especially once they become second nature.

Step 1: Review It One Last Time

Despite the care you take in perfecting your blog post prior to publishing it, there is always the chance of a mistake. A typo or small grammar error might have slipped through, or the formatting might be slightly different when it is live compared to the preview. Search engines have started to rank sites with perfect grammar higher than those without, and many consumers likewise expect quality blogs to be well written. Therefore, take the time to review your post at least one last time prior to moving on to sharing it.

Step 2: Include A Link in Your Email Newsletter

Once you are sure that your content is perfect, it is time to share it to increase its visibility. One of the first places for promoting your blog is your email newsletter. Email marketing is a highly effective way for building relationships with your customers. Those who have signed up for your email already have an interest in your company, increasing the chance they will click on the link and read the post. Email actually is better at converting than social media, with a 17 percent higher conversion rate.

Step 3: Shorten the URL

Another important step in sharing your blog is to shorten the URL. This is especially key for adding to social media sites that limit the number of characters, like Twitter. There are free sites that will provide a unique, shortened URL for your blog post to make it easy to share. If you have a Google account, you can use goo.gl, the Google shortener. You can even track some of the clicks and other information, although it is not nearly as inclusive as analytical software.

Step 4: Post it on Social Media

Social media is a popular place to push your blog post and is now the most common driver of referral traffic at over 31 percent. However, it is important to think a bit outside of the box for a bigger punch. For extra attention on your blogging efforts, create excitement about the post through using different formats besides just a link. For example, film a short discussion about the same topic about which you were blogging and post it to social media, especially Periscope and Facebook Live. Do not forget to share it again on social media days and weeks after you posted it to catch those who might not have seen the first post.

Step 5: Incorporate Links in Older Posts

Once a post is live, it does not mean you cannot go back and make changes. One important change to make is to create links to newer posts that deal with a similar topic, especially on your most popular ones. After you write a post, review your past blogs and find one with a similar topic. Edit it to add a link to the new blog to increase the visibility for those who come across your initial post in the future.

Step 6: Post on Other Sites

Although extensive off-post blogging and link-sharing is no longer helpful, there are ways to share your blog on other sites to increase visibility. Over time, you build relationships with others within your niche. There might be times where you have an opportunity to syndicate your posts on these sites. When you do, be sure that you include a disclaimer that says” this article originally appeared on [your site name]” that includes a link to the original, preferably a canonical link. This type of link reduces much of the duplicate content issues that might develop from poor syndication. It also further improves the ranking by ensuring that Google and other search engines know that yours is the original and the other is a syndicate link.

Step 7: Repurpose the Information

There is a significant amount of work that goes into developing a strong blog post, and you do not want all of this to go to waste. It is possible to take advantage of this new-found knowledge without creating duplicate content. Take the core of the information and repurpose it to create additional value. For example, create an infographic based on the data or develop a script for a video or an eBook out of it. This content is highly valuable and shareable, adding more traffic to your site, and ultimately your original post.

Step 8: Interact with Commenters and Sharers

Part of blogging is providing a space to interact with consumers and build relationships. An important way to do this is to actually react to their responses. Answer any legitimate comments on your site. Demonstrate gratitude to your followers who shared or liked your post. When they see that you genuinely care about their responses, they will be more likely to do this on another blog in the future, increasing your organic reach.

For your content marketing efforts to really provide as much as they should, it is important that you never feel as though you are done. Once a blog is published live, the work has only just begun. Many of the necessary actions will quickly become second nature when you add them to your content marketing strategy.