After you’ve successfully written a blog post and clicked ‘publish’, it’s time to open up that well-deserved bottle of champagne. Is it? As it turns out, your work is far from over. In other words, if you don’t invest a single minute into making sure it reaches the right people, it could end up going unnoticed. And you wouldn’t want all of that hard work to go to waste, now, would you?
If you’re only going to take away one thing from the entire post, let it be this:
Without proper marketing, even the best content can get lost in all the noise.
With this in mind, here are 10 things to do after you’ve published your article:
1. Syndicate It
Those who don’t have time to visit each page individually to see whether someone has published something new are well acquainted with their RSS feed. Once you have it integrated into your website, it will automatically let them know about the update.
2. Post Teasers to Other Websites
Posting an excerpt of your article to other websites is by no means a requirement, but given how much more attention it will get in exchange for very little work, you’d be shooting yourself in the foot not to do it. You could post it in various places such as LinkedIn, Facebook, industry forums, etc. The key point to remember is that you garner people’s interest by giving value. As long as your piece of content delivers on that promise, people will be happy to see what you’ve come up with.
3. Shorten the URL
Let’s face it: long URLs are not pleasant to look at, so it makes sense to use a URL shortener. But aesthetics is not the only reason why you should do so. Did you know that many URL shortener services offer built-in analytics, allowing you to see the demographics and other relevant statistics of where the clicks are coming from? You could even create multiple short links that lead to the same destination. The reason, of course, is being able to track each source of traffic separately.
4. Bookmark It on Social Media
Again, social media is another source of traffic you should tap into since it doesn’t cost you anything but a fraction of your time. It will help you reach more people and gather valuable backlinks to your website, which is great for SEO purposes.
5. Comment Other Relevant Blogs
Commenting on other relevant blog posts in your niche is not only an additional way to secure additional backlinks to your website, it brings additional exposure as well. Bear in mind this only works as long as you make a meaningful contribution, so forget the generic “nice post, here’s a link to my website” types of comments – they will get sent straight to the trash bin.
6. Help People Out on Twitter
Remember that Twitter has its built-in search engine? Learn how to use it to its full potential by looking for tweets in which the author is looking for help with something. This ‘something’ is a problem your blog post was written to address. See where we’re going with this? By reaching out to these people, you’ve not only brightened up their day, you’ve also gained a new subscriber/follower. Nice!
7. Tweak the Post
Go and re-read your post once more to see if there’s something you can add or elaborate on. If nothing else, consider throwing in some pictures or videos to make everything more colorful and interactive. Your readers will love it and so will the search engines.
8. Share It via Your Newsletter
If you haven’t started building your own email list, now’s the time to do it. Once you get your readers to subscribe, you’ll be able to reach out to them at any time you see fit, even if, for some reason, all of your organic traffic disappears overnight. Once you have it set up, a new post on your website doubles as giving value to your subscribers.
9. Do Some Internal Linking
Adding internal links, when relevant, is another great way to boost your site’s SEO score without doing that much extra work. Besides, it also allows you to recycle your readers; instead of having them click away to another website, they remain on yours. As you already know, optimizing your bounce rate is rewarding from an SEO perspective and this is a great way to go about it.
10. Repurpose the Content
Once the hard work of writing the article is done, you can repurpose the content by transforming it into other formats. For example, transforming it into a video, special report, or podcast doesn’t take much extra work and it will get you additional exposure by distributing it through other relevant channels. You can also outsource that part of the work to someone else if you’re short on time.
Do the things mentioned above, and your content will reach more eyeballs than ever. After all, taking the proactive approach to marketing tends to pay off in spades, even if it requires a little bit of extra work. It’ll be well worth the effort.
