Recently I received a question from Susan, a long-term listener of the ProBlogger podcast. Her query was one I think a lot of people struggle with once they feel as though they may have the content production for their blogs under control, but are wondering how to get that content in front of the right people.
I feel like my idea generation is going well and that the writing and completion phases are great, but I can’t help but wonder if there is more that I should be doing after I hit publish, and wonder if you could give me some tips into what I should be doing before I move on to writing the next post.
Susan was referring to the miniseries of podcasts I did recently that dealt with the three stages of creating great content and beating blogger’s block (episodes 84, 86, and 87), and I wanted to devote today’s podcast to answering this, because I think the answer is multi-faceted.
It really isn’t enough to just put your post up and hope people will see it, and the consideration around what to do once you’ve hit publish is something I’ve thought a lot about. What you do next with your post can be the difference between people reading it or not, and it also makes a huge impact on whether people will keep coming back, again and again – the holy grail of blog promotion.
Before you move onto creating the next piece of content, stop and have a think for a moment about how you can truly maximise the reach of the one you’ve just written. In this episode I outline five things I think you should do with your post to help its reach, and why I think these things are important.
1. Socialisation:
- What social network should you choose?
- Social sharing schedules
- Workflow
- Tools
- Images
- Repeat shares
2. SEO Optimisation
- When to start worrying about it
- Choosing good keywords
- How to tweak older posts for best results
3. Repurposing
- What exactly is it?
- Where (and when) can you start?
- What is worth doing?
- Why is it worth doing?
- The impact it has on search results
- How it frees you up to write more
- The risks involved
- How to choose what to repurpose
- Tips that will help you repurpose well
- Successful places to repurpose
4. Deepening Your Relationships – Tips on Interaction & Engagement
- What you can do to ensure your audience aren’t just passive consumers of your content – and then click away
- Extra tips like polls, activities, challenges, conversations and calls to action
5. Extend Your Ideas
- What you can do after every post that will help you devise more content to publish
- What you can do with the tangents you find yourself going on halfway through posts
- Find gold in your archives to inspire you
- How to expand on previous content with the new content
- How to brainstorm and mind map to fill your content calendar
I’d love to hear your thoughts on best practices for publicising your posts across the web. Do you have a newsletter? Do you use Instagram to promote your content? What works really well for you?
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