Last week we delved in deep to the things you can do with your post once you hit “publish”. Some people feel as though that’s the end of the road, and others feel as though it’s only the beginning!
There are plenty of things you can do to keep your post current on social media, ensuring it is optimised for SEO, how to repurpose it for different channels, how to keep readers on your blog once your post is published, and how to extend your ideas for the future. It was a week packed with information, and plenty of takeaways for you at home. Let’s have a look at what we covered, and we’d love to hear your feedback on the ones you think you might like to try (or ones you feel as though didn’t quite work in your situation).
How to Socialize Your Posts For Maximum Effect:
Darren wrote extensively about where you can post your posts on social media to be in the right information stream for your readers. He broke down the choice of social media to what kind of time you have to spend, where the majority of your readers are, what suits your content best, and where your competitors might be. He explained how a rhythm to sharing is important, and outlined how to do this for maximum return. He gave great tips for sharing on Twitter and G+, and the kinds of resharing he does after the initial push. Which tip resonated with you?
Publish Your Blog Post Without SEO, and 1000s of Readers Will Be Forever Lost:
Rand Fishkin reminded us all that content can stay current after its inital social media push by optimizing it for search. He explained how fast your post can die if not supported in the first instance with good SEO, by paying attention to keyword research, the best way to go about finding a title and what kind of information to include in body content, and the best ways of reaching out to your network to get your content seen by the right people. I loved the presentation he included called “How To Earn Traffic Without Selling Your Soul” – something to think about if you feel as though optimising and keywords take away from the beauty of writing from the heart to connect with your readers. Did it have an impact on your thoughts about it?
How To Repurpose Your Content and Why You Should Do It:
Repurposing content isn’t just re-promoting your posts on social media, as Darren explains. It’s about changing up your content for different media streams, and for the different interests for your readers. It heightens your search result rankings, and readers can also connect with your work more deeply. Of course, there are risks present, and Darren outlines those, and he also gives his best advice for how to repurpose your content for the best results. There are some solid tips and concrete examples – which ones do you think you’ll try?
You’ve Got Readers To Your Blog: This is How You Keep Them There:
Day four was all about keeping readers excited and wanting to engage after you’ve optimised your post for SEO, published it to all the right channels, and even repurposed it for different reader needs. I broke it down into site design, reader comments and how to interact with them for the best results, and what you can do off your blog to drive traffic back to your posts. Everything from responding to as many of your readers as you can, being useful, sparking conversations between readers, to having a clear design, making commenting a breeze, and returning the favour of a comment on someone else’s blog. I’m sure at least one of those tips would be successful if you used them today – which one will it be?
Extend Your Ideas With Future Blog Posts:
Darren explains the problem he is seeing with current sites focusing on curated content, and how sensationalist headlines will only get you so far. He outlines the best tips to make you stand out from the crowd – how to go deeper with information, and how to provide genuine, interesting, useful content. He tells us how to find future post ideas in the post you’re currently writing, and how to extend previous posts you’ve written for a new readership. What is something you can adopt in your daily writing practise to help your information go further?
We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Rand Fishkin is right about the SEO tips, I never gave attention to researching before publishing my blog post, now that I am doing it, I realized I have been missing out a lot. Thanks for sharing Darren.
He’s very smart in that department!
In my opinion, the most important part of thinking up a blog post is to think of a proper hook for the visitors. That hook that will make them discuss. I mean you could write something which is not that popular, but if you include a hook (on the right place) it will be a huge boost.
It can make all the difference!
The idea of re-purposing content is brilliant, not only does it reach more people that way but using different methods of media to reach different people is better for your business in terms of content. Search engine ranking is now so focused on good content, that this should be a high priority.
Agree!
SEO and Social sound like stuff that’ll go hand in hand to promote by blog! I’d love to implement those two. Social sharing is a lot fun since I tend to find lots of useful stuff when I stay on social media and when I attempt to share my stuff.
And SEO, well that’s a sweet bit of the content creation process. I don’t obsess over it but I do make sure that I optimize my blog posts for search engines.
It was a great theme week at Problogger. I enjoyed it very much!
Social media can be a lot of fun!
Very informative post, we always optimise social posts for SEO purposes however still see many not doing it. It’s important to get the most from every content published.
I agree with rosie.. social post are very important for SEO
Practise is misspelled – it should be practice with a c; if you are promoting something you will need to spell check a bit more; it’s hard when it’s your own stuff – but good luck.
Thank you for your input, Esther. I am Australian, and therefore go by the British grammar rule around “practice/practise” (i.e. if it is used as a verb in a sentence, it is spelled “practise”). http://www.future-perfect.co.uk/grammar-tip/is-it-practise-or-practice/
Thanks for this incredible series – packed with useful ideas.
I experimented with Slideshare and re-purposed content last week. I created a presentation based on one of my posts and was happy to reach 93 views on my first day (including a handful of email subscribers). Not a big number but not bad for a new social media account with 0 followers!
Well done! That’s a great result!
I really, really need to work on this! Thanks for sharing this info!
social media giant nowwadays. its authority and powerful. yes very comfortable source of getting lots of traffic.
I have been blogging on and off for a few years now, and have this week started a fresh blog. Trying a different direction, and while I don’t have readership or community and it’s certainly not monetised, I’m trying to keep the topic to a succinct length and to stay on-topic. So for me, reading that I can gain future posts from current post writing was an a-ha moment. I’ve been following Pro-Blogger for a few years and I look forward to putting some of the more basic blogging tips to good use with this new blog.
Thanks so much for this series, I am giving a presentation on blogging for business in two days time and will definitely be adding these tips , giving problogger the credit and telling people to subscribe to you guys! Thanks so much your advice sends out ripples of helpful influence to people all across the world.
~Clare in northwest Sydney (Australia)
I liked the point on repurposing content for different media streams. As you mentioned, I agree there are risks involved. But then the rewards are great too. Thanks for writing this post.