You've Published a Blog Post - Now What?

Once you've finished a blog post and hit publish, it is tempting to pour yourself another Wild Turkey while you bask for a moment in wonder at your own wit and intellect. Unfortunately, you will have to leave that bourbon on a shelf for a bit longer as writing and posting a blog is only a small part of getting people to read it. In fact, now the real work begins.

If all you do is publish your post, it will end up in the Internet's black hole - page 2 and beyond of Google's search results.

To make your blog post work, you have to actively seek traffic. Here's how.

Tweak for SEO

If you haven't done this before publishing, open your post up again and start tweaking. Is the page title the right length, and does it include the main keyword? Do the header tags have keywords, and is the keyword in the first sentence? Have you written a killer description, and is it the right length? If not, fix all these problems first.

Post On Social Media

The next step is to post links to your blog post on social media. Post to your business pages and personal pages, taking care to craft posts that are interesting and engaging. Use images too.

Don't stop there though - you need to post multiple times. How often depends on the platform. On Twitter, for example, you can tweet about the same blog post multiple times a day. On Facebook, that would be overkill, but you should definitely post more than once. Schedule your posts to publish at different times of the day and different days of the week to capture the biggest possible audience.

Use Your Email List

You should also work your posts into your email marketing schedule to get traffic from your list. This could be an introduction and a link on your regular newsletter or a specific email highlighting the post. How you do it depends on your strategy.

Reach Out to Outgoing Links

Your blog posts should contain outgoing links to other websites that add value to the reader. If you haven't done that, you should consider going back and editing your blog as it is a key ranking factor.

Once you have your outgoing links, find contact details for the person who wrote the content that you linked to. Ideally, you want an email address, although you can try contacting them on social media too. In your email, explain that you loved their post and referenced it in your latest article. Give them the link - and that's it. Don't ask for anything in return, and don't ask them to do anything - just be friendly, play to their ego, and tell them you have given them a shout-out and a link. Hopefully they will return the favour by, for example, sharing your post on their social media pages.

The Twitter Strategy

This Twitter strategy is a good way to get retweets and therefore potential new readers for your blog. The first step is to go to Google and search for blog posts on a similar topic to yours. You can also use tools like Buzzsumo. You then have to visit the Twitter pages for those blogs and find the tweets they created to promote their posts. Those tweets will hopefully have received retweets. Visit the Twitter pages of the accounts that retweeted the similar post, and reach out to them, letting them know about yours. As they have retweeted similar content in the past, you have an increased chance they will retweet yours too.

Harness Relationships

It is also worth reaching out to people that you know - friends, colleagues, suppliers, and even customers to ask them to share your blog post.

In addition, you can use relationships you have on the web - discussion groups, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. to let people know about your post. This is a long-term strategy though; if you don't have the relationships and reputation in place already, you will get nowhere by blustering in with a "read my blog please" pitch. You have to give before you can ask, so keep working on your relationship building.

Respond to Comments

Respond to every comment on your blog post and every comment on a social media post related to it. If someone has taken the time to write a comment, the least you can do is give a response, even if it is just a thank you. You should even respond to negative comments - try to turn them into a positive.

Add Internal Links

Remember to add internal links on your website that point to the blog post you have just created. This will help with SEO.

Guest Post

This is one of the most important tips on the list, but it has been left until last. Why, you might be asking. The answer is that it is a strategy that requires time to work. If you don't guest post at the moment but want to get traffic to a new post now, work through the above tips first. Guest posting will get you traffic in the long run though.

And that word is the key to successful guest posting: traffic. For too long it was a strategy that was associated with SEO (i.e., guest post on a blog in order to get a link to your website to boost your ranking in search). Anyone who knows anything about SEO knows that doesn't work anymore, BUT it was never the best way to use guest posting anyway. Guest posting is about traffic. The strategy is simple:

• Find high traffic blogs in your industry or niche.
• Research those blogs to find posts that are popular with the audience.
• Come up with three or four blog ideas on those topics, and write headlines for them.
• Email the blog owner with the three or four suggestions, and ask if they would be interested in a guest post.
• Write a brilliant guest post.

If it is good enough, visitors will flock to your blog because they want to read more.

Once you've completed this, you can have that bourbon.