You’ve slaved over your laptop to write your latest blog post and you’re just about to hit the publish button. You sit back and think, ‘ahhh, my work here is done.’
Sorry my friend, but that’s wishful thinking.
I hate to break it to you, but your job is far from over. What you do next is just as important as the time it took you to create the post. You need to work hard to bring your audience to you.
Here are 5 things you should do after you publish your blog post.
Add to your scheduler
No-one is going to see your blog posts if you don’t share them. For every blog post you publish, you should have a system for sharing to all your social channels.
You could do this manually, but that’s a time-consuming way to go about things. You’ll need to go into each platform, write the post and add the link.
Adding your post to a social media scheduler like Hootsuite or Buffer, or my personal favourite Smarterqueue, offers a better way. You can share your post to all your platforms at the same time. You write the post out once, adapt it to the platform if necessary, set a time and off it goes.
If you’re using Smarterqueue you can also add it to evergreen where your post will be promoted automatically over and over again. Each post is recycled and added to the bottom of the queue, ready to go out again in an endless loop.
A social scheduler allows you to show up and offer value to your audience every week with little effort on your part. And if you want to grow your audience without spending hours every week sharing stuff to your socials, a scheduler is a must.
Repurpose into other formats
Your blog post can take many other forms and be repurposed to reach new audiences. By turning your blog post into a different format, you’ll connect with people who are on different platforms and like to consume content differently.
This is also a great way to squeeze more value out of your content so you’re not constantly in creation mode.
Here are a few repurposing examples:
- After publishing your post, you could do a Facebook Live covering the points in your post.
- If you have a podcast, you could record yourself reading the post and use that as your latest episode.
- You could take snippets from your blog post and use them as micro posts for social media. This can literally be an interesting fact from the post or a couple of paragraphs. You can schedule these to go out at the beginning of the week. That way you’re building relationships and offering advice everyday with minimal effort.
Go here for more ideas on how to repurpose your blog posts like a pro.
Send an email to your list
One of the easiest ways to get traffic to your post is to leverage your existing email list. People on your email list have given you permission to contact them. They want to hear from you! And the best way to build trust and stay top of mind is by sharing your latest blog posts.
There are three ways you can do that.
- The not-so-personal approach – You can set up an RSS campaign within your email marketing system. This will automatically send out a link to your latest blog post every time you publish. Here’s how to set up an RSS campaign within the email marketing system Mailerlite.
- The teaser email – Send the first couple of paragraphs of your latest blog post in an email. Then ask the reader to click the link to read more.
- The entire post – Lastly, you can literally copy and paste the entire post into the email. You could also drop the link to invite them to your website, and add a couple of links to your other articles that relate to the post you’re sharing.
All three options have their pros and cons. The RSS option is less personal as it’ll be an automated message, but it will save time sending emails manually. Pasting the entire blog post into an email will provide awesome value, but the reader may have no reason to visit your actual website.
The key thing here is to build a relationship with your subscribers. People will appreciate the immediate value you offer in your emails. So if you can spare the time, I’d stick with option two or three.
Share to Facebook groups
Facebook groups can be fantastic for driving traffic. But bear in mind you need to approach your Facebook group activities carefully.
If you just join a group and start dropping your links, it’s unlikely the admin will approve your post and you may even get the boot.
You need to first build relationships with members by introducing yourself. Get to know members and offer tips and advice where you can. You need to become a valuable member of that group.
Focus your time on just five Facebook groups. Gain insights and if a common question keeps coming up, create content to answer that question.
Then after a few weeks of engaging with members, you can share your link to the post. But be authentic about it. Include an opener like, ‘I’ve noticed a few of you have been having xyz problem, I wrote a post all about how to deal with this. Here are a few things included in the post. I hope it helps.’
Of course, always ensure the group allows blog post links first. If they don’t, focus your attention on groups that do.
Reach out to influencers
Social media influencers have the power to supercharge your content around the web. It can mean the difference between getting a couple of measly shares, or a few hundred, if not thousands!
Reaching out to pet bloggers is a great place to start. If you have a spare $79 a month for Buzzsumo, it’s an excellent tool to find key influencers. But it actually does a lot more than simply finding influencers too. It can help drive your entire content strategy so you’re always creating content your customers want to read.
Within Buzzsumo you can search your blog topic, and the tool will churn out a list of top influencers that often share content on that topic.
If you’re on a tight budget, you can always search google instead. Search your topic and check out any high-ranking pet bloggers. It’s wise to find them on social media to see if they’re sharing other people’s content. This is a good indicator to see if they’re likely to share your content too.
Then either send them an email, a DM or fire up a conversation right there on social media. This method may be a more time-consuming way to find influencers, but it can be done.
I hope you now realise that your blogging activities don’t stop after you hit publish. There’s a whole host of post-publish tasks you should adopt to ensure your post gets seen by your ideal readers. This is just a handful!
What’s your system after you hit publish? Let me know in the comments below…
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