Ten Things You Need To Do After You Publish a Blog Post

Do you know that just like making a sale, you also need to do after service once you have posted an article? Your responsibility to your readers doesn’t end when hitting that “publish” button. If you want your post to go viral or at the least drive significant traffic to your website, then there are several things you need to do. Here are the top ten things that you need to do after you publish a blog post.

#1 Once published, double-check your blog post for grammar, spelling and punctuation errors.

The first tip is already done before you publish your blog post but it is extremely helpful to proofread it once again after you click on the publish button. Most website creation tools like WordPress or Tumblr allows you to edit your post even after it has been published. Even though you have probably proofread your article before publishing it several times, go through it again once you have already published it.

In blog posts, it is always better to use simple words and sentence structures. Always use spell check to review the spelling of your words. A quality article is always free from spelling errors. You don’t have to be a grammar Nazi to remember rules for subject-verb agreement.

There are online tools you can use to help you check your spelling and grammar. In Top Ten Reviews article, 2015 Best Online Grammar Check Review Reviews and Comparison, the 5 best online grammar checker based on Accuracy, Editing & Feedback, Ease of Use are (in order of rank): Grammarly, White Smoke, Correct English, Spell Check Plus Pro, and Ginger.

Also, you need to check if your work is free from plagiarism. When writing blog posts, you must have done your research and may or may not have intentionally lifted some passages from other people’s work. Plagiarism is a big no-no. Plagiarism is the act of giving “ownership” to a previously written article. It may be deliberate or accidental on your part.

The image below from Storify will help you understand the difference between accidental and deliberate plagiarism.

There are several free online tools that you can use to check whether your blog post is plagiarism free or not like Copyscape. You just need to type your URL into their search box, and it will check your article for plagiarism. Grammarly can also check for Plagiarism, but it’s a premium feature.

#2 Share your post on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

As a business owner, your website and your various social media accounts are your platforms in promoting your business online. This is really important especially when you are just starting out with your business. When you share your blog post to your social media account, you are informing your friends and your followers that you have a new post worth reading. Sharing them is very easy.

If you are using a social media management tool like Mass Planner, you can schedule your posts to different social media platforms. This is a one-step process that allows your message regarding your new blog post to be published on various social media sites at your specified timeline. You can easily save up months of work with Mass Planner thanks to their multitude of configuration options they offer. You can use it to directly communicate with your followers and clients or for scheduling posts to all your social media accounts from one single place.

You can also manually post on your various social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. Facebook is the most used social media platform right now, but it really depends on the niche you’re in. For some businesses, Twitter is the best communication platform or even Instagram if you’re in a more creative niche or you can present your products using compelling images or videos.

If you choose to use Facebook as the main platform for your social media activity, you can manually post your messages as status updates on your Facebook account or Business page. To do that you just need to click on Update Status and post your message with the link to your blog post. In LinkedIn, you can use the Share an Update button for shorter messages and Publish a Post for longer notes.

In an article in Search Engine Journal, there are listed other social media sites where you can share your post like SlideShare, Visual.ly, Triberr, StumbleUpon, BizSugar, Scoop.It and even Reddit.

SlideShare allows you to create a variation of your article as you can create slides to present your blog post with the use of PowerPoint or any other program. Visua.ly is another site where you can create and share infographics of your post. Pinterest and Instagram are visual sharing sites where you can post relevant pictures from your article and include its URL. Tribber is a social networking place that allows you to develop friendships with other bloggers from targeted communities called tribes. The good thing about this is it even allows you to earn while sharing posts. If you want to increase traffic to your site and increase its credibility, then StumbleUpon is for you. Google+ allows you to post in specific niche communities to boost your traffic. BizSugar is a community for small business and homeowners to share their tips and news.

Twitter might be a little bit trickier to use because of its 140 character limit especially when you have a long URL for the blog post, this is where tip #3 comes in handy.

#3 Shorten your blog post URL using online URL shortener like bit.ly, goo.gl or Pretty Link

Due to the space or character constraint of some social media sites like Twitter and even SMS, the use of URL shorteners is really important. URL shorteners make a long URL shorter. Some URL shorteners have tracking capabilities for real-time clicks. A URL is created automatically or manually by your website application tool that is entirely unique to the actual blog post.

In Hootsuite’s article, URL Shorteners: The Unsung Hero of Social Media Marketing, it talks about how 3 popular URL shorteners work.

A. Bit.ly – is one of the most popular URL shortening services which also has tracking metrics to help you check the actual number of clicks your links is getting. This is a free service that allows you to track human and non-human clicks. Sharing links to your Twitter profile from their site can be done with bit.ly

B. Goo.gl – is another free URL shortening service that happens to be owned by goog.gl. You can use the service without creating an account. It also tracks the number of clicks your link has. You can access their site everytime you need information regarding your link.

C. Pretty Link – is a WordPress plugin. You can install the free version and create short links that look very professional. Like for example “http://leanmarketer.io/ebook” instead of “http://leanmarketer.io/The-Ultimate-Social-Media-Marketing-Guide-For-Entrepreneurs.pdf”. What’s great about this service is the ability to allow you to track real-time human clicks, and post to various social media networking site like Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. These links can also be used on your website or emails if you want to track the clicks and use URLs that are easy to remember. Especially on Instagram, considering that you can’t add a clickable link, it’s better to offer your users links that are easy to remember and type in the browser.

Aside from making long URLs shorter, the use of URL shorteners will also give you brand identity, recognition, and brand trust.
You can also use vanity URL shorteners. Vanity URL shorteners will not only make your URL shorter; it allows you to create branding on your article. In Bit.ly’s How do I set up a branded short domain?, you can create it by doing the following:

• Your desired domain name should be up to 15 characters only including the dot. You may purchase short domain names that you can only use to shorten your URLs. You may try websites that sell unique shortened domains like 101domain and domain.nr.
• Access your Bitly account by going to Settings then Advanced tab and input all necessary information regarding your domain.

  Non-premium accounts can only use their branded shortened domains non-commercially and personally.

• You need to make a DNS record for the domain.

The Domain Name System (DNS) allows your web browser to translate a domain to a website. You will need to tell DNS that your custom domain now should point to Bitly.

The process of updating your DNS varies on your domain registrar. Generally speaking, the process is similar to this:

• Log into the domain registrar’s website.
• Modify the short domain you wanted to change.
• Go to the section for managing your DNS entries. Name for this button or tab varies but it could be something like “DNS Records”, “Advanced DNS,” “DNS Configuration,” “Total DNS”, “Host records,” or similar to that.
• The next step will depend on whether you have a Short Domain or a Subdomain.

#4 Share your new blog post to blogging community sites like growthhackers.com and inbound.org.

Growth Hackers is an online marketing community that allows marketers and entrepreneurs to share tips and best practices in driving sustainable growth.

The term “Growth Hacking” was first used in 2010 by Sean Ellis “initially intended for startups to define a high impact growth role.”

GrowthHackers.com allows marketers a place for discussing important marketing topics and posting of new articles. You can also ask questions within the startup community.

Inbound.org is similar to GrowthHackers community, focusing mostly on inbound marketing practices, including “growth hacking” tactics.

#5 Email your subscribers regarding your new blog post

One of the most important widgets that your website should have is the Email Subscriber’s List button which allows your readers to sign up to receive newsletters and updates about your website or business.

One way to increase traffic to your website is to invite your subscribers to read your new post. You may email them manually or by using email marketing services like Aweber, iContact and Mail Chimp. If you haven’t subscribed to either of these services, you can either use their trial period or their free signups.

Startup businesses can take advantage of Mail Chimp’s Free Plan that allows you up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. Both Aweber and iContact have a 30-day free trial.

So how does it work? Pretty simple.

#6 Re-post your articles on other free blogging websites

You can repost your article on other blogging sites. You do not need to purchase another domain. What you can do is take advantage of the free blogging sites available on the Internet. Dear Blogger listed the following web creation platforms that you can use for free:
Wordpress, Blogger, SquareSpace, Tumblr, Google+, Wix, HubPages, Joomla, Live Journal, Quora, TypePad, Weebly, Drupal, and Squidoo.

#7 Monitor conversations using Social Media Monitoring Tools

Social media monitoring software are tools used by “marketing organizations and agencies to monitor social media platforms. Consultants, agencies, and organizations benefit from keywords alert, having the ability to respond to customer inquiries in an instant, and understanding customer sentiments regarding their own brand and that of the competitor’s. Social media monitoring tools have changed and vastly improved in recent years from just offering listening features to dashboard creation, rich analytics and powerful queries including semantic analysis”.

These tools will help you monitor your marketing and branding campaigns, customer engagement, lead generation for sales, spot future trends, analyze your competitor’s social media marketing campaigns and get credibility in your chosen niche.

Effective social media marketing tools that you can try include Google Alerts, Social Mention, Mention or Social Insider.
This is how Google Alert works:

Social Mention is a real-time free social media search analysis similar to Google Alerts. It helps you locate mentions of your targeted keywords. Accordingly, Social Mention monitors about 80+ social media networking sites directly including Digg, Google, FriendFeed, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and much more.

Mention is similar to both tools. It can

• Keep a record of customer’s PR campaigns,
• determine new options and coverage opportunities
• generate your client-ready campaign reports.
• monitor you and your products’ online footprint like videos, emails, and articles
• find buzz about your company
• create awareness for your brand
• identify online influencers
• mingle with your social niche community
• make brand’s online performance reports

Social Insider is a free tool that scans the competition Facebook pages and it gives you all sorts of insights like:

• their best posts
• the engagement on each post
• what works best for them
• map with the county for all likers of the page
• evolution of likes correlated with posts
• and so much more

You can compare the data for up to 30 Facebook pages and it’s Free for the first 6 months!

#8 Respond to Comments

When your readers take the time to read and comment on your blog, it is your responsibility to acknowledge it regardless if the comment is positive or negative. You don’t have to provide kilometric replies to their comments. A simple “thank you” would suffice for positive feedback if the comment was just about praising your blog.

For negative feedback, you can still turn the tide in your favor. First, acknowledge their opinion and thank them for taking the time to provide you with the feedback. If you need to defend your views in the post, you can do so but do it in a positive way. Provide links to your old articles or other posts to support your stand. Be prepared though that in doing so, you may have just invited your reader/commentator on a lengthy discussion regarding your post.

#9 Social Bookmark your blog post

Social bookmarking is another way for you to edit and share your posts to a social bookmarking site. You are sharing the URL of your post to that service using tags or keywords. A reader will be able to view your bookmarked post if they use the tag you have selected.

Digg is one good example of a social bookmarking site. It allows you to discover, share and organize the hottest links online. StumbleUpon is another example. You can contribute your link, and the readers have the privilege to either vote up or vote down your URL.

#10 Check Analytics of your post (Google Analytics)
Google Analytics helps you keep track of your website’s traffic. It’s the most used web-based analytics service on the Internet.
Need help in getting started with Google Analytics? Here’s how:

These are just some of the best practices that smart marketers use to increase traffic to their sites after they publish a new blog post. Try these tips and in no time generate the kind of traffic that your heart desires.