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Welcome to episode 7 of the DKSpeaks podcast. Some of you had sent me some feedback on my earlier episodes and had asked me to make this podcast a weekly affair. I just wanted let you all know that I am working on it and we might soon get in to a weekly frequency for this show.
In today’s episode we’re going to discuss about blogging and how to publicize your blog posts and get it the required attention.
Let me ask you a few questions.
- What is the first thing that you do after you have published a blog post?
- Do you work on promoting it?
- What is your strategy to build traffic to it?
There are a lot of blogs that create extremely good content. But there’s very little that they do to promote their blog posts. It is here that they make the biggest mistake. Their posts go unread and there is little traffic that they are able to generate to these posts and to their blogs.
In this episode we are going to discuss about the 8 most important things that you need to do immediately after you have published your blog post, in order to get it the required attention and in order to drive traffic to them.
So let’s start.
8 Things To Do after You Publish Your Blog Post
Okay before you hit the publish button on your post there is one critical thing that you need to do – Optimizing your post for the right keywords. The first thing that you need to do is to ensure that your blog post is optimized for the right keywords. I always recommend that you write the title of your blog post at the end. In doing that you will be able to write a headline that gets attention and at the same time you will also be able to optimize it by using the right keywords.
Head over to the Google keyword planner tool and do a quick research for the keywords relevant to the topic of the blog post that you have just written. Doing this is pretty simple. Just enter the seed keyword into the tool and then research for related keywords. You will get a lot of keyword ideas from the tool. You can note down about 5 keywords with the maximum search volume and with medium to low competition.
Then head over to Google and enter the first keyword into the search box. As you enter the key word Google will start suggesting search terms. These are terms that are being searched by a lot of people. You can use these terms for the title of your blog post. Another way to do this is by looking at what other terms are being searched on Google. You can see this by scrolling to the bottom of the search results page. You will see a lot of these suggestions at the bottom of the page. Again these are the terms that are being searched for by a lot of people. You can use them in the title of your blog posts and it will make them stand out and also help you in ranking your posts in Google.
Second Thing – The second thing to do is to ping the world and let them know that you have published a post. While WordPress has an inbuilt pinging solution, I somehow feel that it isn’t enough. So head over to pingomatic.com and pingoat.com and enter the details of the post that you just published and click on ping. That should let everybody know that you have just published an awesome post.
Third thing – The third thing is to syndicate and bookmark your content. Syndication is a nice way of publicizing your content to your relevant audience and to other relevant sites in your niche. There are a lot of bookmarking sites that have a very high authority and syndicating to these sites will also help build backlinks and authority for your blog and your blog posts.
Syndication services like Outbrain, Zemanta, Taboola etc. are extremely powerful when it comes to promoting content. You can create small campaigns with these services in order to build an initial impetus for your blog post.
You can use services like Onlywire.com or, socialADR.com or even the Socisynd service to syndicate your content to all the primary social bookmarking sites.
Service like Socisynd is a crowd syndication service which means that you can get your post bookmarked and syndicated by a lot of people. Some of these services even lets you set up an RSS feed, which helps automating this entire process.
Fourth Thing – Moving onto the fourth activity. Twitter was a big thing when it launched. You would see some or, the other course that promised to teach you how to generate a lot of traffic using Twitter. But as everybody and his dog flocked to Twitter and started spamming the site, the hype died. Today you will find almost 90% of the tweets are overtly promotional and very few people read them. Yet, Twitter is still a very good source of traffic, if you do it right. You need to develop a sound strategy to promote your content on Twitter. One essential ingredient of this strategy is to identify the times that your audience is the most engaged and then push your content to them at these times.
You can use a service called as followerwonk to find out when your audience is the most engaged. Depending upon that you can schedule your tweets. But make it a point that you tweet the post that you just published at least 4-5 times on the day it was published. You can use a service like Buffer to schedule your posts. In fact, you can import the schedules directly from follower wonk into Buffer.
Another important thing that you need to keep in mind is on what you tweet. You might want to customize and change your tweet. Don’t tweet the same thing again and again. Add a hook to the Tweet, so that you audience is compelled to click through and visit the post to know more about it. Also ensure that you are using relevant hashtags in your tweets.
Since Twitter allows uploading images, you can create a couple of nice little images using a service like Canva and then use this in your tweets.
Twitter has an option of pinning a tweet to your profile page. Use this to pin this post to your profile page so that it appears on top of all your tweets.
Fifth Important Activity– The fifth one, is to post about the article to your Facebook page. If you have a decent amount of followers on Facebook, ask them to share and like the post if they enjoyed reading it. Don’t be shy of asking.
There are some important aspects that you need to keep in mind though. Firstly carefully craft your status updates. Once again create a nice little hook – a teaser for the post which will compel your readers in clicking through to your post. Don’t just post a text update. People tend to post the title of the blog post to their statuses. Don’t do this. Write a couple of sentences. Create a nice image using Canva and post this to your status update. Just as in Twitter, highlight the post and pin it to the top on your Page.
Sixth one – Create a good infographic. In fact a nice image created in Canva with a teaser including a couple of questions that will provoke the visitors to click on the image is best thing to do. Then post it onto Pinterest. A lot of people think that Pinterest doesn’t really work in niches like Internet Marketing. It might be true to some extent, but it is advisable to completely write off Pinterest. If thoughtfully done, Pinterest can generate a lot of traffic. At least I have seen a decent amount of visitors coming onto my blog from Pinterest.
Seventh Activity – Service like Triberr and Viral Content Buzz help you build the buzz for your blog posts by networking. These communities can be extremely beneficial if you have the commitment to spend some time engaging with the community members. The members tweet, share, like and pin your posts and this way your blog posts get a lot of attention on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. I would recommend that you join them.
Install the Triberr plugin and then as soon as you have published a post, it gets automatically imported into Triberr. Your community members will then share the post, if it provides value and the content is worthy of sharing.
Similarly in Viral Content Buzz, start a campaign as soon as you have published the post. Let it run for a couple of days and it will generate enough Buzz.
Eighth – This is something that has been spoken about a lot but very few still do it. It is blog commenting. I have gained a lot of followers and visitors by regularly commenting on a lot of blogs. This also helps in building relationship with fellow bloggers which can also help you at a later point. My strategy is very simple. I am very aggressive with commenting on the day I publish a post. This helps my post gather the initial momentum required to push it into the blogosphere. Once there, it slowly starts to gather attention and traffic with all the rest of the activities.
So comment. Identify about 5-6 blogs that you can comment on regularly. Then keep adding at least 2 blogs to the list everyday. Filter out the ones where you see little engagement. Slowly build up a list of about 35-40 blogs where you can comment regularly. Once there, maintain a regular frequency of commenting depending upon your schedules.
If you daily frequency is to comment on about 6 blogs, just double it on the day you publish a post. So comment on at least 12 blogs. Do it and you will see the difference.
So those were the eight things that you need to do immediately after you have published a blog post, in order to build attention to it. I hope you have jotted down the important points and that you enjoyed this episode.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Keyword Research: Google Keyword Planner
Pinging Tools:
Bookmarking and Syndication
Social Media Sites
Social Media Communities
Social Media Tools
Thank You for Joining
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