A Checklist of Essential Things to Do After Writing a Blog Post

Crafting a good blog post takes time, and a lot of focus. However it is only half of the game.

Once you’ve written an excellent post for your blog, give yourself a quick pat on the back, and make sure you immediately take your attention towards taking care of these important list of tasks, or what I like to call ‘post-post essentials’. Note that a lot of these things need to be done before you publish your post. After the post goes live, it’s essentially all marketing, link-building and getting the word out.

1. Write a relevant, catchy, short post-title that does an apt job of telling visitors what the post is about, and includes relevant keywords as well. Sure, you may already have written a good title for your post, and it’s totally okay to stick with that. However I recommend revisiting your header/title in order to optimize it after finishing your post and before hitting that publish button.

2. Optimize your post’s URL. Doing this is extremely important and a lot of bloggers out there seem to ignore this. Although URL optimization is a vast field in itself, it is important to (a) put in any and all relevant keywords in there (especially your primary keyword), without stuffing keywords, (b) keep it as short as possible – 5-8 words at max, which are easier to share over social networks (use a service like bit.ly for this purpose) (c) use hyphens between words (instead of underscores or anything else), (d) all alphabets should be lower case, as URLs are case-sensitive, and (e) eliminate words such as ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘it’ etc. A good example of an optimized URL for this article, for instance, would be www.WebsiteName.com/things-to-do-after-writing-blog-post.

3. Internal linking is essential and a great SEO habit. It keeps link juice within your blog (maybe even transfer some of it to lower-ranking pages), and helps improve your Google PR. Internal links are also convenient for your readers, as they provide them with relevant information easily. Make sure that you pick up a couple of old posts on your blog – relevant to the current article of course – and link to them.

4. After hitting the publish button, it is essential to put up the post on social mediums. For this purpose, I recommend posting a tailor-made update to each medium – perhaps include a sentence, an image or a teaser from the post with the update. Send out an update on Facebook and Twitter every 4 or x number of hours, and use a scheduling tool for this purpose.

5. Submit your content on social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon or Digg. Even though their effectiveness has waded in recent years, these are still great mediums to promote your content, get valuable exposure and drive traffic to your blog.

6. Post comments on other relevant blogs. Just about every blog out there allows people to post comments, and this can be leveraged in order to get some valuable backlinks to your blog. Almost all blogs allow commenters to post a link to their blog (in a field called website/URL/etc.), and this link – or one of the recent posts from your blog, if a comment plugin such as CommentLuv is being used on the blog – will then be shown along with your blog. Some blogs will even give you a do-follow backlink to your blog. However there’s much more to posting comments than it simply being another link-building method: comments encourage interaction, allow you to build and develop relationships with other authority bloggers and like-minded people, and (if you do it consistently) build your authority.

7. Look at some of the popular trends on Twitter, for instance. If your blog post is relevant to any one of them, send out a tweet about it and make sure you use the relevant hashtag with your update. People from all over the world or anyone following that hashtag will then be able to see your tweet and of course, your link.

8. Send out an update to your email list. You probably spent months, if not years, collecting email IDs of visitors on your blog (if you haven’t done this, I suggest you get on it!). Essentially, what this list represents is a group of people that will be very eager and interested in hearing about what you have to say or buy what you’re selling (which is why they voluntarily gave you their email IDs, right?), and this in turn means highly targeted traffic for you.

9. Ask for endorsements and mentions from other bloggers. In blogging, it is essential to build relationships with other bloggers in your niche. You can do this through social media (engaging with them on Facebook or Twitter), or by linking to their content in your posts. You can then ask for a favor, and ask them to link to or blog about your post, do a review on their blog, etc. A single glowing endorsement or recommendation from an authority blogger could do wonders for you! 

What do you do after finishing up with writing a post? Do let me know in the comments!