You’ve sweated and studied and pulled together one absolutely killer blog post. You upload it and – nothing. No comments, no click throughs, no traffic – nada. Why? Usually it’s because you’ve failed to promote it properly and nobody knows it’s there. So, here’s our handy 7 step checklist for promoting your blog:

Before you go live:

1. Make it visual

The evidence is overwhelming – you need to make your blog post visual if you want to attract and keep visitors on your post. Try to aim for a bold and eye-catching feature image, plus an additional image for every couple of paragraphs of text. Avoid those stale stock images please!

2. Optimise for search

SEO practice changes regularly but some techniques remain stalwarts and are worth making a habit of. So, always aim to:

• Identify a keyword or phrase and use it throughout your post
• Run a Google search for the keyword to see what kind of content is already ranking high with it
• Write a meta description that is both accurate and enticing
• Crosslink to other relevant content within your post, keeping people on your own site as much as posible

3. Plan for social

Social media is made for sharing. But sometimes a little planning means your post gets shared waaaaaaay more. So, as a general rule, aim to include:

• Several tweetable nuggets of wisdom in your text (you can even include a ‘tweet this’ button)
• Got any video content? Embed it!
• Think like a social user. Does your post entertain, inform or educate? Would you read it? Waffle is rarely welcome.
• Check how your post appears on Facebook etc. As you can no longer edit the image or text that is pulled through when a link is shared, getting this right first time is more important than ever.

Once the post is live:

4. Engage your email list

Like social, email is a great tool for distributing important content. We always get a good spike in web visitors when our monthly tips go out – not least because we carefully tailor the content to ensure it’s relevant and topical for people. It’s important to keep your email clean, simple and mobile friendly – and think about segmenting your content so that you don’t turn people off. We’re going to assume you’re all GDPR compliant now, but it’s still worth split-testing your subject lines to make sure you get the best open rate you can.

5. Ramp up the social media

All your previous prep will make this easy to do. As soon as your post is published be sure to:

• Publish organic posts on your chosen networks. Maintain your brand style whilst encouraging click throughs
• Consider paid promotion of key posts to target demographics, particularly popular organic posts
• Re-share the post multiple times, using different headlines to test which works best
• Use the social handles of any experts or organisations mentioned in the post to make them aware

6. Spread the word

Think of all the other ways you can make people aware of the post and select the most relevant. You could include it in your email signature or company newsletter, write a guest blog post for an industry publication and link back to your article or encourage co-workers to share it with their networks, via LinkedIn or similar.

7. Ongoing promotion

Promotion doesn’t end here – it’s an ongoing process. You want to make sure your post works hard for you ongoing and this means checking analytics and reviewing performance regularly. Which channel is giving you the most traffic? Consider increasing your paid promotion there. Which headline is performing best? Streamline accordingly. Which influencers and peers shared the post? Make sure you thank them and return the favour. What events and trending topics are coming up that your post will be relevant to? Capitalise on these occasions and audiences.

As always, we’re here to help if you need us!