7 things I do after publishing a blog post

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I’m a strict believer that ‘content is king’, but I also believe that a king would get lonely and wouldn’t have any value without the queen and in this case our queen is marketing. In the past few months I have managed to produce good content (I don’t mean to boast ) and the traffic has been increasing, but still I must agree that I work in a pretty unorganized way which reduces the value of my hard work. But I have managed to put up a plan on what steps I take to promote the latest article and in the past few weeks my efforts are proven to be much more effective.

In the beginning the only reader your blog will have is you and in my case my mother, but successful foundation for a blog is laid only when you promote your blog post instead of your blog. The steps I take as soon as I post an article are as follows,

Inform friends and family

The first thing I do is share the post with my friends and family, for this I use Facebook as it contains all of my family members and friends. Even some internet marketers and bloggers know me there, so I just share a link on my profile as well as on my Fan page. This is highly recommended because your friends and families are the ones who really care about you and they wont mind sharing it for your sake.

Most of my blogs loyal visitors try to connect with me on Facebook, I try to send to my fan page and I’m sure most of them would notice my latest links, thats why I get up to 20 visitors everyday from Facebook itself.

Email bloggers and webmasters

This gives me just page views initially, but has generate a hell lot of traffic and links in the long run. When I started off as a blogger I visited many blogs in my niche (some outside my niche) which were of my level, after surfing through their posts I used to try to connect to those bloggers through IMs, mails or social networks. This way I have successfully established a good network of connections with other bloggers.

Each time I write a post, I mail it over 100 people in my inbox who are all bloggers, I just give a small overview about the post and then tell them to review it giving them a link to the main article. Almost all of them reply to my mail with a honest review and many of them also link to my post if it has any reference to their future posts.

Massive tweets and retweets

My Twitter activities are more like stress busters, so I’m really productive and engaging on Twitter. I do not have much followers on Twitter, but its one of my top 10 traffic sources. I’m calling this as massive tweets and retweets because I make up to 10 to 12 tweets for each article, by breaking it up into sub-topics.

Many people say that this may cause you to loose reputation and followers, but everytime I do this for a while my twitter follower level will always see a spike as well as my blogs traffic. Twitter is a great tool to interact with my readers too, because it gets more replies and comments than my blog.

Forums and comments

From my oldest to the newest article I’ve always recommended forum posting and blog commenting as one of the best sources for traffic. If I keep a track of time I spend 3 hours a day posting on forums and 4 hours a day on blog commenting. After all the above steps have been done, the next step I’d take is to go to 4 of my favorite forums which allow users to self promote and I’ll start threads with my articles title, post a small summary and give a link to my main article. I usually do this on forums such as Digital Point, Webmaster Forums and Wicked Fire, you can try on others but be sure to read their FAQ or else you might be banned.

I usually leave comments on big blogs such as Techcrunch and Mashable on a daily basis, but when I’m promoting a new blog post it wont be efficient unless I leave it on a relevant article, for this I use this service known as Backtype which indexes discussions on blogs and forums. This technique wont work unless you leave a comment a average traffic blog and you must also be the first 10 to leave a comment.

StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious

These are three major social bookmarking sites used by most of the bloggers in almost all niches, though Digg and delicious would require you to have a existing traffic base with a powerful and influential accounts, StumbleUpon does not need much, as with  just a few subscribers and likes you can generate thousands of visitors. At the same time I would advice you to tap into your existing user base to create a powerful digg account.

I really don’t recommend that you spend hours promoting your blog on any social bookmarking site, as I truly believe that it has effect only when your readers them self recommend it to the community.

Twittley, Blogengage and other small sites

Like most bloggers even I started off foolishly going after big sites like Digg, Delicious and Propeller etc. That is why I said that in the beginning that my hard work was undervalued, I kept working very hard by submitting all of my blogs articles to big social bookmarking sites and I was really heart-broken when I didn’t get a single visitor. Recently I read Yaro Starak’s ebook in which he divides promotional methods into two, small communication channels and big communication channels, he recommends bloggers to tap into small communication channels first and then go for the big ones.

I was constantly on the search for small social bookmarking from the past few months and I’ve chosen Twittley and Blogengage, whom I consider to be pretty effective. I get over 100 visitors every month from Blogengage and just over 150 visitors from Twittley. So you see using such small sites I can easily generate enough traffic to get huge numbers of visitors from big communication channels.

Basic search engine optimization

I can already hear some comments say that why the hell am I putting this at the end, so let me tell you that its a necessity to you work hard on your blogs SEO, but when your posts are concerned then I’d say that too much of SEO will reduce your user experience. The only thing I do with SEO for posts in mind is filling up a form below my editor in WordPress generated by All in one SEO pack and other than that I also submit a sitemap to get indexed instantly by search engines.

Whatever tips I’ve mentioned above in this article contain many SEO benefits though I never do it with them in mind. If you ask me just these steps are more than enough to help you rank well on Google, because too much of SEO should not result in degraded user experience.

On to our readers

If you strictly follow the above steps for each of your latest articles then I’m sure your blog will have rapid growth, I can say this with confidence because unlike my other posts, this is not through any research, but purely from my experience. For more such articles please do subscribe to my blog and follow me on Twitter. If your willing to we can connect on Digg for mutually promoting each others blogs for both our benefits, add me as a friend here and use the contact form on this blog to inform me.