What you do after you publish your blog post will determine its success.
If you’ve published blog posts and they aren’t getting traction, you’re probably not taking full advantage of promoting them. You can’t just post a link to the blog post on social media and move on.
You should be spending roughly 20% of your time writing and 80% promoting that content so your audience is aware of the post and spends the time reading it.
In this article, we’re going to cover 7 SEO techniques you need to use after publishing your blog post.
By utilizing these 7 SEO techniques, you’ll 10X your results and take your blog posts from barren to bustling.
Let’s get started!
Jumpstart Your Traffic with an Email to Your Subscribers
Your first priority is to get some immediate traffic to the newly published blog post. The fastest way to do that is by promoting the blog post to your email list of subscribers.
Do not include the entire blog post in the email. When your subscribers get your full post in their inbox, they don’t need to visit your blog to read the content.
Instead, use a brief teaser email that entices your subscribers to click through to your blog to read it in its entirety and share with others. I’ve signed up for a handful of email lists for two reasons. First, they provide me with value, and second, they give me ideas for my own content. They all keep their emails short and to the point with a definitive call to action.
Here’s an example:
Deploy a Never-Ending Social Media Campaign
The majority of new bloggers only share their posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. one time when they publish the post. Smart bloggers create social media campaigns that last for a week or more.
These campaigns are a series of social media updates that point back to the original blog post. So instead of your post getting seen once, it gets promoted over and over again, on autopilot. There are many platforms to choose from for automating your social media posts (Buffer, Hootsuite, and Later are a few).
Here are some ideas for social media updates to use for your campaigns:
- Share the headline or a variation of the headline for your post
- Share a quote or excerpt from your post
- Share an infographic or image from your post
- Share a relevant stock photo with an excerpt and link
Perform an Internal Link Audit
Speaking of links, that’s something you should take care of on every blog post.
Internally linking your posts with each other makes them easier for Google to index, helps you rank higher in search engines, and keeps readers on your blog longer!
So carve out some time every week to conduct an internal linking audit. Take a look at older posts you’ve written and see if you can add any links to them that point to your newly published post and vice-versa. Just don’t go overboard with it. Too many internal links can make your posts appear spammy.
Answer the Trending Questions on Quora
Another great way to promote your blog post is by answering questions on Quora.
Just search for your topic, and see what questions come up.
Bonus Tip: You can use Quora to find new content topics for your blog as well.
The key with Quora is to make your answers as helpful and informative as possible. Don’t just drop your link and run; That’s a waste of time and won’t work. You must provide value to the person asking the question to the others that have commented already.
Quora uses a voting process to display the best answers at the top. Make sure that you are providing value and that your answer is worthy of being featured as the top answer.
Repurpose Your Blog Post into Other Content Mediums
Don’t forget that content can take on many different forms other than just written blog posts. Repurposing your posts by leveraging different types of content is a smart, and efficient, way to attract new audiences!
Ideas for repurposing your blog posts:
- Record yourself reading the blog post and publish it in a podcast audio format.
- Turn it into a video for social media and YouTube.
- Create a downloadable PDF version.
- Take multiple related posts and turn them into an e-book. This option can become a passive income stream as well.
Take a Deep Dive Into Your Analytics Data
This is one of the most overlooked items by new bloggers, partly because of the sheer amount of data available. It can quickly become overwhelming, but if you don’t analyze your blog’s performance, how will you ever know what’s working and what’s not?
Set up a Google Analytics account to see whether your content strategies are working.
Look at the data a week after your post to see how well it did immediately after publication.
Did it get as much traffic as you were expecting?
How long did visitors stick around to read your post, and did they convert to email subscribers or paying customers?
How much of your existing traffic is from social media vs. referrals (people linking to your post) vs. direct channels (your teaser email)?
For example, if you have lots of direct but no social traffic, that could mean that you’re doing a great job with your teaser email, but it underperformed in the social arena.
Also if you have a higher number of users vs. new users, that means you’re reaching a niche audience that keeps coming back for more. If it’s the other way around or near parity, then you’re reaching a much broader audience that doesn’t return as often.
From this data, you can adjust your strategy to ensure the month-over-month growth of your blog.
Remind Yourself to Refresh Your Blog Posts Regularly
The freshness of a blog post is an important factor that Google takes into account when ranking your post(s) in the search results.
You should update your best-performing blog posts with new information on a regular basis. Your posts will continue to provide the best content for your readers, and you maintain your ranking in the search engine results pages.
So after you click publish, set a reminder for yourself to go check on your post in 6 months and see whether it warrants refresh or not.
If they are getting very little traffic, it’s not worth your time to refresh. If you think the post is worth giving a second chance, you could try targeting a new keyword and updating the title tag.
Wrapping It Up
If you think your work is over as soon as you click “publish,” think again.
What you do once your post is live is even more important than what you do before. Taking your foot off the gas can make all the effort you spent writing your post goes to waste.
Instead of cranking out post after post, spend some time getting people to read the content you’ve already written. Try some of the above techniques on your older posts, and keep them in mind for your next ones.