You’ve written your blog post.

You’ve edited the text and added an image or 3.

You’ve added links to other website pages and previously-published blog posts, as needed, within your new blog post.

So now that it’s ready to go, the work’s all done?

Not exactly.

Writing your original content, and creating or locating images to use in your blog post are 2 huge parts of the business blogging process. But we always want to make sure we are getting as much oomph for our content creation work as possible. That’s why we need to also work through the next 5 steps below before we mark this marketing task as “complete”.

5 Things to Do Before Publishing a New Blog Post

• Add Categories & Post Tags Customers search through your old blog posts to learn more about a certain topic. Because you write about a variety of topics and (hopefully) blog pretty regularly, customers aren’t going to want to scroll through months and months (or years and years) of older blog posts in hopes of finding more information on a specific topic. Instead, they can use a list of categories or post tags (typically located in your blog’s sidebar) to seek out exactly and only the type of content they are interested in reading. Your Categories are broad topics whereas your Post Tags are much more specific. You can read more here about using categories and tags in WordPress.
• SEO your Blog Post If I was ordering these 5 steps based on importance, optimizing your blog posts for search engines would be a very high #1. You are publishing content that will reside as part of your site (and as a representation of your business, knowledge, and experience) for years to come. Failure to optimize your blog posts for search means your hard work is as good as lost once the initial social sharing period is over. Each new blog post is a new link back to your business site, and another way for a prospective customer to find your business on the internet. Businesses that blog receive more leads and more website traffic than those that don’t.
• Complete Social Media Meta Data There are lots of options for adding social media meta data now. Social media meta data provides social media networks with information about each blog post. This meta data is what’s “pulled in” when you paste a link from your new blog post onto that network. Some plugins let you set up meta data for multiple social networks, and other plugins are platform-specific (e.g. Twitter Cards)
• Schedule your Blog Post to Publish Consistency is key here. Your business blog isn’t going to be as successful if you publish 4 posts one week, then 1 post next week, then skip 3 weeks, and then post twice more the week after that. It’s also going to be more difficult to build a loyal, engaged following if the time of day you publish is all over the place. Most blog tools offer a way to schedule your new blog post for a future publishing day and time. I recommend taking advantage of that feature to provide consistency in your posting schedule.
• After Publishing, Share to your Social Media Networks The easiest way to do this is to work through the social sharing buttons you have (hopefully) located on your blog post itself! Making it easy to like, share, tweet, pin, +1, and Buffer from your blog posts helps you share your new post in a timely manner, and also increases the chance that the other people reading your blog post will do all of those same things. Your blog posts help drive traffic back to your website while also providing you a new piece of content to include in your social media content calendar.

I understand the feeling you get when you save that new blog post for the final time. However, it’s true that a little bit more time and effort spent can yield tremendous results for your blog and website traffic, and your overall business.