If you’re blogging for your business, you care a lot about proving your expertise, giving people a reason to come back to your site over and over, SEO, marketing, and increasing your sales. To make sure you get the most payoff from each blog post you write, there are a few “finishing touches” you really should complete. I wanted to share a bit about the blogging process that takes place for me after I finish writing the blog post and before it publishes.

My Blog Posting Process

Once I complete the writing of a new blog post, here are the finishing steps I take each time.

• Research my keyword phrase There are definitely SEO purists who would say you need to research the SEO keyword phrase first and then write a blog post for that phrase, but I try to keep things as simple and realistic as possible. Busy small business owners will have a much easier time continually blogging if they write blog posts about whatever topic strikes them, or a topic they have been inspired to write based recent industry news or customer interactions. Either way, you want to conduct your SEO research to find out the best keyword phrase to optimize for, so your blog post SEO corresponds with the content on the page. 
• Read through the blog post with SEO in mind You do not want to stuff a bunch of keywords into your already-written post, but many times, you can find a few places to incorporate more of your keywords to help rev up your blog post’s SEO (without sounding like a robot). Check your post’s headings, too. Those are a great place to incorporate your keyword phrase.
• Add links to other blog posts or pages on my site Doing so is good for SEO and keeps people on your site longer because they are more likely to investigate other pages or posts on your site since you’ve included those links.
• Write my title tag and meta description Your title tag should incorporate your designated keyword phrase. Remember: title tags max out at 60 characters and meta descriptions at 150. Meta descriptions are written in sentence form and are usually what earns the click (your title tag is what gets you ranked). Customize your permalink, too, if your CMS allows.
• Create an image for the blog post Size it appropriately so it works on most social media platforms. If you need to designate it the featured image for the post (this depends on your CMS or blogging platform), don’t forget to do so. Select it for your social media sharing and SEO plugins, too. If you need to make it in more than 1 size, do so before at the time of creating the image. I love Stencil, and create the image as a Facebook ad image (I find this size is pretty universal across platforms) and then resize it in Stencil for Instagram, too.
• Schedule my blog post, and move on to Grum and Linktree. I publish a new blog post every Monday at 6:00am Central time. Before scheduling my blog post, I make sure to choose my Categories and Tags. Then I schedule my Instagram post about the blog post in Grum. Then, I head over to Linktree and schedule this new blog post link.

Once my blog post publishes, I have a new set of tasks to complete but we’ll cover those tasks in another blog post.

What does your blog post publishing process look like?