How to Share Your Blog Posts Once They’re Published

Blogging, to many people, begins and ends with writing posts. The problem these people encounter, then, is the complete lack of growth or audience participation. If you want blog growth, if you want an engaged audience, you need to share your posts and get as much exposure as you possibly can.

Step 1: Publish the Final Version

Before you can start sharing your post, you need a finalized version. Before you finalize a post, you need to do a last minute overview. Read your post through and make sure it says everything you want it to say, with minimal fluff. Make sure it’s writing about the topic you’re actually covering, and ensure you have all the SEO data filled out, like meta description and title.
This is also where you might schedule your post to appear later. If you want to use post scheduling, all of the following steps will have to happen when the post actually goes live. If you want, you can explore options for automating each step; they exist, but I won’t be covering them.

Step 2: Post on Google+

Google+ is not the best social network for traffic, for engagement, or for exposure. It is, however, a great social network for getting quick indexing on Google. Think of it as a way to submit your post to the search engine without having to actually do so. Plus, there are people who use Google+ as their primary social media platform. You can attract them as an audience
Google+ is also beneficial primarily to local businesses, though the convergence between local businesses and businesses with blogs is narrow. The social network gives data for local search results and the carousel, when applicable.

Step 3: Tweet Your New Post

Twitter, of course, is basically built for quick messages. Formulate a tweet and post it. I recommend a question that has something to do with your topic, which the reader can expect an answer to in the post. Use a custom shortlink here if you want, or just use the default Twitter shortener. The advantage of a custom shortlink is that some services allow you to track specific data with it.

Step 4: Post on Facebook With a Link

Posting new content on Facebook is a lot like posting a new tweet. For one thing, you need to keep it short. Even if you have plenty of space, users tend to gloss over anything longer than a sentence or two. You can, if you want, use the same question you used with your tweet. Just make sure to prune out any hashtags.
It’s also typically a good idea to link an image to your Facebook post. Facebook users love graphical content, and it’s a lot nicer than just a text post that can easily be skipped in the feed.

Step 5: Notify Your Mailing List

If you have a mailing list that sends out a message each time you post, now’s the time to send out a message. If you don’t – and you probably don’t – instead, add the link to a future message. A digest of recent posts is a good base for a newsletter, and you can add value to it before it goes out.

Step 6: Add Links to Old Posts

One often overlooked technique is to go back through your site and find existing posts that have something to do with the topic you just finished writing about. When you find these posts, you can edit in a link to your new post. This gives you the appearance of a more networked site, and it helps people who find your old posts make their way to your new posts.
Don’t go overboard with this, however. Make sure the links are relevant, otherwise you run the risk of looking like you’re just pushing in links wherever you can regardless of quality.

Step 7: Add as Relevant Comments

Once your post has been live for a short time, start looking for other fresh posts around the Internet. Your goal is to find posts on a similar subject, where your post works as a compliment. When you find one, post in the comments for that blog and let them know your post on the subject might be of interest to them. Make sure your comments are valuable on their own, however; you don’t want to be branded a comment spammer.

Step 8: Tweet Again

Twitter is the fastest moving social network online today, and that means the people who saw your post when you posted it this morning are no longer online. By evening, the people who are checking their feeds are probably different from the people who had been checking earlier. By posting again, you catch a different audience with your content. I recommend coming up with a new tweet, rather than reposting or retweeting the old one.

Step 9: Submit to Reddit Where Relevant

Reddit can be great if you have something interesting to say, but it can be very fickle if you come across like you’re just using them for links. If you can find a relevant subreddit with relevant content, go ahead and add your link to the pile. If you’re downvoted into oblivion, take it as a lesson and try again in a different way, with a different post, at a different time.

Step 10: Deliver to Influential Bloggers for Comment

As a blogger, you should have some idea of the people who influence your industry, and the sort of content they care about on their sites. When you post something new that they might be interested in seeing, send them a message on social media or through their contact forms.

Step 11: Repeat

That wasn’t such a bad process now, was it? Once you get the initial research down, every subsequent post is much faster and easier to share. You can also automate most of these steps, and that makes the next post that much easier to share.