6 Things to Do After You Hit the Publish Button

July 17, 2023 | Basic SEO

Things to Do After You Hit the Publish Button

So you wrote another great post. 

You know it’s the best but you worry about one thing… namely, having it end up like your other posts with little to no traffic.

It doesn’t seem fair.

You see others who create lower quality posts yet they get much more traffic than you. You keep wondering how that can happen when you have much better content. The problem is not about creating your best content. It’s what you do after that to help promote your content. Getting your content done is just 20% of the process.

Of course, the next logical question is what to do to help promote your post. Well, you’re in luck because that’s exactly what you’re going to discover in this post. You’ll learn exactly what steps you need to follow to promote every post you publish from now on.

1. First Things First: Promote to Your Email List

This is a great way to get a surge of traffic directly.

By now, you’ve collected a list of people who already love your content. You should always start by promoting your content to the people who have asked you to send them your content.

The best part is that people open their emails at least every few hours, so you’ll get a surge of near-instant traffic.

Another great thing is that because those people are your fans, some of them will share your post, kickstarting a snowball of traffic to your blog. Make sure not to include your whole post in the email, because that doesn’t send you any traffic. Big mistake.

Doing that would also train people to just read your emails without clicking your links. In the long run, this will get you fewer visitors to any post/product you are sending to them. And make sure to include a quick click-to-Tweet button at the end of every email to encourage your subscribers to promote your post.

I personally use ConvertKit to segment my emails which ultimately gives me more open rate when I send emails to my subscribers.

Things to Do After You Hit the Publish Button

2. Interlink Your Post in Existing Content

This is a great way to jump-start your rankings on Google.

As you know, links are still the main indicator that Google heavily depends on in their algorithm to determine which sites rank first and which sites don’t deserve to be on the first page.

A great way to add a few links to your site from already indexed pages is to find old content on your blog, especially the ones that are performing great on Google and find opportunities to link to your new post in your old content. This may mean adding few sections or just mentioning a link.

It won’t take you that long. Just set aside 10-20 minutes to do this. It will be so helpful, you’ll feel like you have an unfair advantage over your competitors’ posts.

3. Hunt for Sharers of Similar Posts

Now that you have published your post, you want people to share your post to spread the word about it, right?

The best thing to do is to find people who have already shared content similar to yours and tell them that you have much better content than the post they shared, and the will be very happy to share your post.

You might be wondering how to find people who have already shared similar content. There are 2 methods. One is free, and the other one you need to pay for.

Let’s start with the freeway. 

Grab the link to the popular post by your competitor covering the same topic. Then put the link in a Twitter search.

After that, you go manually and save their name, find their website, and place all this info on a spreadsheet.

Then you try to find their email address to be able to reach them. Here’s one way to do that.

  1. Take a quick look at their About page or their Contact page.
  2. Try the email permutator technique. Place their name and website in this spreadsheet, and use a chrome extension like Rapportive to help you know if this email is working or not. Once you find the working email, place it in the spreadsheet. You can read more about this technique in this post by Distilled.
  3. You could then use the hunter extension to find it. Free for first 10 emails per day.

You could save yourself some time by using Buzzsumo. What Buzzsumo will enable you to do is find popular content in your niche. After that, you’ll be able to find the sharers in a much simpler way, and you can easily export them all without the need to manually add one by one.

Things to Do After You Hit the Publish Button

The export file will give you all their information, like their follower’s count, avg retweet, and so on. After you find their email, you then email them to ask them to promote your post.

Just so you know, this is a numbers game. Don’t expect to email 20 people and get all of them to share your content, suddenly bringing hundreds of visitors to your site.

Not even half of them will respond. You need to go for 200 people, at least. And if your post is very good, go for 1000 people.

4. Search For Linkers and Email Them

After you’ve gotten some shares, the next step is to get some links to your site.

The best thing to start with is to find the people who linked to similar posts and email them asking for links to your site.

Here is what to do:

  1. You can use Buzzsumo to find people who linked to your post, or you could use Ahrefs, which is what I prefer. If you already have Buzzsumo, go for it.
  2. Export the list of people who linked to the post.
  3. After that, find their emails the same way as previously mentioned.
  4. Email them asking them for links.

Here is an example from Brian Dean of Backlinko:

Things to Do After You Hit the Publish Button

5. Search For Resource Posts

Another great way to find easy links to your site is to find resources pages that share the best content in your niche. These people want to provide people with the best resources on a specific topic.

And if your post is very good, then you’re doing them a favor by sharing your post with them.

Go to Google, and type in the following, intitle: Resources “[TOPIC]”

This generates a list of all the posts on the topic in the title tag.

Create a new spreadsheet with the names and emails of the authors and also a link to the page.

And then email them a personalized email telling them about your great content.

You could use other keywords like:

  1. “keyword” + “weekly link roundup”
  2. “keyword” + “Friday link roundup”
  3. “keyword” + “link roundup”
  4. “keyword” + “best articles of the week”

6. Track and Analyze

The above steps will help you get a surge of traffic to your post from your email subscribers and influencers in your niche and they will enable you to get some links to help you promote your post.

What’s more important is that after a month you sit down and track the results. How many visitors did you get? How many from each platform? How many links did you get? What is your ranking on Google?

You need to do this tracking to find out what worked best for you and double down on that technique the next time you create a new post.

Also, it will help you find out what did not perform that well, so you could either stop wasting time on that strategy or tweak it to make it work.

Also, you’ll find some sources of traffic that didn’t require you to do anything to get traffic from them. Find these sources and start finding out how to get the most out of these sources to send more traffic to your blog the next time.

This step will help you save time while getting more results to your site.

Conclusion

It’s getting harder to get the traffic your blog deserves. The competition is increasing every day, and you know it.

But the good news is that you are now equipped to be able to handle the competition and start getting traffic to your blog.

So what should you do? Get things done right and follow the above steps every time you publish a new post.

And sooner or later your blog will get the traffic it deserves, and you’ll be able to build a viable business from your blog.

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5 Comments

  1. The tips and insights shared here have not only boosted my blog’s performance but also saved me so much time. I finally have a clear post-publishing strategy. Thanks for sharing these valuable tips with us!

  2. I’m truly impressed by the impact this blog post had on me! The practical tips and step by step guidance provided have undeniably boosted my content’s engagement, leading to a significant boost in my website traffic. Major applause to the author for generously sharing these valuable insights.

  3. I used to hit the publish button and then just sit and hope for the best. But after reading your tips, I now have a clear checklist of 6 essential things to do right after publishing. It’s made such a difference in the engagement and reach of my blog posts.

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