Top 11 Helpful Actions To Take After Publishing Your New Blog Post

Last Updated on March 6, 2024 by Nadim Alamuddin

One of the most misunderstood concepts in blogging stems from people thinking that once you publish your new blog post, you’re done. It cannot be further from the truth. In fact, this is where the real work starts. This post concentrates on fifteen helpful actions you need to take after publishing your new blog post.

Please don’t take it the wrong way. Creating a blog post is hard work. And, if you have done so and published it, congratulations. If you haven’t yet and are interested in a step by step guide on how to do so, be sure to take my free  7-day course, which conveniently e-mails you one lesson per day for 7 days. You can sign up when the dialog box pops up. Alternately, you can read “5 Simple Ways To Create An Awesome Blog Post“.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the key actions to take for your new blog post once you click on “Publish”.

Action 1: Promote, Promote, Promote!

If you believe that once you published your new blog post, people are just going to flock to your site to read your material, think again. I wrote a post on this, as it is one of the myths of blogging.

While promoting your post is a logical action, please do not underestimate its power or its time consumption. The best places to promote your blog post are social media platforms. The main objective is to show the links to your blog posts to as many eyeballs as possible. The secondary but more important objective is to get people to click those links and read your posts.

Now, not all social media platforms are created equal. Some will help you better than others. Here are my recommendations on what may work better than others, based on my experiences.

Pinterest

Think of Pinterest as a visual search engine. If you pay attention to this platform, it may pay you well in terms of traffic. A lot of people on it use it to link out to other sites, so this usually drives a lot of traffic.

About 80% of my traffic comes from Pinterest and this is why it’s my preferred social media platform. Since I run my blog on WordPress, I have a plugin called Social Warfare which lets me add pins to my blog post in such a way that it helps my readers share (pin them) directly on Pinterest.

You can create pins very quickly by using Canva or PicMonkey, to name a few applications. Both have great solutions to create social media images fast. I’ve written a post on Canva here.

TIP: Here’s an immediate action to take once you publish your post: Click on the Pinterest share button and save the pin on an appropriate board on Pinterest. I usually have boards where there are lots of active members so that saving my pin there gets some engagement.

Reddit

While I don’t use Reddit to drive traffic, you cannot ignore the sheer number of users online on it. If you can create some posts on it that pique interest, you will drive a lot of traffic back to your blog.

One way to use Reddit efficiently is by way of subreddits. These are similar to Groups on other social media sites, in that you can join in conversations regarding different topics.

Twitter

Twitter is yet another social platform that can generate traffic for your blog. There are lots of bloggers on it who offer to promote each other’s posts. This is key to getting noticed.

TIP: There are plugins on WordPress that will let you insert a “Click to Tweet” text within your blog post. Readers will then click on it, which will then automatically tweet the text to their Twitter account. That text has a link back to your blog post.

To illustrate, I’ve inserted one below. I use the Social Warfare plugin which gives me this functionality.

A key action to take once you publish your new blog post is to insert 'Click to Tweet' functions within your content. This helps your readers share your content on TwitterClick To Tweet

A word of advice in the case of promoting on Twitter. There are so many tweets that occur every minute that you would need to tweet your blog post links many times a day and then reschedule them at many intervals during the following days or weeks. Ideally, you should use a social media scheduler like Buffer or Hootsuite (both support Twitter, Facebook & Instagram platforms).

Facebook

Unless you have a good following, I wouldn’t recommend FB. However, there are some key FB Groups that help promote bloggers’ posts and Pinterest pins. Those are amazing. Here are a couple of recommendations:

• Pinfinite Traffic For Bloggers – Every day of the week, there is a particular promotion. Normally, there would be Pinterest pins and Blog post promotions. Be sure to read the rules and adhere to them.
• Problogger Community – Every now and then, Darren Rowse, the blogger who owns probogger.com asks new joiners to introduce themselves with links to their blogs. There are a lot of questions & answers on the group discussions and sometimes people do share their blog posts.

Of course, there are multiple groups on Facebook that you can join, in the hope of promoting your blog posts. However, I have found that the best group so far is the first bullet above.

LinkedIn

I wouldn’t count on LinkedIn as most users tend to stay on the platform. The most you may get is a Like…or a comment if you’re lucky.

However, if you have good connections on LinkedIn and you can instruct them to click your links and read your posts, you may get lucky. In my experience, most readers just click Like and move on.

Instagram

Forget that one – users there love to stick around and stay on the platform, browsing their connections’ images and videos.

Promotion Strategies

As discussed above, since promoting on social media is time consuming, you’d be better off using a scheduling tool such as Tailwind, Buffer, Hootsuite or others.

Networking is another form of promotion, an action to take once you publish your new blog post. You can use FB or other platforms to introduce yourself to like minded folks and promote your posts that way. Of course, you would need to be tactful here. First, study their content, whether on their own blogs or in posts on social media. Then, you can comment on their content and maybe connect. Then, you can start sharing your posts with them.

Within networking, you may develop good relations with other bloggers. If you do, you may ask them to help you promote your blog post within their network or subscribers, and offer to do the same for them. I’m honored to have been featured in a blog post by a fellow blogger, Angie. The post is titled “21 Inspiring Blogs To Follow In 2021“.

There are other blogging platforms where you can join and promote your posts there. For example, Medium or Bloglovin’ come to mind. Medium has quite a lot of bloggers on it and it would be advantageous for you to repost your links there. You may even blog a portion of your post and let the readers link back to the post on your blog to read the end of your article.

Related Post: Check out “The Best Tool Used To Triple My Monthly Visitors” for more info on Tailwind.

Action 2: Send Your Blog Post To Your Mailing List

One of the most important tasks on a blog is the ability to capture emails from your audience, and build a mailing list. This is referred as email marketing.

One of the key actions you need to do when you first publish a new blog post is to let your subscribers know about it. You can do so in many ways, depending on what email marketing application (called autoresponder) you’re using.

In general, the following methods are common in most applications:

• Newsletter: A newsletter is a way to broadcast a message to your mailing list subscribers with links to your blog post. Of course, you can personalize your mail and use it to promote your posts properly.
• RSS-to-mail: If you setup this option, your subscribers will get a mail whenever you’ve published a new post. There are different settings here. You may select to send the mail immediately once a post is published, or send a mail at a predetermined interval, with links to one or more of your recent posts.

Of course, sending your blog post to your list is another form of Promotion. But, these readers will be returning visitors to your blog, rather than new ones. Ideally, you should try to increase the number of returning visitors, by publishing amazing content full of value, and sending newsletter back to your list. Over time, you will gain your subscribers’ trust and they will start sharing your posts more readily to their network and/or buy into whatever you may be promoting.

Related Post: Best 3 Benefits Of Email Marketing To Your Business

Action 3: Review / Update Your Post

Many times we publish posts once we’re happy with the content we just wrote. Yet, when we look at it again a couple of days later, we notice that a couple of errors here, some grammar mistakes there, or something that’s just not right.

Not all is lost. You can always make your post better, even after you publish. So, this is another action to take once you publish your post. Here are some key updates I would recommend. These may be done within a couple of weeks of publishing your post, or even after a few months/years, depending on the circumstances.

For example, if your content is evergreen (meaning it doesn’t need updating over time), then you don’t really have to maintain it that much. However, if your content is date sensitive, for example talking about a specific version of an app, you may want to update it regularly to keep with technology developments.

Typos / Grammar

While I usually recommend bloggers to proof read their content before publishing, we’re all human. Some mistakes may slip. One way to proof read your content is to have someone else read it for you. A fresh set of eyes always helps. Not only from a typo / grammar perspective, but also from the way you’re trying to put your ideas across.

Of course, there are apps that help in this aspect. For example, you can copy / paste your content into Word and run the spell check and/or thesaurus on it and correct what needs to be corrected. Or, you can use a plugin or app like Grammarly, which will highlight your errors.

TIP: Grammarly comes with a free extension for Google Chrome.

Action 4: Link From Older Posts

Internal linking in blogging is an important strategy and will benefit your blog with respect to Google and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The idea here is to show Google how your website is structured.

This strategy benefits your readers too. Depending on the subject of your recently published post, you should be able to find an older post that you wrote which relates to it. Once you do, go to the older post and update it with something like “Please refer to xxx for more information” or “Here’s a blog post I recently wrote on xxx”. The text should hyperlink to your new post.

Similarly, you should link your recent post to other similar posts. I use a plugin called Yoast SEO, which provides linking suggestions based on the content of your post. You can use these as a guideline or link as you please.

Internal linking can also benefit you in terms of traffic. If an older post has been getting a lot of traffic, it would do you good to send this traffic to some of your newer posts that may not be getting as much yet. Similarly, if you’ve been heavily promoting your newer posts, linking them to older posts may help revive them.

Related Post: For more info on SEO, you can check out Best 7 Strategies To Increase Organic Search Traffic (this is an example of internal linking).

Action 5: Add New Pins / Images

One of the key benefits of adding media to your posts is to separate the text by images or videos so that it becomes more legible and may even attract your readers to the content. Video tends to grab the attention of visitors. Colorful images do too.

As you review your posts, you may want to pepper your content with more media, or update some images to more colorful ones.

If you’re on Pinterest, or if you use Pinterest as a traffic source, you should create more pins for the same blog post. You can test different variations with larger text, other images, new graphics, etc. to see which pins are getting the most views, clicks and saves. Now that you can do video pins, this may be a medium you don’t want to miss.

Action 6: Reply To Your Comments

While this task may look like it’s the logical thing to do, you’d be amazed how many bloggers fail to do so. As a blogger, I read quite a lot, mainly to inform myself, to stay current and to learn new tricks of the trade. So, I end up visiting quite a lot of blogs, and do comment on a lot of them (see action 7 below). I am, however, surprised at how few bloggers reply to my comments! On other blogs, you’ll see lots of comments with hardly any replies from the website owner.

Not all comments should be answered, or should be approved to be posted on your blog. There are lots of spam out there. Be sure to have the Akismet plugin activated on your blog to weed out all spam comments. You should periodically review the spam comments, in case some valid comments slipped in.

Ideally, you should only approve comments that add value to you and your readers. I wouldn’t approve a comment like “Good post”, as it just doesn’t add any value.

Engage with your readers and build trust by replying to their comments on your blog post.Click To Tweet

Please make time to reply to your comments. This will not only help your readers, but will also show that you care and that you’re continuously providing value. And when you do reply, readers are motivated to get more engaged in your content. Did you know that comments add value to your SEO?

Action 7: Comment on other blog posts / forums

Other Blog Posts

Once you publish your blog post, it’s important to check other similar posts. There will be lots. A great way to promote your blog as well as have other perspectives on your subject is to read those posts and, if you have some value-added feedback, you should comment on those posts.

As in Action 6 above, do not just say “Great post. I bookmarked it” which doesn’t add any value. Ideally, you should praise the blogger on some tip he/she wrote about that taught you something. In addition to this, you could mention that you’ve written about something related and leave your blog post link. In a lot of cases, when you leave a comment, you would also leave your name, email address and URL. When your comment is approved, people would be able to click on your name and link back to the URL (your blog or blog post).

In essence, commenting on other blog post would be a great way to get backlinks (links to your blog). These help in what is called off-site SEO.

Forums

In the case of forums, you may want to search topics related to the blog post you just published. Forums like Quora and Reddit are powerful platforms. Be sure to read the platform guidelines and abide by them. Some websites do not like self-promotion, so be careful.

Once in the forum, search for questions related to challenges that you have solved in your recent post. Answer these questions, either by rewriting portions of your blog post or by writing answers and linking back to your post for more in-depth information. It’s another way to get backlinks.

The more active you are on some of these forums, the more “reputation” you will gather. Your profile will ideally have a link back to your blog and you will often get traffic from these sites.

Action 8: Repurpose Your Post Into Other Formats

When you have published a few posts, you may look back and notice that some can be redone differently or packaged as an e-book. For example, some training or user guide posts may be packaged as a Powerpoint presentation, with graphic slides showing each step in the training guide.

Or, you may have written about the “top 7 strategies of blogging”, where you can create an infographic that illustrates these, so your readers can print them and retain them better.

You should always be looking at ways to “repurpose” (repackage) your content.

Once you do, check out the next action to see how you can take advantage of this strategy.

Action 9: Add Lead Magnets / Content Upgrades

This action is closely related to email marketing. First, let’s define the terms, so we’re all on the same page:

Opt-In Form: An opt-in form is a dialog box that asks for your name (optional) and an email address. It may be a pop-up, it could be placed in-line (within your text), it could appear as you try to exit the site (moving your mouse towards the close icon), etc.

Lead Magnet: A lead magnet is basically an opt-in form, where you’re offering something in return for an email address (a sign up). You could offer a free e-book, a report, an infographic, some printable cheat sheets or a training course. It gives the user an incentive to sign up.

Content Upgrade: If you’ve written a blog post, you may complement it with an infographic, an e-book, a detailed case study, a detailed report, or anything related to the blog post that may be of further value to your reader. Basically, you’re upgrading the blog content you’ve just written. The content upgrade will be an example of an opt-in form.

As you can imagine, adding these elements to your blog post will help you capture more subscribers so you can gain more returning visitors and loyal readers.

Action 10: Complement With Video

If you’re comfortable at making videos, this is a great way to:

• Promote your blog posts
• Repurpose your blog posts into video tutorials or other content – here, you can offer the content by way of lead magnets or content upgrades, but you can also insert the video into your blog post for visitors who would prefer to watch the video instead of reading the post.

Video doesn’t limit you to YouTube, Vimeo and TikTok, but you can also consider all the other social media platforms that have introduced video into their apps, such as FB Live, IG Stories, etc.

The advantage of using the likes of YouTube, Vimeo & TikTok are that they are visual search engines and provide you a different medium for traffic to your blog.

Action 11: Monitor Your Analytics

When you first setup your blog, it’s important to integrate it with some analytics, whether it is through a plugin or directly with Google Analytics, which is a free service. Nowadays, analytics services provide you with a slew of insights that can help you slice and dice your blog.

What you really want, however, is to know how your particular blog post is performing over time. Of course, as soon as you publish your blog post, you will hardly get any visitors, unless you start promoting it right away and you have optimized it properly for SEO. But, even SEO will take a few weeks to kick in and give you organic traffic.

All of these will be clear if you are tracking your site with some analytics. It will allow you to know where your traffic is coming from, as an example. So, you can concentrate on how to promote in channels where you’re not getting any traffic.

Related Post: For a good post on WordPress analytics plugins, check out WP Beginner’s post “11 Best Analytics Solutions For WordPress Users“.

Conclusion: Actions To Take After Publishing Your New Blog Post

As you can appreciate, there are lots of things you should do after you publish your blog post. A lot of these tasks take quite a bit of time. Whether you’re blogging full time or part-time, be sure to allocate enough time on a periodic basis to do some of these activities. You need to do them consistently for best results, especially the promotion part.

I’d like to thank you for reading through this long post. I hope you’ve gotten value out of it. Please write me some “constructive” comments below about your own experiences, what worked and what didn’t and anything that may help other readers. 

If you’ve enjoyed this post, you can check out:

• Revealed: Top 5 Reasons To Create A Top-Notch Blog
• 5 Simple Ways To Create An Awesome Blog Post
• Blogging FAQs: What Alternatives To WordPress Can I Use?