The Life Cycle of a Business Blog Post – Know it and Maximize Your Marketing

On a business blog, where you’re marketing your business and not “just” writing a blog, you do not write a post out of the blue, hit the publish button and call it good.

Unless of course you like wasting your time and getting lackluster results for your efforts.

If you want to see real influence and traction from your blog posts, though, you need to understand the life cycle of a blog post. Once you understand it, you can find ways to take advantage of it to get the maximum return possible on your marketing efforts.

Check out my thoughts on this subject below.

Pre Publication Steps

• Editorial Calendar: The post you’re going to write fits into your editorial calendar. You have an awareness of how a particular post fits into your overall publishing schedule. This helps you create topics that people want to subscribe to because they don’t want to miss the next one. It helps you figure out which previous posts you want to link to it or vice versa, which improves your SEO.
• Research: You may need to do some research. Can you cite examples of what you’re talking about? Can you prove and back up what you’re saying? Incidentally, this is one area where most bloggers could learn a lot from old-school journalism.
• Purpose: Decide what is the purpose of the post. Is it to spur discussion? Get sign-ups? Direct visitors to a product or sales page? Decide what you want people to do when they’re done reading your post, and then tell them to do it.
• Engage: Ask questions of your friends & followers on your social networks and encourage them to ask you questions, too. I see very few people doing this, but what I have seen has proven effective when the post is published. I’ll admit I could do this a lot more myself, and will make more of an effort to in the future.

Writing and Publication

• Write First, Edit Later: In today’s webcentric world of immediate satisfaction, some of the best writing advice from yesterday often gets ignored—and the result is nothing less than crappy writing. But see, having an editorial calendar and knowing in advance what you’re going to be writing means you can take a lot more time to make it your best work.
• Publication Times: There’s been a lot of research and discussion about the best times to publish and that’s great. I love that we have some general data to go by. But it’s just a starting point. What’s generally a “best practice” may not be so great for you at all. And you won’t know unless you look at your social network and site analytics. I use HootSuite (affiliate link), Klout and Google Analytics, mostly.
• Consistency: Having a deliberate posting day and time is important not only for getting the most traffic, comments and social shares, but also because your readers and customers value consistency. Just banging something out and immediately hitting “publish” may not be such a hot idea. Consistency builds trust.

Post-Publication

• Social media automation: If there’s any time when social media automation is appropriate, it’s when you want to promote your own content. You want to create post-dated entries in your social media marketing dashboard (again, HootSuite to the rescue) that will auto-post to Twitter and Facebook. Because people live in different parts of the world and are in different time zones, the only way your stuff is going to get eyes on it is if you send out at least three social network messages to drive traffic. Space them out throughout the day and also for the next few days if you don’t publish every day.
• Comments: Even if your purpose for the post was something other than a strong discussion in the comments, you’ll still get them and you want to nurture that and use them to help extend the lifespan of your post. One way I like to do that is to share a quick note about comments with my friends on social networks. For example, I may tweet out something like: “Interesting discussion on this post. Come have your say.”
• Email: Sure you probably have RSS subscribers to your blog, but the beauty of having an email list is that you can send out an email letting everyone know you have a new post up on the blog. I do not recommend that you just have the whole post go out via email because that does not send your site traffic (and generally traffic has to be on the site to buy something or convert in some other way).
• Backlinks: Can you think of useful ways to link back to this post in later posts you write? This goes back to the notion of having an editorial calendar above. When you’ve got a bird’s eye view of your publication timeline for a longish stretch of time, it’s easier to post topics that are related enough to each other to deserve backlinks. And again, that’s awesome for SEO.
• Resharing: Is “resharing” a word? It is now! Writing “best of” and “round up” link collection types of posts are a great way to reshare older content and give it some new life. A plugin like Tweet Old Post is a great way to automate this so you don’t even have to think about it once you’ve got it set up. So are “most popular posts” or “most commented posts” style of WordPress plugins (be careful not to clutter up your blog design, though).

What You Need to Do Now

Get a snapshot of your current analytics: stuff like general site traffic and visits to blog posts over the course of a week after publication. Then try these ideas out for several weeks and check your numbers again. I’d love to hear it goes for you, so make sure you leave a comment here and let me know.