The Blog Checklist – Part III of III

After writing the perfect blog post, it’s time to get readers. In Part III of our blog checklist, learn about driving traffic to your content. Be sure to read Part I (Planning) and Part II (Writing) to round out all aspects of successful blogging.

Promoting

1. Social for Them
   Make sure your readers can easily share to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc, etc. If your content is good enough, people will want their friends to see, thus turning them into advertisers for you. This is important for “going viral;” you want your content to spread to everyone. Be warned, though: you will never be able to manufacture a viral post. Virality stems from being organic and real.
2. Social for You
   Share your content on your own relevant social media channels. Share a link to your blog post on your LinkedIn, or from the company Twitter. If you have a very visual blog post, also share from your Instagram or Pinterest, for example. Never pass up an opportunity to share your content with your captive audience. They followed you for  reason, after all.
3. Comments
   I, personally, believe comments are in a transition phase, so the importance of this topic may change at some point. Allowing people to comment on your posts could help generate more traffic. Remember to moderate comments, though! WordPress makes it easy to let anyone comment on your posts. The downside is that WordPress makes it easy to let anyone comment on your posts. If you are not weeding out the off-topic or spam comments, they will decrease the quality of your blog, and its traffic.
4. Guest Blogging
   Offer to blog on other people’s (relevant) sites. Add your expertise to their site. Your Author Page should have links to your own blog/social media, thus driving traffic back to you. As you become more well-known in your niche this will help your SEO. You are building your authority as you publish more content to the Web. When the search engines see your name/company on various outlets, they may increase your visibility on the results page because your content makes you relevant.

Throughout this series we have given you a road map to blog well, consistently, and passionately. SEO is no longer about algorithms and tricks. It’s about real content that real people care about. The better you are about creating this content, the better the search engines will be at ranking you.

Read Part I and Part II to become a blogging pro.