Tune in to the most recent episode of our Lunch and Learn Podcast with our host Kenny Jahng!
In this episode, Kenny discusses the 10 things you should do after publishing a blog post.
Get to know more about Kenny and Lunch and Learn podcasts on the links below:
Website: churchbutler.com
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter: @thechurchbutler
TRANSCRIPTION:
Welcome to the Church Butler Lunch and Learn podcast. We help you put social media to work for your church. Social media is your opportunity to engage your community all week long, reach new people and start new conversations. Every week, we bring you a dose of practical, tactical, skill-building training as we talk to communicators, church leaders and members of our team. Are you ready? Let’s get to today’s session.
Hey, friends, it’s Kenny Jahng. It is time for another episode of Church Butler Lunch and Learn. Hope you are doing well. This week, we’ve got a couple of questions about people’s blogs. Blogs are back in fashion, just like all content is back in fashion for content marketing. People are looking for radically useful content. It doesn’t really matter what form or factor it is in. However, one of the things about blogging and one of the things about publishing a lot of the social media content that we have out there is that there’s a misnomer, miscommunication, misunderstanding of just how you’re supposed to get our eyeballs on them today. Used to be that once you build it, people will come. You publish anything and you’ll get the traffic. It is 2019 today. You are bombarded with thousands of thousands of brand messaging all day long. It is the attention economy. We are trying to fight for the attention of your audience.
In fact, I’ve just heard… more just read actually an article about Netflix and that they’re winning the attention economy. They are trying to get your attention. Their competitors are not Hulu and Amazon Prime and the other streaming services, their competitors from their point of view is anything else in terms of your disposable leisure time, that they want to consume as much of that as possible. That’s really interesting. Anyway, the point is, once you publish content in today’s age, day and age, you cannot just put it out there and hope that people will discover it, share it, find it, consume it. In fact, it’s that age-old, 80/20 rule or maybe even a 90/10 rule where 20% of the efforts should be publishing your content. We’re flipping the model now. 80% of your efforts really have to be about figuring out how you can distribute it, syndicate it and get it out to more outposts and places where your audience has a better chance of coming across it.
There’s an infographic that I have, it’s called, 10 easy things you should be doing after you publish a blog post. That’s the confusion. Most people think that once you publish your blog post, you are done with your job and you’re going to go onto the next one. That is by far not the case in today’s world. We’re just going to go through these 10 easy things you should be doing after you publish your blog post. If you’re listening along on the podcast in the car or something like that, you can actually come back to the Church Butler website and go to the blog and you can follow along and actually get a copy of this infographic as well. Anyway, so let’s go to the first thing.
The first episode is, you should offer a content upgrade. Once you write your blog post, you should think about what is something that the reader is going to want to dive deeper or wants to know that’s related to the content that they just consumed. If they finish the content that you just published as a blog post, their behavior is telling you something, that they’re interested in that topic and that they actually might want to know more, want to have case studies or examples or something else. There’s a lot of things that you can do with it. Now, at the very, very beginning, what I really suggest for people is, a lot of times that once people consume your content, they want to share it with others and you want to make it as simple as possible. A great and easy way is to save the post as a printer-friendly pdf.
You simply add a cover and a back page and then you offer it within the original blog post. You can ask actually say, “Hey, download this art… If you like this article and you want to share with a friend, download this article as a pdf right here,” and you put an opt-in form. You’re going to trade your name… the name and email of the person downloading it so that you can put them on your email list and nurture them further along and then you can deliver the pdf either on the thank you page or in their inbox, et cetera. That’s what we call a content upgrade. That’s the very basic lowest hanging fruit is, take exactly what you wrote, lay it out decently in a pdf and then offer it as a clean way for them to take it, make it portable and share it with a friend or colleague, etc.
The second one is simple, tweet it. Twitter is not dead yet. It’s a discovery platform, and it’s something that you should take your blog post and actually tweet it. You’ve got to remember the time decay on social posts and Twitter is much shorter than almost any other social media network out there. So you don’t need to just tweet it once. You should schedule it so that it goes out maybe today, maybe three days from now, a couple of weeks from now, a month from now, six months from now. Set up that schedule so that it’s automated and on your schedule automatically.
Number three, and this actually… Sorry, I got ahead of myself. Schedule another tweet in the future. The half-life of a tweet is so short that you need to repeat yourself in the future to get the word out for valuable content. There’s a lot of tools out there, Hootsuite, Buffer. Our Church Butler product actually allows you to pre-schedule stuff in the future. So if you’re a Church Butler member, you should be using the Auto Platform tool to schedule your content out there. CoSchedule is a good plugin that we like.
Now, number four is Facebook. Facebook is still the hub for social. Today in 2019, a lot of subsegments might have moved on. You might think that it’s 40-year-olds for… middle school for 40-year-old. You might think it’s irrelevant more and more. However, everyone is still on Facebook. This is one place. It’s a home base that you need to treat with respect because you can get your content out to a lot of people still on Facebook.
Number five is to add a social action pull quote to your actual blog post. So what does that mean? You know how in magazines and newspapers you’ll read the article on any given page. They’ll have a call out box and they’ll put a quote from the article in that box. Nice big. That’s a pullout… pull quote. There are actual plugins that make it easy to create those boxes with a pull quote. You can actually also create links in your blog post so that when they click the quote that you want them to share, it will actually spawn Twitter. It’ll open their Twitter accounts and it also pre-populate that quote and anything else you want to put in there for them already so that they just need to hit publish and the tweet will go out. Click to Tweet is a great tool to try and experiment for that one.
Number six is, notify anyone you mentioned or link to in the post. This is a great exercise. When you’re writing blog content, you want to try to figure out, can you refer to resources out there on the net or mention people as examples. You want to humanize your stories. Once you do that, if you publish it, hey, just send the link to the person that you mentioned. If you celebrated them in or set them up as a hero, an example, it’s great to get an email. Say, “Hey, I wrote about you, just to let you know.” Most times, that person is going to be flattered and they’re going to share it on their social networks, etc.
If you actually have a website, find out their social handles and contact them. If they have an email on their website, contact them. Just let them know as a polite gesture that said, “Hey, I just wrote this blog post on this topic.” Then say, “I happened to mention your site here. You might want to take a look and here’s the link. Feel free to share it with your own social networks.” That’s short and sweet and you probably are going to get somewhere between the 20 and 30% hit rate with those people actually actively sharing it across their own networks.
Number seven on the list of things to do after you publish your blog post is, figure out infographic options. We’ve gone from a textual society to a visual society. Anything in the post, think about anything in the post that can be turned into some sort of visual, an image or an infographic. It’s something that explains it, something that represents it. Can it be a text over a headline, graphic text over an image, that we call a quote card, a factoid? Posting an image as you know, gets more eyeballs on an actual piece of content than if it’s just all text. Infographics or visuals is something that you want to figure out, how do you turn this text… body of text into something much more interesting? Animated gifs, embedding that into blog posts is another way to have some fun with them.
Number eight on the list is, take the pdf version of the article that you created early on in this list, right as a content upgrade, and then use that to upload to different sites. SlideShare is one of those sites that you should think about because SlideShare is a content discovery sharing site platform that really is actually quite effective if your content is paired with a smart title and description. You’ve got to think backward, reverse engineer searching what people will be searching for related to the topic of your content. Fill out all the information as you upload the document. It is the largest social document sharing platform today. That’s something that you definitely want to keep an eye on. You want to find other places to upload as well. Facebook groups. Facebook groups allow you to upload documents in many places. You could actually upload it to LinkedIn, to your profile, either as an actual article or offer the link as something that readers can actually download and look at.
Number nine, StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a great discovery engine. It has been around for almost eons in internet history. Here, how you tag it and categorize it is key to discovery. Remember, people are stumbling upon going through, rifling through contents. For you to actually categorize it properly will increase the odds that people are going to stop, thumb it up, share it and do something with him.
Lastly is, Reddit. Reddit is a thriving subculture of the internet. If you’re not part of the Reddit community, you should start to look at all the subreddits out there, the subcategories. There are all these niches that people are posting content and having discussions about. That’s someplace that if your content gets discovered, can go viral and find other new audiences across the internet.
There you have it, 10 different things that you should be doing after a blog post. I’ll post this infographic on the Church Butler blog or you can go to churchbutler.com, and I’d love to hear what other things you’re doing for promoting your content after you publish it. Drop me a note, DM, puts something in the comments. Let’s learn and share together. In the meantime, I’m Kenny Jahng and I’ll check you out here next time on the Church Butler Lunch and Learn.
HIGHLIGHTS:
03:22 The first episode is, you should offer a content upgrade. Once you write your blog post, you should think about what is something that the reader is going to want to dive deeper or wants to know that’s related to the content that they just consumed. If they finish the content that you just published as a blog post, their behavior is telling you something, that they’re interested in that topic and that they actually might want to know more, want to have case studies or examples or something else. There’s a lot of things that you can do with it. Now, at the very, very beginning, what I really suggest for people is, a lot of times that once people consume your content, they want to share it with others and you want to make it as simple as possible. A great and easy way is to save the post as a printer-friendly pdf.
04:58 Second one is simple, tweet it. Twitter is not dead yet. It’s a discovery platform, and it’s something that you should take your blog post and actually tweet it. You’ve got to remember the time decay on social posts and Twitter is much shorter than almost any other social media network out there. So you don’t need to just tweet it once. You should schedule it so that it goes out maybe today, maybe three days from now, a couple of weeks from now, a month from now, six months from now. Set up that schedule so that it’s automated and on your schedule automatically.
05:34 Number three, and this actually… Sorry, I got ahead of myself. Schedule another tweet in the future. The half-life of a tweet is so short that you need to repeat yourself in the future to get the word out for valuable content. There’s a lot of tools out there, Hootsuite, Buffer. Our Church Butler product actually allows you to pre-schedule stuff in the future.
06:07 number four is, Facebook. Facebook is still the hub for social. Today in 2019, a lot of subsegments might have moved on. You might think that it’s 40-year-olds for… middle school for 40-year-old. You might think it’s irrelevant more and more. However, everyone is still on Facebook.
06:37 Number five is to add a social action pull quote to your actual blog post. So what does that mean? You know how in magazines and newspapers you’ll read the article on any given page. They’ll have a call out box and they’ll put a quote from the article in that box. Nice big. That’s a pullout… pull quote. There are actual plugins that make it easy to create those boxes with a pull quote. You can actually also create links in your blog post so that when they click the quote that you want them to share, it will actually spawn Twitter.
08:49 Number seven on the list of things to do after you publish your blog post is, figure out infographic options. We’ve gone from a textual society to a visual society. Anything in the post, think about anything in the post that can be turned into some sort of visual, an image or an infographic. It’s something that explains it, something that represents it. Can it be a text over a headline, graphic text over an image, that we call a quote card, a factoid? Posting an image as you know, gets more eyeballs on an actual piece of content than if it’s just all text.
09:46 Number eight on the list is, take the pdf version of the article that you created early on in this list, right as a content upgrade, and then use that to upload to different sites. SlideShare is one of those sites that you should think about because SlideShare is a content discovery sharing site platform that really is actually quite effective if your content is paired with a smart title and description. You’ve got to think backward, reverse engineer searching what people will be searching for related to the topic of your content. Fill out all the information as you upload the document. It is the largest social document sharing platform today. That’s something that you definitely want to keep an eye on.
10:52 Number nine, StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a great discovery engine. It has been around for almost eons in internet history. Here, how you tag it and categorize it is key to discovery. Remember, people are stumbling upon going through, rifling through contents. For you to actually categorize it properly will increase the odds that people are going to stop, thumb it up, share it and do something with him.
11:22 Reddit is a thriving subculture of the internet. If you’re not part of the Reddit community, you should start to look at all the subreddits out there, the subcategories. There are all these niches that people are posting content and having discussions about. That’s someplace that if your content gets discovered, can go viral and find other new audiences across the internet.
Recent Comments