Is Your Job Done When You Publish Your Blog Post?
You take the time to write a great new post for your blog, you’ve researched, speculated. agonized, edited, spell checked, polished, re-edited several more times, and made your post look pretty…. Then you hit publish….
What happens now? Are you done? Do you move on and push the post idea from your mind? Do you begin searching for your next killer blog post topic idea?
Rather than hitting publish and moving on to your next topic you might want to pause. I’d suggest that a smarter thing to do would be to think about how you could use the post you’ve just written to help create some momentum on your blog.
Many blogs have a common problem. They are filled with posts on similar topics that don’t have any real connection between them. Bloggers often feel intense pressure to keep producing good content. While they are doing this they don’t think about the journey that they’re taking their readers on.
This is what I suggest you do instead:
How Every New Post Should Introduce Your Next Post
It’s not easy to do. However, instead of hitting publish, pushing the post from your mind and then searching for your next post topic try something different. Stop and ask yourself how that last post you wrote could be extended.
On my blog post publishing calendar I have already penciled in the posts I intend to publish over the next 6 – 8 months. I have active drafts written for many of these penciled in posts. And I’ve already written and scheduled the posts I’ll be publishing during the next month.
That doesn’t mean I can’t change my schedule. I do it all the time. I’m constantly moving things around because I’m telling a story to my readers. When all is said and done, I owe them the best possible story that I can tell them.
It’s not a perfect process, but it’s mine. What do you do? How do you decide what you will write about?
How Can You Accomplish Flowing From Idea to Idea
Here’s a few ways that I do it:
- Take the opposite point of view from a previous post
- Write a post to answer a question from a reader
- Respond to a readers idea with a new post
- Pick up on a social media comment left by a reader
- Write an opinion piece on a previous news piece
- Follow the post up with a post on how it affected you or your readers
- Write a followup ‘how to’ post after writing a more theoretical one
- Explore alternatives to an idea that you’ve written about
How do you handle this issue?
Your Posts Will Not All Be Part of an Amazing Blog Series
I’m sure that there are a lot more ways to do this. The key for you is to keep an open mind about the process. Look at each post you’ve written as an opportunity to write a stream of posts that build on one another.
Not every post that you write will be suited to doing this. That’s OK. And your posts that build upon one another don’t have to be formally tied together as a series.
However, over time if you can build a sense of anticipation among your readers. By building upon the things that you’ve previously written you’ll find that readers pick up on the threads that you’re exploring and will feel as though they’ve been taken on a journey with you.
I find myself constantly editing everything I write. The last edit I made to this post was changing a single word in the title. Can you guess what word I changed? I’d love to hear your guesses.
