You can write the greatest blog ever, but if it isn’t seen, all you’ve really done is practice your writing. Once you write a great blog post, wouldn’t it be even greater if lots of people read it?

Rather than rely on random chance to get people to your page, it’s important to establish targeted connections and promote your blot. Think of the post as an ad for your work. You wouldn’t build a great ad and then not run it anywhere, and so you should remember that after the blog post is built, you have to place it to its best advantage.

Here are TEN steps to take once you’ve written your blog post to give it the maximum opportunity to be seen by your potential customers:

1. Scan through your post to pick out keywords and plug those words into your Wordtracker SEO  for blogs or Google Adwords free keyword selection tool.  Once you see the most popular search terms for certain keyword strings you may want to adjust some wording in your post or its title. For example, if I’m writing about SEO for authors, I may want to adjust that term to SEO tips for bloggers, which returns more results, meaning that’s what folks are actually typing into their search engines to learn more.
2. Choose your category. If you already have blog categories and the blog you’ve done applies to more than one, check all that apply. This lets readers easily find related topics within your blog; don’t ever let a post go uncategorized!
3. Add tags – keywords that help folks find your post. Many of our authors ask the difference between categories and tags. Simply put, a category applies to a broader scope of your writing, whereas a tag is something specific to that post. If you’re writing several posts about the publication process for instance, that would be a category. But a post within that category may reference a specific publisher – that publisher could be a tag.
4. If you have a subscribe form you want the form to appear at the bottom of your post. Someone who runs into your blog may want to read other words you write; make it easy for them! Also make sure your blog is RSS enabled, which is standard with most of today’s blogging platforms. I subscribe to many blogs via RSS, but the special ones I wanted to be reminded of via email.
5. We enable blogs with meta data, keywords and descriptions plugins – some auto-enter that data, others allow you to customize your meta-description, typically the first line of your post. That description are those first words you see under a site’s title when you go searching for something online, so the more potent those few words can be to draw readers to read more, the better!
6. Once your blog is properly prepared within your editing screen, it’s time to grab that post link and share it! Begin with your Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and/or Google+ audiences (or link several at once via an aggregate sit such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck).
7. Next, post the link at other social sites relevant to your readers, i.e. a post on golf tips would work well at any number of golf-centric social media sites.
8. Put your latest blog post link in your email signature.
9. Share your post with other like-minded bloggers and ask them to link it (and be willing to do the same for them when they have content of interest to your readers). This lets both parties grow the conversation and expand your audiences.
10. Bookmark your post on social bookmarking sites (Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious). This is an optional step; don’t spend much time on it if you know your potential readers aren’t into bookmarking.

Happily, once you perform these ten steps a couple times, you’ll discover it takes less time to perform them than it does to read this post. The key is to be diligent; a blog post unconnected is a blog post only half-baked!

Learn more about how the WWW team can help you increase your audience at www.WhereWritersWin.com!
(Graphic courtesy FreeDigitalPhotos.net)