By the time you get a fresh blog post published, you might feel like you’ve just run a marathon. But you’re not over the finish line quite yet. There’s one more essential step to your blogging workflow that you can’t forget.

Episode Highlights:

• The Importance of Marketing a New Blog Post
• Why Pinning is Essential
• How to Avoid Posting and Ghosting

Resources Mentioned:

Episode 13: Does It Matter When You Publish a Blog Post?

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Mentioned in this episode:

My 37 Favorite Places to Find Blog Ideas

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Stephanie 0:00

By the time you get a fresh blog post published, you might feel like you've just run a marathon, but you're not over the finish line quite yet. There's one more essential step to your blogging workflow that you can't forget.

Stephanie 0:25

Welcome back to the podcast. This is the final episode of our blogging workflow audit. I really hope that this series has helped you just kind of fine tune your blogging workflow so that you can make the most of your marketing efforts at this point in the workflow, your post is either live or scheduled to go live sometime in the near future, but you're not quite done well. Technically you are, but I want you to maximize the traffic to this fresh blog post with a little bit of marketing, because promoting your blog post to your audience is the final step in a truly effective blogging workflow.

Stephanie 1:05

I wanted to start with a little fun fact about me that relates to this topic. I lucked into a somewhat unconventional job as a very young teenager. So instead of babysitting, I worked in an antique shop on the main street of our little town. Now, there's a lot that I could say about the many years that I worked there, but I need to stay on topic the owner of the shop, she was super sweet, and she would occasionally bring me lunch from somewhere within walking distance of the shop. So one day, she brought me the most delicious sub sandwich. Now, again, this was a small town, and I was born and raised there, and I didn't recognize this sandwich, which was odd, so I asked my boss where it had come from, and she told me that a new sandwich shop had opened up just one block away. I loved that sub sandwich so much that I started going to this new place during my lunch break. It was a tiny little hole in the wall place. Honestly, it was like a glorified hallway with just a couple of tables and chairs. The shop owner had just a small sign in the window, but that was about it. If you walked past the storefront on Main Street, you wouldn't even suspect that there was a food establishment there. Now I was pretty excited about this development, so I mentioned the sandwich shop to my parents, and they said they had heard nothing about it. They were avid readers of the local newspaper, and they hadn't seen any ads for this shop. And this was also before the days of social media, so the business owner had clearly been planning on the main street foot traffic and word of mouth as her marketing strategy. Unfortunately, waiting on organic business growth with minimal marketing was not the best choice. Her sandwich shop closed down just after a short time, and I was bummed because those sandwiches were delicious. But I share this to illustrate that when it comes to your new blog post, it is really not the best idea to sit around and wait for Google traffic. I mean, yes, there are websites that succeed with only organic search traffic, and their main strategy is just SEO, and that works for them with no other marketing. But those websites are the exception to the rule. For the rest of us, it's important to let people know that our blog posts are live. Some people do this by sending out a quick email to their list. Others share a blurb and a link on Facebook and others add it to their Instagram stories. But if you only have time to promote your blog post in one place, it needs to be Pinterest.

Stephanie 3:51

You shouldn't add pinning to the list of marketing tasks that you'll get around to if you have time instead creating and scheduling pins for your new blog post should just be a non negotiable in your workflow. And I'm going to give you three reasons why Pinterest is such an essential part of blogging, and I'm going to use that sandwich shop as an example. So first, that little sandwich shop struggled because she sat up in a part of town where people didn't typically go for lunch. Main Street in our little town, was not known for being a place to grab lunch. She would have done much better in a different part of town, where people just navigated on autopilot when they were looking for a quick bite to eat. Now, even though that part of town had a lot of competition, it's where the right people would be, and it's similar with Pinterest. People go to Pinterest for the purpose of finding fresh ideas and navigating to websites. People don't go to Instagram with the intention of reading blog posts. People who are opening their email first thing in the morning probably don't have time to read your blog post. So adding your blog post to Pinterest is putting your content in front of people who are most likely to click on it. Now this doesn't mean you shouldn't talk about your blog on social media and email marketing. It just means that if your time is limited, make sure that you're putting your content in the place where the most people are going to click. Now the second problem the sandwich shop had was that she didn't seem to have a plan for long term marketing, and if she had done an ad in the newspaper, it might have just been a one time thing for like a grand opening, because I know my parents had never noticed it, but a one time ad that's just a flash in the pan. She didn't have a system in place to attract new customers over the long term. The same is true for marketing your posts on social media or through email marketing, while it's great to get an influx of traffic right away to your fresh blog posts, the lifespan of those emails and social media posts is short and the reach is limited to your followers and your subscribers. But on the other hand, a well optimized pin on Pinterest can market your blog post on autopilot for literal years. And then finally, we need to talk a little bit about trust, because by relying on foot traffic only this new restaurant owner, she just was not getting the word of mouth. She needed to build a reputation and to get that trust in the community. I mean, I saw this when I went home to share my excitement about this sandwich shop with my parents. They were skeptical. They had seen no ads in the newspaper that made it feel like a legitimate business. They didn't see any signs on the storefront when they drove past, and the more I described what the inside was like, the more they looked at me like they should be watching me for symptoms of food poisoning. When you rely only on Google for your blog traffic, especially if your website is relatively new, it's just not the best idea. Getting Google to trust your website is a huge part of SEO, but that's difficult because Google has major trust issues when it comes to new websites. So anything you can do to show the algorithm that your content is high quality and trustworthy is going to serve you well, and Pinterest traffic is a great way to start sending some positive signals to Google about the quality of your content, because you're showing Oh, look, there are lots of people visiting this blog post already.

Stephanie 7:36

I just wanted to give you one more tip to help your blog post be as successful as possible. Don't post and ghost - blog posts are assets for your business, and you want to make sure that they're being maintained appropriately, just like you would any other asset. Once the blog post is live and you've added some pins to Pinterest, be sure to have a game plan to come back to that post later, you want to create a system where you periodically check in with the post, see how it's doing on Google. Does it need any updates to keep the content fresh? Are all the links still working? Is there a talking point in that post that would benefit your audience if you shared it on social media. Again, you'll also want to create a pinning workflow where you're periodically creating fresh pins for that blog post. This is a great way to make sure that your post is targeting a variety of different keywords on Pinterest, which will maximize your reach.

Stephanie 8:38

I know all of the time and effort that goes into creating a blog post. And I mean, we've talked about all of the different steps that we should go through to create effective blog posts, so it feels like by the time it's published, that marketing that post is a job you can just put off until later, like you'll get around to it when you get around to it. But I hope that this episode has shown you the importance of treating Pinterest like a non negotiable in your blogging workflow, that you don't move on to your next blog post idea until the one you just wrote is promoted on Pinterest. Because just like that sandwich shop owner, if you rely only on organic traffic for your blog posts. I think you're going to be underwhelmed by the results.

Stephanie 9:25

Even though we're at the end of this blogging workflow audit, we still have a lot to talk about. So next Saturday is another installment of the Let's Pay Less series. Now, if you'll remember, this is where we look at popular budget busters to see if they're actually worth the money, or if your marketing dollars would be better spent elsewhere. So be sure to follow the podcast, and you'll be the first to know when it goes live.