15 Things To Do Before Publishing A New Post

Great content is the key ingredient of a successful site and a successful content marketing campaign. The big question is figuring out how to create all the great content. Most of the times you just don’t know the potential of a piece of content. You can work on something that you feel very good about, you can spend a lot of time on making it the best that you can do, but then you publish it and nothing happens. Sometimes on the other hand you might just get a quick idea, put something together fairly quickly, maybe even in one go, publish and it does so well that it breaks your traffic records.

It is difficult to predict viral potential of content but to give yourself a better chance of achieving your goals you can definitely be more structured and focused when preparing to publish your content. Over the years of being a blogger you pick up some lessons and learnings, you have them in your mind when publishing but to definitely get it all in place correctly and at all times it is worth writing all the things down that help make a successful post for you. You can use this list as a checklist to go through before clicking on the publish button. It will definitely help you publish better content and will help people that you work with create better posts.

Things to check before publishing your post

Here’s a checklist that I go through when publishing a piece of content. It is useful to ask yourself the following questions and make sure to tick all the relevant things off the list before clicking the “publish” button:

• Have I created an attractive headline? It is difficult to get much attention in social and even more difficult if you try to do it with a bland headline. Make sure to make people curious to click on your headline. For me personally top-lists and how-to’s have worked well so might be worth trying them out. Here’s more advice on writing headlines.

• How do I hook the visitor in the first paragraph in order to get him to dig deeper and continue exploring the post? Use one of the many hooks.

• Did I add multimedia to the post? It’s increasingly important to have nice large images in your posts to attract clicks from social. Pinterest for example is image exclusive. I always make sure to add one image to each of my posts. I also regularly include videos, infographics and SlideShare presentations in my content.

• Is there enough meat on the bone? What is the word count of the post? General advice is that a post needs to have some 300+ words of text in it for Google and search engines to pick it up. You might have other rules in terms of word count, but definitely a point worth checking before publishing.

• Did I properly tag the content? This all depends on how you tag your content. If you use categories make sure that you add the post in the relevant category, if you use tags make sure to add the relevant tags.

• Did I manually edit the permalink? It’s easy to edit the URL of your post so it is more concise and direct compared to your headline so make sure to click on that “edit” button and do it. It looks nicer, more clean and is better for your SEO.

• Did I add internal links within the content? Adding internal links in the content is important in getting people introduced to other areas or archives of your site. Adding links to the content makes people click and explore more of your work and it increase the page views and engagement with the site. I always make sure to add at least one internal link back to my other content.

• Did I read through the post to check for spelling mistakes and make the post read better? You want to read through your content before publishing it. It makes you aware of spelling mistakes, typos and sentences that may be more clear if rewritten. Spend some time doing this for every post.

• Did I split my content and add subheadings? Your content can be difficult to read through and engage with if it is full of text. Make it easier to consume by splitting it in paragraphs and adding subheadings every few paragraphs.

• Is there a call to action? For most posts you might want your visitors to take an action after reading your content. Make sure to ask them to as that will increase the chance of them doing so. Ask them to comment, or to subscribe, or to share, ask whatever it is that you are trying to achieve.

• Is this piece of content timeless? Ask yourself if the piece of content can be consumed and still be relevant a month or a year from now? Timeless content is the kind of content that will work for you over a long period of time, will rank well in search engines and drive traffic months and even years after it has been published. You should aim to produce more of this type of content.

• Is the content valuable to my audience? You know your audience and have to ask yourself does this piece of content help your audience and is it valuable to them in any way. Is this piece of content sharable? Would you share it with your friends?

• Does this content meet our overall objective? You will see better results by having some goals and being more focused with your site. If you do have goals and objectives make sure to check that the piece of content helps you meet those before publishing. See more about how you can work strategically.

• Did I preview the content? Click on that “Preview” button as check how the post looks like to the visitors before you actually publish it.

This is how the work in progress process may look like in your WordPress writing field:

And this is how it all looks like when I am creating it: