Do you have a business blog that’s not getting the visits, readership and engagement that you are looking for? Spending a lot of time writing blog posts and not seeing any sort of return on your investment can be frustrating. Chances are, you may not be creating the right type of posts, or not optimizing them, or not promoting them. Any one of these can turn your blog post into a tree falling in the forest. In this post, I’ll walk you through a step-by-step process of making the most of every single post. (Hey, I’m a poet, and I didn’t even know it!

1. flyte school
BLOGGING BLUEPRINT:
How to Create & Promote The Perfect Post

2. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Do you have a business blog that’s not getting the visits,
readership and engagement that you are looking for?

3. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Conceive of a topic that solves the problem of your
ideal customer.
• Chances are you’ve been doing this long enough that you
know the challenges your customers face.
• Come up with an idea of what the blog post is going to cover,
whether it helps them raise their child, raise donations,
or raze a building.

4. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Uncover the keyword phrase that your ideal customer is
using at Google.
• I recommend Google’s Keyword Tool.
• Look for phrases with lots of search volume.

5. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Start with an engaging, keyword rich title.
• Your title is critical. It must grab the reader’s attention
and get them to want to read more or at least share it on
Twitter
• Lead with your best keywords, as the search engines put
the most weight on the first few words of the title.

6. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Write an opening sentence with your keyword phrase.
• A title needs help. Search engine look not just for your
keywords, but where you place them. Make sure you use
your phrase in the opening sentence.

7. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Explain the benefit to the reader in the next paragraph.
• There’s a number of ways to go about this, whether you
start off by asking a question, like I did above, or just jump
right into the problems that your post will help the reader
solve.

8. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Keep your post focused.
• A title needs help. Search engines look not just for your
keywords, but where you place them. Make sure you use
your phrase in the opening sentence.

9. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Make it easy on the eyes.
• Big blocks of text on the screen are difficult to read.
Break up your content with subheaders (like in this post)
and bulleted lists.

10. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Wrap it up.
• Don’t leave the visitor hanging. Give them a recap,
or some takeaways, or draw some conclusions.

11. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Ask for comments.
• While I’ve often said that comments aren’t customers, they
can help with the social proof on your blog, and make your
blog more engaging.
• There are several ways to get people to leave comments,
including the outright ask, or posing a question that they
can answer in the comment section, or asking for people
to provide examples of when something similar happened
in their own life or business.

12. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Find a good breaking point.
• Your blog home page should work like a good news page:
it should tease the stories, showing more “above the fold.”
To accomplish this, use the Insert Page Break feature in
your blogging platform. I recommend right after where you’ve
explained the benefits of reading your post.

13. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Find a great image to use at the top of the page.
• People are visual and a good image can really pull them in.
Plus, with the rise of Pinterest, an eye-catching visual can
greatly increase your chances of getting pinned and driving
more traffic to your blog.

14. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Use an appropriate alt-tag for that (and every) image in
your post.
• Google’s image search can drive more traffic to your site,
and alt-tags are just the right thing to do. Start by saving
the image file with a keyword rich name, like
potato-peeling-tips.jpg, and then add an appropriate
Alt Tag like “Potato Peeling Tips.”

15. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Find appropriate places to link to other blog posts or
pages on your website.
• Creating links to other posts and pages can provide
additional help and resources to your readers, and can
help promote older posts. In addition, those internal links
can really increase your search engine visibility.

16. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Find appropriate places to link to other sites.
• Share the love! Linking to authoritative sites provides
value to your readers and may help your search
engine visibility.

17. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Proofread it.
• Nobody’s perfect, but too many typos can damage your
credibility and hurt your message. If you suck at grammar,
give the editing job to someone else.
• Ironically, “proofread” never looks right to me.

18. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Publish it.
• ‘Nuff said.

19. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Use your share buttons.
• You know how bartenders put a dollar or five in their tip
jar at the beginning of their shift? Yeah, do that.
• Click on the Facebook like button, retweet button,
+1 button, and anything else you have. This primes the
pump for the next visitor to your post. They see that
people have already shared it and say, “wow, this must
be valuable,” and hopefully share it themselves.
• Plus, you’re spreading the word.

20. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Send it to your email list.
• These days I recommend sending out a teaser email
rather than the full blog post to your subscribers.
It brings them back to the post where they can more
easily share it or comment on it.

21. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Schedule some tweets.
• I’m not a big fan of automation, but scheduling out some
tweets isn’t a bad idea. I use TweetDeck, but others prefer
Hootsuite or Buffer.
• Since your tweets don’t have a very long shelf life, it’s a
good idea to post 3 or 4 times during the day.

22. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Publish it to your Facebook profile.
• I know you just “liked” it through the Facebook share
button, but you’ll get more visibility if you head back
into Facebook and post the link into your timeline.

23. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Publish it to your Facebook business page.
• If you’ve got a lot of overlap between Facebook friends
and your business fans you might want to stagger this
update by a couple of hours or so. I also recommend
taking a screen capture of the top of the post and making
that part of your update so that it shows up more
prominently in the newsfeed. Just remember to keep the
link in the update.

24. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Like, comment on, and share that update.
• Switch back to your personal profile and like and
comment on your business page’s post immediately.
An hour or two after that, share it on your personal
profile. Any likes, comments or shares you get on this
will also count towards your page’s engagement ranking.

25. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Find appropriate groups on LinkedIn and share it there.
• Yes, you posted it to your LinkedIn profile when you clicked on
the LinkedIn share button, but you’ll get more mileage when
you post it to a relevant LinkedIn group. Or two. Or three.
• If you’re a pro, you might consider staggering the posts to the
groups, one per day, so you don’t look like one of those guys
who posts the same self-promotional crap to every group he
belongs to. (Hangs head in shame.)

26. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Post it to Google+ as yourself, and later as your
business.
• There are search as well as social benefits to Google+.

27. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Pin it to Pinterest.
• The shelf life of a pin can also be short, so consider
posting it once a day for two or three days.

28. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Use other social media platforms as appropriate.
• Reddit, StumbleUpon, even Digg might be appropriate
for your content.

29. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Respond to comments.
• If you want to build a community and get subscribers and
repeat visitors, you need to get them engaged. Respond to every
comment on the blog, whether positive or negative,
for as long as you can keep it up.
• That might mean for the first 10 comments, or the first two
days, or forever. Your call.

30. CREATE A PERFECT POST
Be consistent.
• The trick to blogging, or social media, or life, is to be
consistent. Whether that means daily posts (crazy!),
weekly, or even every other week. Create consistently
valuable posts and publish them consistently.

31. THANK YOU
Rich Brooks
flyte new media
flyte.biz
flyteblog.com
@therichbrooks
http://bit.ly/createperfectpost