Being able to hit that ‘Publish’ button when finishing up a blog post is a very exhilirating thing to do. Your words are going out into the blog-o-sphere for everyone to see. I know I have hit that orange button (since I am on WordPress) and later noticed something I either forgot to put in, or I misspelled something, or what-have-you. So I thought I would put together a list of 3 things to do before sending you work out into the world wide web!
- Make Sure You Have All Your Pictures Edited and Inserted – There have been a couple of occassions where I have forgotten to add a picture that I meant to add. A friend will mention to me that I mentioned a picture of a product or my daughter and I’ll realize I totally forgot it. To try and remember better now, I insert a place tag where I want a picture to go, like this: [insert picture of product]
- Cite Any Sources You Used – Just like in any paper you wrote in high school or college, you should link back to any posts or pictures that you referenced in your post. There are great sites out there, like Cite.com, to help you out if you’re not sure how to cite something correctly.
- Optimize Your Post URL and SEO Description – Sometimes WordPress (or Blogger, I am sure) will take out important words in your post URL. You can fix this by editing the URL under the post title in your post editor. Make sure to do this! I feel that this is just as important as adding an SEO description in a plugin like Yoast. It will help your site rank higher in search engines if you have those important words in your URL.
- Spell Check, Spell Check, Spell Check – This is a certain must. You should really edit a couple of times to make sure you don’t miss anything. You could always hire a virtual assistant, as well, or use a website like SpellChecker.
There are, of course, many other things you should do when publishing a blog post. SteamFeed has a great list of 5 Things You Must Do Before You Hit Publish.
What do you think is important to do before hitting publish?
I’m a 20-something stay-at-home mother and wife. I have an amazing husband, a beautiful daughter, two loving dogs, and a lazy cat. I wouldn’t change my life for anything! I love to read, listen to music, cook and blog!
Those are great tips. I find that it helps if you set all your drafts to a date far into the future. That way, if you ever hit the publish button by mistake, your post does not go live instantly and you are able to edit your blog post.
These are great tips. It’s really important to have all your ducks in a row before making a post live.