Blogger Tips: 5 Things you MUST do before you hit ‘publish’

Whether you are new to blogging, a professional blogger or a designer looking to add fresh content to your website, there are 5 keys steps for each new blog post before you publish.

So, you’ve decided to start a blog where you can showcase your unique style and innovation as an interior designer, or maybe a stylist. I think its a great idea and a fab way to show your unique personality. It’s a great outlet to share your creativity and reflect on your work, and to share how your professional practice is a worthwhile investment. However, writing a great blog post is more than writing good content, there are steps you need to take to make sure that your published work reaches an audience.

Blogging isn’t just about your writing skills and your talent as a designer. It also requires you to keep your content fresh and relevant, be your own editor and publicist, and become a specialist at search engine optimization (SEO) in order to gain the most traffic. Before you publish your work, how do you make sure that you have checked all of the necessary boxes? If you were just going to write the odd blog post from time to time, this might sound like an awful lot of steps, but don’t panic I have five quick steps to follow.

Use these top five bloggers tips:

1. Proof read! There is nothing worse than reading along about a topic that you love and being interrupted by a misspelt or out-of-place word. Also, check the readability of your post, are your format and word choice appropriate for your audience?
2. Include metadata. Metadata is information about your content, and it includes post name, publication date, author, and appropriately related tags. Make the metadata clickable links so that your readers can go directly the author’s page or other posts about related topics – if you look at the bottom of this post you see links to BLOGGER TIPS, BUSINESS, WRITING. If you’re using WordPress or Squarespace there are lots of tutorials online and on youtube.
3. Are you using the right keywords? There are specialists out there who make megabucks on this topic alone. Your readers shouldn’t have to guess what your post is about, it should be clear because of the words you choose to include. No need for flowery language…just get to the point.  I use Yoast to help me clarify the density and repetition of certain words in my blog posts, that way I make sure that I’m ranking for exhibitions rather than grief for example.
4. Add relevant images that support your posts. This makes your blog more appealing to readers, and will improve your social media shares. Be sure to compress your images so they don’t take a long time to load and are more efficient to share with others. 
5. Optimize your images for SEO by selecting images that are unique. Also, by adding “Alt Text”, you can increase your readership by making it available for visually impaired users using screen readers. 

I hope these blogger tips on publishing your blog post have been helpful. If you’d like to see more of my blogging tips take a look here. You can also see my board on helpful blog tips on Pinterest here.