You’ve just finished writing a great new blog post. You’re excited to share your ideas and expertise with the world. But what should you do next?

As I work with more and more companies to develop social media strategies, blogging inevitably comes up. As it should. But this post isn’t about why a company should be blogging, it’s about how we can make that blog grow legs and turn it into a major traffic and activity driver for your business.

Setting the Stage: Create Good Bait, Find Your Fishing Holes

Before you start throwing your blog content blindly into cyberspace, you need to think strategically about the content that your target audience will find valuable (your bait). What assistance do they need? What are their pain points? Which formats might work best (written posts, video, audio, etc.)? You also need to do your homework to sniff out the best social media ponds in which your targets are swimming. For example, if your business is trying to reach C-Level executives in your local market, then using Twitter as your main promotional vehicle may not get you many bites.

Blog Post Promotional Tools: 11 Step Checklist

1. SEO / Keyword Integration – Your content may be good as is, but a little keyword research and keyword integration effort can have a big impact on search engine traffic. Scan through your content and pick out the main topics covered in your post. Plug those terms/phrases into Google Adwords free keyword suggestion tool. Take note of the most popular search terms and variations is phrasing and verbiage. Go back to your content and try to beef up your post title, content, description and tags with those popular terms/phrases.
2. Syndication – For the purposes of this article, I’m going to skip the "What Is RSS" content and focus on how you can leverage your blog’s RSS feed (assuming your website/blog has one) to expand your reach and save you hours of time. Also note that this step is more of a one-time setup. Once you have established RSS connections on your social sites, you shouldn’t have to do it again.
    
   Quick explanation: when your RSS feed is plugged into your social sites, hitting "publish" on your new blog post initiates an automatic "syndication" of that content to those sites. To get started, locate your blog’s RSS URL and plug that into the following:
   • Facebook Fan Page – Use your "Notes" or "Social RSS" applications to publish your content to your FB wall automatically.
   • LinkedIn – Look for "Blog Link" or "Wordpress" in the applications section (left-side nav bar) to auto-post your content to your LinkedIn profile.
   • Plaxo – Plaxo’s new aggregation functionality makes it really easy to "add a feed" and plug in your blog.
   • Ning Community Sites – If any of your fishing holes are built on the Ning platform, you can plug in your feed using the "Add RSS" widget included on your profile page.
   • Other Social Networking Sites – There are probably many other social sites that allow you to plug in your feed. Scour your sites for this option.
3. Shorten the URL – This step used to only apply to posting links on Twitter, but with the addition of analytics (click-through tracking) on many of the URL shortening services, posting a shortened URL on any of your social sites is a smart strategy. Here’s how it works…Copy your new blog post’s URL, paste it in a URL shortener that offers analytics (Bit.ly, Tr.im, BudURL, Ping.fm) and then use the shortened URL in any status update, link posting or teaser you plan on executing. After your link has been up a while, check your shortener account for click stats, geographic and referring site data.
4. Status Updates – While this one may seem pretty obvious, it’s not that simple. Sure, you could just type your blog post’s headline into all your social site’s status boxes, include your shortened link and call it good. But this might not get you the most clicks. Realize that each social site is a bit different (different environment, social etiquette, audience demo/psychographics). Tailoring your status/headline for each community could make a big difference. No time for that? Use Ping.fm. Plug in all your social networks and use Ping.fm to shorten your URL and launch your new post to all your sites in one step.
    
   Twitter-Specific Strategy – When you tweet your new blog post, realize that only a small percentage of your followers will be on Twitter at that moment to see it. To maximize the likelihood of your followers seeing and reading your new post, you may have to tweet mulitple times on different days and at different times. I’d also recommend using different headlines each time. If your content covers multiple topics, create a different tweet for each topic and then spread those out over the course of a few days. Don’t forget to ask your followers to retweet the link. Productivity Tip: use a tool like TweetLater to set up and schedule your tweets to go out throughout the next week.
5. Content Teasers on Other Sites – Most social networking sites and online forums allow content promotion as long as it’s valuable and objective in nature, and not blatant self promotion. A few examples: LinkedIn group forums, LinkedIn Answers, Facebook groups, Ning community group forums, general business forums. A great strategy is to write a compelling headline or question as your forum post title, then include an excerpt from your post followed by your shortened URL. Lastly, ask for readers to provide feedback on the forum to continue the discussion.
6. Social Bookmarking – Posting your content to popular social bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc.) can be a great source of traffic, backlinks and overall exposure. Think of social bookmarking as peer-reviewed content. If others bookmark/digg your content, the more exposure you get and the more opportunity you have for others to link to you or reference your content on their sites.  
7. Seek Out and Comment on Other Blogs with Similar Topics – Providing helpful, valuable comments on other blogs can be a great way to build a following and generate backlinks. And if you’ve just finished a post on a topic, now is the perfect time to do a quick search to find other blog posts on the same topic. Are the other posts lacking something that you covered in your post? Add your viewpoint in a genuine, non-self-promotional way. If the comment form asks for your website URL, paste in the full URL to your blog post.
8. Seek and Assist on Twitter – Genuine assistance is one of the best ways to build a community of loyal Twitter followers. Let me use this post as an example. When it’s posted and I have my shortened URL, I might jump on Twitter and do a search for a phrase like, "need help promoting my blog". Scanning the resulting tweets will probably offer me several opportunities to help people who are reaching out for help. I reply to them with some genuine advice and the shortened URL. The result is often a new Twitter follower, a new subscriber to my blog and a blog comment. Is there such a thing as opportunistic warm and fuzzies?
9. E-mail Signature – Another powerful little technique is to add your latest blog post headline to your e-mail signature. You never know when a prospect, vendor or client might read a post that sparks a conversation or creates an opportunity.
10. Share it With Target Customers – You’ve just created a blog post that you know would be beneficial for certain customers…What are you waiting for? Send them the shortened URL with a note, "thought this could really help your business".
11. Ask Other Bloggers to Mention Your Post – Building relationships with other bloggers in your space and asking them to blog about or link to your post can be a great way to expand your reach. Reciprocating promotional efforts can have a big payoff in the form of high-quality backlinks and big jumps in blog traffic and subscribers.

The First Time is the Hardest

As with most tasks in life,  the first time through this list might be tough and time consuming. Setting up accounts and getting to know the interface and functions of the various social sites might make your brain hurt. But it will get easier. I usually dedicate an hour to blog post promotion after each launch. Also note that most of these tasks can easily be outsourced to a social media specialist.

Immediate, Trackable Results

If you’re utilizing the shortened URL and have analytics installed on your website/blog, you should see your hard work pay off almost immediately. I typically see large spikes in traffic and conversions on the days I’m promoting a new post. Multiply all this by a blog post per day and you should see a significant increases in activity, traffic, rankings, reach, opportunities and overall sales.