My Guest Post has been published. What’s next?

You submitted a Guest Post on your favorite A-list blog and they accepted your pitch. So you beautifully hand crafted your post, added your links, checked your spelling and re-read it before sending it for publication (you should).

Everything seems fine, and suddenly you receive an email with a notification that your guest post has been published. You’ll be exposed to hundreds, thousands or even millions of hungry readers.

This is your moment of glory! (and this is sparta!… OK, not yet)

But, are you ready to take responsibility? Perhaps you’re not.

I’ve seen many bloggers trying to submit posts and once they achieve it they completely forget about it. Well, if you’re thinking of doing this, you’re totally WRONG and there are a lot of mistakes you can make that will kill your inertia and probably your relation with the Blog’s Author, but I won’t talk about them because they’ve been covered before here.

I’m here to let you know some basic actions you should take right after your post has been published. Not before being published. Not before pitching the administrator. But right after publication.

How bad is too bad?

If you think you shouldn’t take any actions after your post has been published, let me put my point of view on perspective.

Imagine you’re one of the biggest enterprises in the world. You create great products and great services, but you’re short on customer after sales service. So you sell 1,000 Smartphones per day and your RMA rate is lower than 1%. That’s good. It means only 10 Smartphones out of 1,000 are showing problems.

Ten customers are easy to handle, but you’ve got no tech support or after sales services. Well, that’s going to spread like fire. Most people will still love your products, but the rest will hate you. And believe me, hate spreads really fast.

Now apply that to the “Guest Blogging” scene. See?

So, let’s see 5 simple things you can do after your post has published that can help you get the most out of it for you and your brand.

Check your e-Mail and answer it

Sometimes it’s just as simple as that. Your guest post has been published and you don’t notice it until it’s been a week or more. That’s really bad, because it probably lost all its launching energy already. If you submit many guest posts at the same time on different blogs, make sure they let you know when it has been published.

Famous Bloggers usually sends you an email right after publication. You should at least thank the administrator for publishing your work and check if there’s anything else to be done.

Promote it like hell

You’re not submitting your guest post only for a backlink to your site. You also want to send readers and provide valuable content to that blog. In the end, all of this is going to make your brand or image more appealing.

When my Guest post about how I turned my hobby into a profitable blog was published, I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. But I took actions immediately, so I started promoting it on all my channels, including Social Media and I even made a post about it on my main blog.

You can post it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, send it to your email list and more.

The results I checked many of the posts published after my story and my post was one of the articles with more engagement, including comments and social reactions. It got almost 200 shares on different social networks but I’m sure I at least contributed with 20-30 of them because I promoted it right away.

If you’re a new blogger and you still don’t have any followers or a list to promote, you can still submit your article to social bookmarking sites like Tumblr or at least promote it on Just Retweet. There’s always something to do and improve.

Comment in a timely manner

I bet most of you already know the importance of answering comments on your guest post. It’s not only polite to do so, but it also increases engagement and the probability to get visits to your own blog.

What most people don’t know, is that it’s definitely better to answer comments as soon as they appear. Do I really need to explain why?

So, instead of answering a comment and saying: “Hey, thanks for your comment and sorry for the late reply (5 days later). I’ve been busy riding magical horses and stuff BLA BLA BLA…”

You can answer right away and increase their answer rate too. No more excuses. Just imagine:

• If I have a question for the author and receive an answer after 1 week, I’ve probably checked it on Google already.
• If my question is being answered in a few minutes or a couple of hours I’ll feel like I’ve stablished a direct line to contact the author. I might even write a second comment and follow you on Twitter!

What can you do to answer in a timely manner?

1. Subscribe to the comments so you can get an email each time someone decided to speak
2. Carry your Laptop or at least a mobile device with internet access
3. Stay in front of your computer and press F5 every 5 seconds. (OK, just kidding. But we’re in front of our computers many hours a day, aren’t we?)

Follow your readers

Follow the people who are leaving a comment on your post. If they’re taking some minutes out of their busy schedule to leave an insightful comment or question on your post, they’re the kind of followers you want to have.

They already know your name but it won’t stick for too long in their heads (unless you create a fantastic post). Let them know you’re interested in their stuff and they’ll add you back. They will remember your name or even your face because they recently read something from your repertoire.

Here’s what I do:

1. If someone comments here at Famous Bloggers I make sure I check their blog/website and see if it’s related to my niche. I’ll look for their Social Media links and follow them on my favorite networks (usually twitter and G+). Famous Bloggers makes it easier by adding a link to their twitter account.
2. Then I just go ahead and do a search on every social network the post was promoted to find the people who retweeted, liked, re-pinned, +1ed my post and follow them too. It isn’t a hard task. For example: I go to twitter and check everyone who retweeted my post to their followers. I add them and most of them add me back. Now I’ve got more followers that already know me.

Give it a second chance

There are many things you can do to give it a second chance and gain traction after a few weeks or months. Great content lasts for years.

So, if you think the promotion ends after a few hours or days, you’re wrong. Why not revive it later?

• You can re-publish it on your Social accounts. Something like “from the archive” or “oldie but goodie” is OK.
• Link to it on your blog or another guest post. It will create a bigger authority and more traffic for you at the end.
• Make a post about how you made it or use it as a case study.
• Link to it on your auto-responder series for new subscribers.
• Use it as a portfolio to pitch new bloggers for a guest post. They normally prefer to see some real life examples because it helps them understand the kind of post you can create for them.

What else would you do?

These are 5 simple ways to promote your guest post and get the most out of it. Remember that promoting your guest posts and doing all these steps helps you to become a better guest poster, but not only that. It also helps your site because at the end you’ll get the backlink with higher PR juice. And finally, but not less important, it helps the Blog to grow with targeted content.

The owner will love your post and will want more of you. That helps building a relationship that in the future could help you a lot too.

In a world where good guest bloggers are hard to get (most of them don’t even read the guidelines and send horrible pitches), you’re going to be 1 in a million. It’s a win-win situation.

What else would you do after your guest post has been published?