A few weeks ago, we talked about what to do before you write your post. Much like content marketing doesn’t start with writing a blog post, it doesn’t end with the post being published, either. To make sure you’re getting the most out of your content, you need to have a post-publishing task list, too. Here are a few places to get started:

Social sharing

You probably know you should share a post once it goes up, but do you keep sharing it? Depending on the platform, you should be sharing it the day it goes up, maybe more than once (on Twitter, that makes sense, Facebook, not as much), and then re-sharing it the day, week, or month after it goes live. Here’re a few tools to help you do that:

• Coschedule is a WordPress plugin that lets you schedule shares for not just the day of, but the day, week, and month after a post goes live (and further into the future, if you want), all from within your WordPress dashboard.
• Buffer is also a good go-to, although it’s more for scheduling things out over the next few days (as opposed to weeks or months in advance).
• The Tweet Old Post plugin isn’t exactly scheduling shares, but it can keep driving traffic to older posts in your archives.

For more tips, check out our article on why your content marketing needs a social media strategy.

Optimize for search

Ideally, you’ll have already done this, but if you didn’t optimize for search before the post was published, now it’s time to do so. The Yoast plugin for WordPress is a great (free) tool that can help, and here are a few articles from our archives that can also help you out:

• 4 SEO Strategies You Should be Focused on in 2015
• How to SEO Your Website Home Page and Blog Posts
• Simple SEO for Content Creators

Email it out with a personal touch

Sharing your posts on social media and making sure they can be found in the future via search engines is great, but sending it out via email can also help get it in front of more eyes. Sending it out via your newsletter email list (more on email marketing here and here) is a must-do, but you can also reach out to individuals. You can take two routes with this one:

• Email it to people you know
• Email it to people you don’t know, but who might legitimately be interested in it

The first one is pretty self-explanatory. You reach out to people you know, whose interests overlap with this article, and include the article link with a brief note about why you thought it’d be interesting to them (“our previous discussion on XYZ…,” etc.). If it’s someone you know well and you’re comfortable with it, you can also include a Click to Tweet link so that they can easily share it if they feel so inclined.

For the second one, you’re looking for either people you want to connect with in general or influencers who curate content for their audience. You can use a tool like BuzzSumo to find influencers for specific topics, and then send them a quick email that introduces yourself and the post, and tells them why you thought they’d find it relevant. Keep it friendly but brief, and don’t make any demands (as far as sharing or featuring it in a link roundup, etc.). If you match up the articles well with people who would be interested in them, and you create genuinely valuable content, it’s likely that this will work well for you.

Send it to anyone who was quoted or featured in it

People love to get an ego boost, and being quoted in, featured or, or referenced as inspiration also adds to their own social proof. With that in mind, if your article or piece of content specifically references anyone (or anyone elses’ article) as inspiration, or quotes it, or uses someone as an example, it makes perfect sense to reach out to the person and let them know that they were featured or referred to as inspiration. They might share it around some, but even if they don’t, you’re building goodwill among fellow professionals. You can also tag them in the social media shares of the post, which will often garner more retweets and shares.

Curate a collection with it

If you’ve created an especially strong piece of content, you want to keep people coming back to it. You can do this by making it part of a content collection, in whatever way makes the most sense to you, by linking back to it from:

• A how-to page on your site that collects posts around a specific topic (for example, a page that covers everything you need to know as a beginning gardener, with links to all of your gardening 101 posts)
• A FAQ page, if it answers a commonly asked question
• Your about page, especially if it covers a commonly asked question or if it showcases your expertise
• A “best of” page that collects all of the most popular posts on your blog

Making a post part of a collection keeps traffic coming to it further on down the line and strengthens the SEO of your site as a whole.

Create a follow-up post

If a post has done really well, it’s likely created some kind of discussion or you’ve received questions asking you about one specific aspect of the post.

Repurpose it (four different ways)

Once you’ve written a post and it’s published, you can re-use that same content elsewhere, getting more mileage out of it. It’s a great way to get more leverage out of a high-quality article. Here are four ways to repurpose your content, to get you started:

• Republish it on Medium or LinkedIn (this is a simple way to get more use out of previous articles)
• Create audio content from it (take advantage of the podcasting boom!)
• Create a video from it (this is great for how-to topics)
• Create a Slideshare slideshow from it (this one especially useful if you’re in a B2B industry)

You can go through each of these individual strategies with the same piece of content—which, if you have a list of posts that have done well in the past, gives you a wealth of potential new content pieces.

If you want to dig more into repurposing your content, check out this article on repurposing your content for more ROI, which gets into the nitty-gritty of where to start and the benefits of it. And if you want to get actionable content marketing like this sent straight to your email, sign up for our newsletter below: