06 - How To Polish And Publish Your Blog Post

Welcome to the sixth part of 14 Steps To A Career-Boosting Portfolio Interactive Course - we're now well under way to have great portfolios!

If you missed it, read the announcement here!

Introduction - Why Should You Have A Portfolio?
Start Your Portfolio Faster With Hugo
How To Present Yourself In A Portfolio?
How Do You Publish Your Site Online?
Yes, It's Time To Write Your First Blog Post
How To Polish And Publish Your Blog Post
Guide To Spreading Your Online Presence
An Introduction To Building Your First (Tiny) App
Ideate And Choose A Stack For Your App
How Do You Analyize And Plan An Application?
A Guide To Project Setup Using Web Technologies
Getting Your Little App From Idea To Realization
Show Your App To The World By Deploying It
A Few Words About Maintenance And A Goodbye

Lesson 6 - How To Polish And Publish Your Blog Post

Now that you've got your first blog post written, you can publish it. But wait! There's still a few things to do to polish it.

Writing tone

First, go back to your blog post and read it again, this time noting the tone of the text as you read. If it sounds too dull, or if it's negative towards something or someone, you need to change it a bit.

Don't be Boring

Nobody likes to read a boring text. And listen, it's easy to write a boring text. You just write and write and write, and that's okay.

But it's not too late! To avoid being boring, you can use several techniques. One is breaking up long sentences into several smaller ones. This paces the reader through your thought process instead of taking one giant bite.

On a similar note, you can create shorter paragraphs. That contributes greatly to understanding and legibility of your piece.

Another thing to break the monotony are lists. People love lists! They increase the engagement , and often users will skim the text, but focus on the lists.

Don't be Negative

Let me break it down for you. Nobody likes to read a text full of negative energy. Blog posts are supposed to be short stories, fun and informative.

If you must write about hating something, make it a funny rant. Don't be serious in your negativity.

Use simple words

Everyone likes being a smartass every once in a while, but don't let that show in your texts! If you find yourself using a word that's not often found in the real world, use a simpler one. If your want to use a long, complicated word, don't. You'll want to be very pauciloquent. See what I did there? Don't do that. The point is - write like your audience are children. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get it.

Headline flow

An important aspect to think about when writing is how will people skim thorough your text. The truth is, most of them won't bother to read the whole text. No, it's not your text's fault, it's them. Internet people are often in a hurry, jumping from site to site. And when they decide to check out a text, they won't spend whole 10 minutes reading it, they'll skim through it and read the parts that seem interesting.

So, how do you entice the short spanned, hurried Internet people into reading your text? First you follow the advice from above - divide your content into many smaller chunks, so it's easier to digest. And then, sparingly insert some headlines.

You've got many headlines to choose from. You've got your main title, the most important headline. Then you can use subtitles to divide your text into logical sections. Now, within every section, you may add subsection titles. Do it, and you'll see your text looks and feels much better.

Now, of course, you can't just insert headlines or divide a paragraph at a random place. It has to make sense. And you may have written a really long paragraph that can't be logically divided, because it talks about the same thing in much detail. Leave it be, do not artificially break it up. As you write more, and start to think about this in advance, you will create content that is composed of many small chunks that naturally form smaller paragraphs. Just keep this in mind when writing!

Images

Now, now. Images. Don't ever publish a post without images. Seriously. If you're presenting your content just as a wall of words, people will get bored just by looking at the page and will leave. You have to adapt your ways to the habits of the Internet people.

How do you find copyright free images that you can use? There are sites that offer those. And it's really high quality photography. Some links to checkout:

Here is a nice list of more sites - https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238646. You can just search Google for "free stock photos" to find even more of these sites.

Okay, so now you know where to get images. But how should you use them? One header image per post? An image after every paragraph?

You can add one image per subsection for good measure. When thinking about what image to choose, try this technique. Find something interesting you're talking about in that subsection, and try to think of a funny reply to it.

For example, in one article, I talked about how exhausting it can be to manage all your social profiles manually, and as an image I put a pug that looked sad. And the image captions read:

"Managing and syncing all your social accounts for all your blogs by hand will make you feel sad like this pug."

So you get the idea. But again, use this sparingly, don't force it.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Where's my pug?! I want to see the picture of that pug!". Yep. Here it is:

Enjoy your pug

Optimizing images

One more topic we need to talk about in regard to images is optimizing them. You often have a choice of multiple sizes to download. And more importantly, if you don't you'll probably end up downloading a really large image.

So, first you need to make sure that you image is small enough. You don't want people to wait 30 seconds for the photo of that pug to download. The sooner they see the pug, the better.

What is an optimal image size? Anything between 700px and 1024px for width of the image will work fine. Of course, you would ideally use responsive images, so that an image of different size is loaded for different devices, but that's not our main goal right now.

As for the size in bytes, aim for 100KB - 300KB per image.

You can also try to reduce the size by compressing images. A good online tool is https://kraken.io/. It can reduce image size by 40% in some cases. That's means a lot for people viewing your site over mobile networks.

SEO

Okay, let's talk a bit about SEO. We won't be diving deep here, but we'll cover a few easy guidelines to follow.

The first thing to mention is something you can do fairly easily - add links in your content. You should review your post and insert links to sites where appropriate. Maybe you mentioned an information that you read somewhere online? Link to the source. Or maybe you mentioned a product, or a service. Link to it.

Hugo automatically inserts most needed tags and that's great - you just need to be aware of what content will turn up in there.

There's a title tag that's automatically populated from your post's title attribute. Here's a good guide to see how you should optimize your post's title for SEO - https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2154469/write-title-tags-search-engine-optimization.

Then we have the description tag, and that will also be automatically populated, from your post's title attribute. Here's another nice guide that covers optimizing descriptions - https://yoast.com/meta-descriptions/.

Open Graph tags are meta tags that Facebook uses to display the right data in a post preview. You can tell it what should be the title, description and what image to use. Here's more about OG tags - https://blog.kissmetrics.com/open-graph-meta-tags/.

You don't need to use all the advice from there, of any really. Just be aware of how SEO works, and what you can do to make it work for you. If you don't want to bother with this right now, it's okay. Most of the time, search engines and social media do a pretty fine job of extracting the relevant data from your page. You just write great content and everyone will be happy. If you want to really optimize the way they do it, then you should focus on SEO.

Social Media

If you don't post about it on social media, it's like it never happened, right?

But seriously, like it or not, social media ARE a very important part of your online presence. You can benefit greatly by investing just a little time each week into it.

You don't have to be a social media expert to create engaging posts, either. You just need to follow these 3 rules:

An intriguing image that's at least somewhat related to the topic of the post
Add the post title over the image in contrasting color
Include your picture there too.

And if you don't want all three - no trouble, you can omit either step 2 or 3.

If that sounds stupid or too simple, here is an example:

BAM! 13 million views!

Of course, I'm not suggesting that the tactic above is solely responsible for the popularity of the above video. What I am saying is that this seems to work so well that a huge number of people are using it. It's informal, the way social media should be. It's fun, if you choose the right images. It's informative, since you got a clear and easily readable title right up there.

And remember the Internet people? The ones with short spans, skimming through never ending streams of information? They won't bother to stop and read the title and contemplate what the post's about and if that interests them. But if you serve it on a plate, by following the above 3 steps, they will have no choice but to absorb that information. And that means a higher click through rate!

Okay, okay, now you're at least partially convinced that promoting your content on social media is a good idea. But what exact sites to use, and are you really going to post the same story to each one, manually?

The first part - my suggestion is to start with Twitter and Facebook, and maybe expand later on. Other interesting social media sites for software developers are HackerNews and Reddit, but you could even go with Pinterest and Instagram if it fits your content.

So, go there right now and create accounts on Facebook and Twitter for your blog. If you want, you can use your personal accounts for that, but I like to have it separated.

For the second part, of course there's an app to automate posting the same story to different social media sites. There are many, in fact. But I'll suggest Buffer, which is free for Facebook and Twitter usage. Check it out!

We've covered social media. Now we're on to something even more important... Newsletter! Maybe you didn't expect this one, that mailing lists would be so important in this day and age. But the truth is that the majority of digital communication still happens over email. Personal communication, business communication and sales and promotions.

That's why on many marketing blogs you'll read that having a mailing list is the most important asset that you can acquire. You want people to give you their email addresses so that you can send them news and promotions about your work.

But listen, and this should go without saying, don't spam people who gave you their emails. Just try to be nice and send only as much content as you think will actually be useful to them.

If you don't do the social media thing from above, do this one. This is really something you should go on without.

Okay. How to you collect you visitors email addresses? And how to you batch send a newsletter to them? There are many online services that deal with this problem. I'll recommend MailChimp because it's easy to use and free for small blogs.

When you register with MailChimp (or any other provider), the next thing you'll want to do is create a mailing list. You can have multiple, but for now you can use just one - for your blog's newsletter.

Now you need a way to allow people to register for the newsletter. MailChimp offers to generate a subscribe form that you can customize, and then just copy the HTML code to your website.

And the final step - sending mail. When you've had a few people sign up, you can start sending a newsletter. When you publish a new blog post, you can create a Campaign on MailChimp, and use their interface to design and add content to the email. You'll be able to preview it right there as you work.

When you're ready to hit send - do it! After the Campaign is sent, you'll have access to analytics. You'll be able to see how many people opened the mail, how many of them clicked the links inside and more. This allows you to tailor your emails over time, as you gain feedback from your readers.

Homework

Polish your first blog post

Pay attention to the things we talked about in the beginning of this lesson - Headline flow, Writing tone, Images and SEO. Take some time to modify the post before (or after) you've published it.

Pro Tip: Take a look at this blog post and try to incorporate some of the techniques used. Like subsection headlines, short paragraphs and images.

Create accounts on Facebook and Twitter and register for Buffer.

One thing to note is that you'll need to create some artwork for your pages - profile and cover images. You can do it later, but if you choose to do it now, here are some nice ideas and guidelines.

Set up an account on MailChimp

When you're done, send me the polished version of your blog post as a reply here.
If you've created social media pages, send me the links so I can check it out.

What's next?

In the next lesson we'll talk about how to spread your online presence.

The next lesson is scheduled for Monday, October the 02. 2017.

Thanks!

Drop an upvote if you liked the article, share if you believe it will be of help to someone. Feel free to ask any questions you have in the comments below.