If only putting up a post was as simple as writing it, finding appropriate images and clicking on the publish button.

With all the additional task to do in order to gain traction on a post, writing it seems like the easy part.

Over the years, different methods have been used in an effort to increase traffic to my blogs, all with varying degrees of success.

Being able to consistently find topics to write about can be challenging. So far, this hasn’t been an issue as I tend to write about topics that are on my mind at the time.

Take this post for instance, it was initially written at a time when I was trying to figure out how to drive traffic to a blog. The method used to drive traffic was via the use of keywords, commenting and a few grey areas I thankfully opted to stop using. (Some of the information in this post has been updated since the original version was written.)

After writing and editing a post, looking for images can take quite some time. Thankfully, there are lots of places you can go to get royalty free images suitable for commercial use.

Once appropriate images have been found and inserted into the post, deciding on a title for the post is the next task.

I used to use a headline analysing tool that was freely available to everyone. Now I use a tool called Webtexttool, where I have a subscription.

Reason for the change in tool used came down to Webtexttool being able to analyse headlines, descriptions and the body of a post to check and make it is SEO friendly.

The tool also checks how readable a post is and as an added bonus, I can check how competitive a keyword is before opting to use it.

I do this all in one tool.

Next is to get snippets from each post to use on social media. The use of social media as a way to promote blog posts has gotten a few clicks to my site.

This is a very manual process and one that takes a few days to complete. As each social media platform has a limit on number of characters per post, this has to be taken this into account with each snippet selected.

Twitter limits characters to 140 (this has been increased to 280 characters), Instagram has a limit of 2,200 and Pinterest has 500 as a character limit.

Thankfully, the snippets I selected could either be used as is or adapted for each social media platform. As for hashtags, I have 2 standard ones I use on each post and then add an additional 2 or 3 max, depending on the social platform

Instagram - Even though Instagram allows 30 hashtags to be used, I tend to limit the number I use to either 4 or 5.

Twitter - Some of the Instagram hashtags can be used for Twitter, where I use a maximum of 5, as I need to leave enough characters for the URL - Twitter no longer count the URL as part of the number of characters

Pinterest - If I opt to use hashtags on Pinterest, I would use a maximum of 3 and add it to the description of a pin

Quuu Promote - Another way I promoted posts was using Quuu Promote. This is where you promote your blog posts to get shares, mentions, and clicks via influencers.

Using Quuu Promote supplemented all other activities I did to promote a post.

Missinglettr - An app I found that creates social media snippets to use in a similar way to the manual process I used before is Missinglettr.

This app monitors your blog for new posts and automatically creates snippets that can be scheduled over a 12 month period on Twitter and Facebook.

It has the added benefit of using images on your blog or creating text images from phrases taken from your blog post.

Using this app has dramatically reduced the amount of time it takes to plan my post promotions.

Both Quuu Promote and Missinglettr are subscription based.

The one platform missing from my promotion plan in the early days was Facebook.

This was partially because it was a platform I did not feel suited the site I was promoting at the time. The other reason was, I found it harder to gain likes on my business page.

So after weighing up effort vs. reward, I opted to stick with the platforms where I had already started gaining followers.

Another benefit of using Missinglettr is that it publishes your blog post on Medium. Another place to use in getting business exposure.