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Yesterday I gave a presentation entitled “Discovery- How People Find Blogs, Video and Podcasts They Love & What That Means To You” at podcamp Boston 3. The powerpoint is available here, and the audio here.

After the presentation, I started to think of different techniques I use to produce and promote my blog posts and came up with some big bucket categories. For those getting started, here’s a quick run through of what I do, from start to finish.

1. Composing The Post- I use WordPress for my blogs, but I never compose posts within the WordPress editor. Instead, I use Windows Live Writer. It’s free, and it’s really easy to use. I also sometimes post to more than one blog, and Windows Live Writer lets you post one post to as many blogs as you want.

When I’ve completed a post, I choose to “Save Draft To Weblog” rather than publish directly to the blog.

2. Editing The Post- Once I’ve published a draft, I’ll log in and edit the post. That way I can add tags, trackbacks, categories, etc.

Additionally, this is the step where I use the Zemanta plugin, which I mentioned yesterday. Zemanta will look at the content of my post and will suggest relevant articles and photos.

3. Check out related posts- If Zemanta suggests similar posts, I’ll go check them out to see what others are saying about the topic I’m writing about. This way readers are able to see other perspectives on the same topic.

4. Trackback- If I’m linking to other blogs, I’ll then send them trackbacks, letting them know I’m linking to them. Many blogs will send links back to my post for sending a trackback, creating a chain of similar posts on one topic.

5. Post- Hit the publish button in the editor.

6. Visit the post- Take a look at the post to make sure everything looks okay (this is especially necessary when embedding video, etc).

7. Make a short URL- I copy the URL of my post and go to a service like TinyURL to get a shortened URL.

8. Post in twitter- I’ll then take the TinyURL and make a tweet, saying that a new post is up. I’ll first do this in the blogstring twitter account (@blogstring), and if it’s a particularly interesting post, I’ll post it in my personal twitter account (@nathanwburke)..

And sometimes……

If I have a post that I really think is helpful or interesting, I’ll submit the post to social news sites (reddit, digg, mixx, etc), and stumbleupon. But I don’t do this often, as it definitely seems spammy.

So, that’s the process for one blog post.

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Filed under: Twitter, Uncategorized, blogging, podcamp Boston