Sometimes writing can be the easy thing. At least when it is only a rough draft. It is the re-writing that can be hard. Along with that, cleaning up your blog posts to optimize them can be time consuming and monotonous. Here are 7 steps of a workflow that can help improve the process.

1. Rewrite – Take your blog post and re write it. It is time to polish it. Make your post as timeless as possible, this will help when readers come to you in the future, your blog won’t appear outdated.
2. Edit – Go back through and check for spelling and grammar mistakes. Also look at how you word things to make sure that it makes sense.
3. Links – Read through your blog post and highlight where you will include links. You are going to have two types of links in your blog posts: internal and external.
1. Internal – These are links that will refer back to old posts that you have written or to other pages on your site.
2. External – These will link to either someone else’s website when you mention them in your post or to an affiliate product link that you promote.
4. Pictures – As you read through your post, you will also make note of any pictures that you wish to include. Along with pictures, you could group audio and video into this process. Make sure that any media that you use, you have permission from the copyright holder. You may want to create a master list for pictures and media, so you can search for them all at once and then add them to your library. Especially if you are optimizing several posts at one time.
5. Questions – End each of your blog posts with a question or two. The reason for this is to encourage your readers to get involved in the conversation. You could also use a call to action depending upon what your desired outcome is or what your topic may be.
6. Format – Take the time to format your post so that it is easier to read and looks good. Be consistent with this, it will help your readers become comfortable with your style.
7. Publish – Assign categories and tags to your post and set a post date for sometime in the future. The other possibility that you have is to simply archive the post to be used in an emergency. It is always a good idea to have a number of posts waiting in the wings for when life gets in the way and you don’t have time to write a post. It has been suggested that 3 months worth of posts is a good amount.

While these may seem like a number of time consuming steps to go through, they are actually not that bad. Once you begin working on polishing your posts, they move along quickly. If you follow these steps, you can get your posts to be published and they will have consistency while looking good and building connections.

So what do you think of the steps?

Did I miss anything?

What else would you include?