PUBLISH YOUR RLL

MODULE 1 LESSON 4
TRANSCRIPTION
MODULE 1 LESSON 4 TRANSCRIPTION PUBLISH YOUR RLL

TRANSC R I P T I O N

Publish Your RLL

Hey, what’s up everybody?

Brian Dean here and welcome to the final lesson in Module 1.

This module was all about the RLL, a strategy that you can use to accelerate your blog’s growth
in record time.

You’ll learn how to find a topic, how to outline new RLL, and how to assemble all the pieces together.

So at this point you probably already have a first draft ready to go, and if you don’t have your first draft
ready yet, no worries. As a charter member of this program, you have lifetime access to the course
material so you could always revisit these lessons later when you’re ready to take action.

Anyway, in this lesson, lesson four I’m going to show you how to get your RLL ready for publication.

Specifically, I’m going to deep dive into the exact steps, tips, and strategies you need to make sure your
content is ready to go live.

One quick note before we get started, even though everything here is designed to get your RLL ready
to publish, you can apply everything from this checklist to pretty much every blog post that you put out.

In fact, I use this exact checklist to get every piece of content ready to go live at Backlinko.

So without further ado, let’s dive right in with step number one, make sure pop-ups, pop-ins, and other
distractions are turned off.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with pop-ins, pop-ups, and other tools that help you build your email list.

In fact, this is something we cover in depth in Module 4.

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That said, you definitely don’t want to use this stuff on new posts when they first come out.

Why? Two reasons.

First of all, most of the people that read your new posts are existing followers and subscribers.

They’re already subscribed to your newsletter, so there’s no point to bug them to sign up again.

Second, pop-ups can turn off big name bloggers that want to share your post.

Seriously, if I’m a popular blogger and I see a post that my audience would love, but it’s covered up by
a giant pop-up, I’m going to think twice before I share it, which is why even though I strategically use
pop-ups throughout my site, I turn them off on new posts.

That way I don’t annoy existing subscribers, and it increases the odds that other bloggers will share
my stuff.

The next step to make sure your content is ready for publication, is just to double check that your blog
post and your blog in general looks clean and professional.

Why is this so important?

Well, research shows that people largely judge your content based on design not the content itself,
at least at first, which is why you want to make a strong first impression with your content using your
design.

That way people will take the time to read your content and realize that it’s really awesome. So before
you hit “Publish” just review your blog to make sure that it looks professional and trustworthy.
Otherwise, people might not give your content a fair chance.

Obviously what makes a nice design, or a professional design is subjective.

That said, you know it when you see it. Besides the Backlinko blog, of course, here are a few examples
of blog designs that I think are really clean, modern and professional.

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That said, your blog design doesn’t have to be fancy or win any design awards to work, and it doesn’t
need to be some sort of complicated design thing either.

For example, check out my Google ranking factors Ridiculously Long List.

It’s a simple basic blog design. There’s nothing fancy about this design, but it does look clean and
professional.

Next, make sure that your content contains several different subheadings.

No, this isn’t for SEO even though, yeah, including a keyword in a subheader can help your page rank
a little bit higher sometimes.

It’s because subheaders break your content down into chunks, which makes it easy to read, and this
is especially important for a super long post like an RLL.

Fortunately, you already have your subheaders ready to go. They’re the categories that you created back
in lesson three.

If you want to see an example of how these subheaders should look, check out my Google ranking
factors post. Each category like domain factors, backlink factors, et cetera, is an H2 subheader. Simple.

Next up, we have your blog post banner.

A blog post banner is just a big banner that goes at the top of your posts.

Most people use stock photos for these and it makes their content look super generic. Instead, I
recommend using a custom design visual. This is one of those little things that helps your content
stand out.

Here are two examples.

You can get these made on freelance sites like 99designs or Fiverr.

Once you get your blog post banner made, it’s time to go through and edit your copy.

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Specifically, you want to make sure that your content is easy to read and more importantly, skim.

That said, editing a blog post isn’t as complicated or hard as you might think. In fact, it can be pretty
easy.

All you need to do is go through your copy with these three things in mind: short sentences, short
paragraphs, active voice.

Let’s break these down.

First up, short sentences.

As you go review your posts, look for sentences that you can trim down a little bit.

For example, check out this section from one of my posts. It’s not possible to make every sentence
that short, but it gives you an idea of how much information you can convey with short sentences.

Next, short paragraphs.

And short paragraphs are just like they sound. You want to make each paragraph about one to three
lines, any more than that and you have a giant wall of text that people just won’t read.

Last up, we have the active voice and the thing to keep in mind here is that the passive
voice is boring and the active voice is interesting, so turn passive sentences like this into active
sentences like this. That’s all there is to it.

When I edit a post, I pay attention to these three things, and this simple editing process makes my
copy 10 times better than it would be in my original draft.

Finally, we have proofreading your content for typos and mistakes.

You can do this yourself, but you’re probably going to miss a few typos or grammar mistakes. That’s
because it’s really hard to review copy that you wrote for mistakes and typos.

Instead, I recommend having a friend or someone from your team quickly review your copy for typos
and mistakes.

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This is actually a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

I once sent out a newsletter to over 10,000 people that had a bunch of typos and after some frantic
Googling, I quickly learned that there’s no way to unsend a newsletter.

Today, I always send out our content to my team to review before we go live. And they almost always
find typos, and mistakes, and grammatical errors that I missed when I edited my content myself.

There you have it, my six step process for making sure that your content is ready for publication.

This stuff might seem like window dressing at first but, in my experience, this content can make a big
difference in how your content performs.

So I highly recommend going through this entire checklist before you hit “Publish” and to help you
with that there’s a worksheet below this video. The worksheet will help you implement the checklist
that I just covered.

And with that, Module 1 is complete.

Congrats.

Lots of people that enroll in online courses don’t even finish the first module, but that’s clearly not
the case with you, so big props for making it this far.

And looking a little bit ahead to Module 2, you’re going to get access to six proven blog post templates
that are working great right now. That’s where you’ll learn the exact types of content you need to grow
your blog, and exactly how to create each one.

So, if you ever struggled with what to write or how to write it, module two has you covered.

See you then.