The internet has many facets, but one of its most popular ones is without a doubt blogging. People blog for many reasons, but no matter the motivation, one should be passionately interested in what he or she is creating. There is an over-saturation of information on the worldwide web, and there is simply not enough time for readers to process everything. In other words, content that is probably high-quality and informative might never make it out of the pit of anonymity, for the simple fact that it doesn't engage with readers. When interesting and informative are no longer assets, bloggers have to come up with something else: emotional triggers.

Have you ever had an idea for a blog post, but before you can write about it, someone else beat you to it? If you write about social media and technology like I do, you probably answered "all the time!" It's actually quite rare for me to write on a topic that no one else has already. Jeff Bullas goes so far as to say that everything has already been said. I don't buy into that 100%, but I see his point.

After I have finished writing, editing, deep linking and have published a new blog post, my work has just gotten started. Simply creating content isn't sufficient to gain readership. You need to actively promote that new post so that people can see it and have a chance to read it. It can take a long time to build up email and RSS subscribers, so in the meantime, you will need to be more proactive.

Here are all the things I do after I publish a post to get readers to it.

One of the more challenging topics that I often discuss with clients is the concept of having an editorial calendar or publishing schedule. The idea is that you know in advance on a particular day, week or month what topic or topics you're going to be talking about through your online platform, including your business blog. When you know the topic in advance, you have an opportunity to plan everything and guide the conversations in directions that you intend.

It's tough when you're writing a blog post and you've been working on it a long time, and you suddenly realize that what you've been writing is garbage. Maybe it's not the whole post. Maybe it's just a paragraph or two. But it stinks. What do you do? Do you leave it in and hope no one else notices? Do you try to massage the words a bit? Do you forget the entire article and go watch a movie instead?

Writing can be hard work. And a lot of writers have no greater critic than themselves. If you're writing regularly and have multiple articles in progress like I do, you might have a few that you haven't touched in a while because you didn't like how they were turning out. Or maybe you're still struggling to get that first post finished because you think it's not good enough.

While it's great to have a business blog, it's easy to fall into the trap of posting whatever you can in order to stick to your blogging "schedule." Newsjacking is great, certainly, but if you're just writing about any news event you can in order to loosely tie it to some product or service, you risk losing readership, and worse, devaluing your influence.

It's important that if you want to be a Thought Leader in your industry, you take the time to develop your thoughts and publish information that will educate, entertain and engage your readers.