Creating Your First Round Up Post

If you blog regularly you might worry about some of your new readers missing out on your older, yet still awesome content. I hear you! What if there's a way that you can create a post where you can showcase your content on a specific theme or topic, and introduce the content to your readers all over again? This magical post is the round-up post. The round-up post is a collection of articles, tools, resources or links that you bring together for your readers. There's also a content roadmap for you to download at the end of this post.

• It helps your older content get found.
• It helps your audience understand your content better
• It helps search engines index your site thoroughly

If you blog regularly, I recommend you do a "Best of" post at least once a month. If you're taking the 30-Day Blogging Challenge I recommend that you do this every 7 days.

Step One:

Choose a time frame and a theme for your round-up post. If you are doing a monthly round-up then you might call it "The best of [sitename] February". If you are doing a themed round up you would call it "Content Nitro's Best of Infographics Round-Up". You'll notice I don't specify the time frame if I'm focusing on a theme.

Step Two:

Add all your links to your post editor I can see from the list above that I have 9 posts in February. Is there a theme that I can see on the list? Not really. So this is a round-up that's leaning towards the "Content Nitro: best of February" round up.

Step 3:

It's now time to sort your links. Do you want them in the order of publishing? The number of visitors to the post? The number of shares? How you sort them is up to you, but you need to know so you can write an accurate headline and a heart-opening paragraph. As mine are the best of February I'm going with reverse date order. Re-arrange your list accordingly. Make any adjustments before you start activating your links.

Step 4:

Now you've sorted your links, it's time to introduce the concept to your audience. Write your heart-opening paragraph and then explain to your reader what these links are and how they're sorted.

Step 5:

Now introduce your links... Yes, each link has a personal introduction.

First on my list of awesome things I shared with you in February is my SEO checklist https://www.contentnitro.co.uk/seo-checklist. This post walks you through how to optimise your content for on-page SEO. It also contains a shareable SEO Checklist! Blogging not your thing? What about courses? If they are you will want to take a look at the 10-Day Online course Challenge. So brilliant you even are gifted the content! https://www.contentnitro.co.uk/course-challenge/

You can't just leave a list of links. It looks ugly, it's not shareable and no one will read it. Every link in your round up needs two or three lines letting your reader know what the post is about, and why they should click to read the post.

Step 6:

Make sure all your links in your round-up post open in a new window. After you've highlighted your text (a) and added your link click the cog (b) Then locate the box to open in a new tab and click so that it's ticked When you've done this, make sure you click update.

Step 7

Now you've almost compiled your round-up post - Yay! well done. Now you need your call to action for the post. I recommend you invite your readers to share the round-up post, or join an email list where you will send them the weekly or monthly round-up. Remember to add an image to the post. I recommend creating a branded template in Canva. This means your audience starts to recognise it on social media when you share it.

Bonus tips

When you've created your first few round-up posts on your own site, the next step is to start exploring expert interview round-ups, and tool-specific round-ups. This helps elevate your standing with your audience. This type of post takes around 20 minutes to do, and can easily be outsourced to your VA. Over to you... Are you ready to create your first round-up post and boost your site's visibility? [sociallocker id="117641"] Round Up Roadmap <---- Right click and "save-as" to your desktop. When ready, print and add to your blogging challenge folder.   [/sociallocker]