After you finish a blog post what are the steps you take to promote it?

I use wordpress and the wordpress plugin yeost for help with optimizing SEO.
As part of this pluggin - it prompts you to select a primary seo keyword for a given blog.

Once I've optimized the blog around that given keyword - I then try to find subreddits and facebook groups by searching those platforms for the specific keyword. If I find groups that seem relevant, i'll share my blog post there.

It's not perfect but it seems to help drive some traffic.

I also post on HN, crosspost on Medium, and send the blog to subcribers through my newsletter. In general - posting on HN is like playing the lottery it's not usually very effective but when it works, it works really well. I also don't love crossposting to Medium but I do them both because there really isn't any downside.

Usually I'd send out a Newsletter to my subscribers, compose a Tweet and then go to the places where my audience hangs out (and I'm already a member of) to promote it (e.g. Reddit, Indie Hackers, HackerNews, Slack Communities, ...).

What's important to me is to not be spammy and only post in communities where the post adds real value. I'm also hanging out in those places to answer questions and engage with people who comment in the post.

Otherwise I sometimes import and publish the story on Medium and dev.to.