How I create my blog posts using Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

The article you’re reading has been created using the same process that I’m about to walk you through, step by step.

When I came up with it, it was a game-changer for me – my blog publishing went from about 1 or 2 per month to about 2 or 3 per week!

Before I get into the details, let me give you some prerequisites for using my system;

You need to;

• Have a Kit account (free or premium)
• Have a WordPress website
• Have Kit’s WordPress plugin installed (it’s free)
• Have time to design, craft, and publish helpful content.

By the way, as a bonus, I’ll also share with you how I leverage all my posts to create another way of being found on LinkedIn (it’s also great for SEO).

Okay, if you’re still with me, great – you either have the list above or plan to!

It starts with my idea for an article

Most articles I create are based on questions I hear from people in my network – mostly from clients or questions I get from my network on LinkedIn.

Whenever I get one that I haven’t answered before, I add it to my ‘Content Ideas‘ spreadsheet – this is a Google sheet that I can access via laptop or mobile.

The image below shows the question that prompted this article;

I just checked my latest version, and I have *39* questions/ideas for future articles – so when choosing one to create, I scan the list and look for something that I either have had a few people asking about or a topic I haven’t covered for a while.

Side note – my content creation tends to happen in batches, so I’ll normally take 3 from my list to work on.

Create a blank broadcast email in Kit

I like the Kit editor.

It’s clean and simple to use, and I find it easy on the eyes (I’m also very familiar with it, so that helps).

The first thing I do in the editor is insert the title of the article and a thumbnail image, which will also be used in social posts (gives consistency and alignment).

I know this is a bit meta, but below is a screenshot of the article I’m creating right now, inside Kit’s editor…

Publishing the broadcast email

Once I’ve completed the article in Kit’s editor, I publish it as a ‘public post’. This is a way of sharing content via my ‘Creator Profile’ (another Kit feature you should use – it’s free!).

Note: Publishing your post to your Creator Profile is what enables it to become a WordPress website article further along in my publishing process – which I cover later in this article.

To publish the post, head for the ‘Continue‘ button at the bottom-right of the editor window;

Clicking the button will bring you to this screen (below) where you choose ‘Publish to web‘ option.

The thumbnail image you upload on this screen will be used as your default image when the post appears on your Creator Profile – the best image ratio to use for your thumbnail is 4:3.

Click ‘Continue‘ and you’ll see this screen (below); if you’re happy with the summary information presented, click the ‘Publish broadcast‘ button.

Your post is now ‘public’!

⏸️ Okay, let’s pause for a moment just to recap what I’ve done so far…

1. I’ve created a new broadcast email and crafted my article (inside Kit).
2. I clicked through and ‘published’ my broadcast email, making it ‘public’.

At this point, my article is viewable via my Creator Profile (think of it as a mini-website that Kit allows you to create), but nowhere else – I also have NOT sent it via email to any of my subscribers.

Okay, back to the process…

Automatically create a blog article on my WordPress website

Using Kit’s free WordPress plugin, you can configure it to automatically detect any new ‘public posts’ that you created in Kit (just as I did above).

The plugin checks once per hour for any new public posts and imports any that have been found.

You can configure the plugin to either publish the website article immediately or to create it in ‘draft’ mode, meaning you can publish it to your website manually yourself (e.g. you may wish to make some changes before it goes ‘live’).

By the way, if you want to learn how to install and use the WordPress plugin, check out this article where I walk you through the process; 👇

Once detected and processed by Kit’s plugin, your broadcast email will be listed as a blog article on your website, just like the examples from website below;

Repurposing my blog articles on social

Having published my broadcast email to my Creator Profile and created a website blog post via the Kit WordPress plugin, I now repurpose the same article and publish it as a ‘Newsletter’ edition on LinkedIn (the social platform I use).

Unfortunately, (at least at the time of writing) there’ sno way of automating this part of my process, however, it takes just a couple of minutes to do.

This is my process for creating my LinkedIn Newsletter edition…

1. I start by creating a new ‘article’ in LinkedIn.
2. I copy the entire blog article from my Kit email.
3. I paste the content into my LinkedIn article, reformatting if necessary (sometimes the LinkedIn editor doesn’t quite line elements up properly, so I may add in some white space or dividers to improve readability)
4. I then add contextual information to the edition and schedule it (using LinkedIn’s native scheduling tool) to be published at a future date.

That’s it, once scheduled on LinkedIn, I can forget about it until it’s ‘live’ when I then make sure I’m online and ready to respond to any engagement the post gets (to keep things simple for me, I schedule all my LinkedIn posts to go out at 7am – that way, I know I’ll be online).

Below is an example of my 6 most recent LinkedIn Newsletter editions, all copied from Kit emails;

The less obvious benefit of your article being in multiple places

The benefit of having my articles published in multiple places is that through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), there’ smore chances of them being found.

The screenshot below shows an example of what I mean, showing the same article being picked up by Google and listed a good answer to someone’s question;

In this screenshot, you can see what Google offered when I asked the question “How to create a course using ConvertKit” up my LinkedIn Newsletter edition as the top answer, followed by Kit’s article, followed by my website article.

⚡️ Summary

So, there you have it – my end-to-end process of how I craft my blog posts using Kit, including how I leverage it on social too.

The time taken for the entire process varies from article to article, however, I’d say it probably takes me a couple of hours per article.

If my article is something that I need to research first, then this time can easily double, however, for any Kit-specific articles, I’m usually writing from what’s in my head.

Here’s a summarised list of steps in my process;

1. Write my article using Kit’s editor and a broadcast email.
2. Publish the email to the web.
3. Automatically import article to WordPress website.
4. Copy article manually into LinkedIn as a Newsletter edition.