You’ve spent half your day or more pouring over your draft jam packed with 2000+ words of valuable information for your target audience. It has sub-headings, bullet lists, two graphs and a picture. You plan on including a video eventually too…

You’re eager to get it on your blog ASAP. I understand the urge – you’re ready to share your masterpiece with the world.

So you open up WordPress, upload it and hit publish. You then proceed to draft up a robust social media update and post it on your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Heck, you even open up your nifty little shareasimage tool and make a quick little text-graphic to include on your Twitter.

You get all that done and say – “Hey, I just uploaded this awesome article. I’m going to kick off early today.”

So you give your email and Twitter feed one last glance over, shut down your computer and call it a day.

But your dreams are crushed when you get online the next morning….

That’s because your Twitter and blog comments are filled with embarrassing comments rather than what you were hoping for, which was a discussion about your topic and a few likes and shares of your piece.

No, instead you have comments pointing out that obvious mistake in your first sub-headline where you use “there” instead of “their.”

Or you have a sentence near the end of your piece where it runs on for several lines and contains multiple subjects and verbs. Or you have a sentence that’s obviously a question but has a period at the end.

You’re fuming with anger at yourself and don’t understand how you could have missed these obvious mistakes. You read through your piece twice before publishing it, so how did these slip through?

This scenario happens all too often. Most of us, including myself, learn it the hard way.

You may think reading through something a couple of times right after drafting it is sufficient. The reality is much different…

When you just finish with a draft, your brain is exhausted and needs a break, preferably out of doors and away from your computer.

You also have been looking at the same thing for several hours, so what may seem right at the time may be very wrong in the end.

This is why you should always let a draft sit overnight if at all possible. Come back with completely fresh eyes and a rested brain. If you can’t wait that long, you should at least put it aside for an hour or two and review it again before publishing or sending.

Avoid embarrassing mistakes like this. While a missing comma or slight misspelling is forgivable by most, any glaring grammatical mistakes will hurt your credibility.

Don’t worry though, you can recover, but it’s best to save yourself the near-term stress.

Come back to the old oak soon to learn about a 10-step process for ensuring your web copy is flawless, optimized for search and written in the right voice.