Back when I had the time to write more regularly (before my Masters degree took over my life) I was using CoSchedule to manage LARP Guide. It was a Godsend. No word of a lie. It saved me so much time that although LARP Guide wasn’t making me any money, it was more than worth every penny.
Well, with a plan to kick LARP Guide back into action, the first place I’m turning is to CoSchedule again. My plan is to run a campaign reposting *all* of my previous blog posts to the LARP Guide social media profiles again. I pondered briefly if I could get away with just using the Facebook post scheduling interface that is available to pages, but I just couldn’t face it. That sounds like absolute hell, and I just don’t have the time when I’m trying to build businesses, write a PhD, and have a bit of free time to myself as well!
So here we go again.
If you’ve never looked at CoSchedule for managing social media you really should. It is built around the most brilliant editorial calendar that allows me to see and schedule all of my WordPress blog posts. Then I can see when all my individual social media accounts are posting too – just take a look:
The one thing I used most, I think, was the drag and drop scheduler that allowed me to take my WordPress drafts (of which there are many – I just jot ideas down as new posts when I’m on the go) and just drag them on to the calendar. It was that feature which allowed me to keep up with my relentless editorial calendar. When I saw a gap I’d just look through the post list and figure out which was most appealing to write next – before dropping it in to the gap and setting myself a reminder to work on the content.
And then there’s the social media feature that tells me when I should schedule my posts for. It’s brilliant. I know almost nothing about social media, other than the fact that I have to use it if I want any readers. So this feature is brilliant for me. It takes all the difficulty of choosing when posts should go live by analysing past performance of social media platforms and posting at the best time.
And then there’s the performance reports. I should really delve into these a little more in the future, I’m sure they’ll tell me all kinds of things about the content that I *should* be producing for the blog. But for now I just look at the numbers and watch them go up. It’s kind of fascinating, even though I’m not really quite sure what they’re doing. Big numbers are good though, right? As long as the graph is heading upwards then I’m happy to be honest – and CoSchedule gives me the tools to make the numbers go up.
I struggle to understand why you’d run a blog without this kind of tool today, to be honest. And I’ve been running blogs for well over a decade now. If only things were this easy ten years ago and CoSchedule had been around perhaps I’d have hired people to do this stuff for me a long time ago if it had been this easy! 😀
