Using CoSchedule to Run Your Blog
Most blogs fail in the first 100 days, and one of the main reasons is disorganization. Successful blogs post new content frequently and consistently. But if you aren’t organized, you won’t be able to do either.
How do I keep my blog organized? CoSchedule. It’s an excellent tool which allows you to plan, assign, write and share content on social media–all in one place.
What Is CoSchedule?
CoSchedule is a web application designed to make blogging easier and more efficient. CoSchedule provides you with a calendar to plan your content and syncs with your WordPress and social media accounts, so you have all your blogging tools at your disposal in a single window. CoSchedule also allows you to communicate with everyone on your blogging team, send them assignments, and set deadlines for them.
Using CoSchedule to Plan Your Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar helps you set deadlines for yourself and for your team, and ensures you are putting out content consistently. An editorial calendar is also a great tool for planning your topics in advance, so you never find yourself in a situation where you run out of ideas.
The first step in using the CoSchedule calendar is brainstorming topics. A good keyword tool is useful in this process. Once you think of an idea for a blog post, create it as either “content” or a WordPress post. Creating the WordPress post right in CoSchedule will save you an extra step later. Place that content on the day you want to publish it. Repeat that process until you have a full calendar.
When you are ready to actually write the blog post, simply click on the calendar entry, and you will find a link to edit your blog post in WordPress.
Try to plan your content as far in advance as possible. You always want to give yourself enough time to research, write, and create visuals for the post. You can set deadlines for these parts of the blogging process using the “tasks” feature in the calendar.
Using CoSchedule to Connect to Your Team and Assign Content
If you have a team of bloggers, you can use the tasks feature in CoSchedule to send assignments to them. Simply click on a calendar entry, create a “write draft” task on it, and assign it to the writer. The writer will then get an email that they have been assigned a task. You can also do this for photo sourcing, and any other part of the blogging process.
CoSchedule also has a “comments” feature, which you can use to write a more detailed description of the assignment. The writer can also ask questions in the comments. If your writer has access to WordPress, he or she can go straight to WordPress from CoSchedule to write the post. If your writer does not have WordPress access, he or she can easily attach a word document to a comment in CoSchedule.
Using CoSchedule to Manage Social Media
Many blogs use Hootsuite to manage their social media accounts, but Scribblrs now uses CoSchedule. CoSchedule allows you to access your social media accounts from your Coschedule calendar, or from the WordPress “Edit Post” page.
When you schedule social media posts, CoSchedule will show you a dropdown menu with all your social media accounts. Select which accounts you want to share your content to (you can easily do them all at once). CoSchedule will then automatically pull photos from the article, and fill in the text of the social media post and meta description. All the hard work is done for you, but you can also easily customize the fields.
CoSchedule gives recommendations for how often you should share your posts on social media. With CoSchedule, you can easily create social media posts for one day from now, and one month from now. If your content will stay relevant for a long time, you can schedule more social media posts for even further in the future.
No matter what your goals are, good planning will set you up for success, and poor planning will set you up for failure. CoSchedule provides you with the organizational tools you need to build and maintain a successful blog. It’s definitely a worthy investment.
Plan and Manage your social media posts better with @CoSchedule coschedule.com/ via @supermonitoring
About the Author
Eric Brantner is co-founder of CutCableToday.com, a blog that sees hundreds of thousands of hits each month. He now seeks to help others start their own blogs on his newest site, Scribblrs.com.
