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Introduction
I’ll admit, that headline seems ostentatious and worryingly biased, considering that one ought to be objective in matters of promotion and review.
However, it really is that good, and I honestly do use CoSchedule every day to manage my blog and social calendar.
In fact, this article is written as a result of auditing all the software I use in my business. For each one I ask, “do I need this product, and could I run my business effectively or efficiently without it?”
And, CoSchedule is just one of those products that would greatly diminish the effectiveness I had within my business if I was no longer able to rely on it for help.
Before we get started, it’s only fair that you know a few things up front:
- I consider myself a solopreneur; I rely on myself to do everything within my blogging business & personal brand, and I’m solely responsible for making sure that it’s a success. This means that I can only elaborate on my own experience with CoSchedule. I also only have access to their Marketing Calendar. If you would like information on their pricing, plans and products (such as their Marketing Suit), they have a ton of material available for your reference on their website. Additionally, if you sign up today using this unique link, you’ll get exclusive access to a 14-day FREE trial, meaning that you can try it out (risk-free) for 14 days before making a commitment;
- I cannot compare CoSchedule to other – similar – software, because I have only ever used CoSchedule to handle all my blog marketing needs, and do not have experience with their competition;
- I am also an affiliate of CoSchedule, which means that if you click on one of my referral links and make a purchase with CoSchedule, I will receive a small commission at NO additional cost to you. Please familiarise yourself with my affiliate disclaimer. I only recommend products and services I know and trust, and am confident that you will benefit grea… well, actually, read on to find out what I think.
What is CoSchedule Anyway?
CoSchedule is pretty much an Editorial & Marketing Calendar that syncs with your blog, social media, other calendars and analytics, so that you can not only get a bird’s-eye view of almost every aspect of your business (from a marketing standpoint), but are also freed up to focus on more important aspects thereof.
CoSchedule is automation software, working on a ’set-it-and-forget-it’ type of philosophy. Planning blog marketing – from writing the post to sharing it on various platforms – can be time-consuming as it is; but, juggling and staying on top of everything becomes almost impossible when the process is all over the place.
CoSchedule allows you to take your blog marketing, put it in one place, set it up in one go and then watch as the magic happens.
Some Great Ways CoSchedule Can Work For You!
Sign up today using this unique link, and you can enjoy 14-days of CoSchedule for FREE, meaning that you can try it out for two weeks before making a commitment.
The Blog Calendar
Get an instant overview of all the projects and tasks you’ve set up over a four to six-week period – including blog posts and social campaigns – all in one place.
In this view, you’ll also be able to see which projects are in draft, which require review and which have been published and are in the process of (or will be) going out automatically to their respective platforms.
It’s all drag-and-drop, too, so you’re able to move things around without it interrupting your flow. This is because it’ll update connected tasks within a project, relative to the new date a particular project has been allocated on the calendar.
Social Campaigns
A Social Campaign is essentially a marketing campaign that you set up over a period of time, whereby marketing messages you create for a blog article, newsletter post or product/service offering are automatically delivered at selected intervals and sent out to your respective social media accounts.
This gives your audience comprehensive exposure to whatever you are promoting at a given time in a very professional and consistent manner, without you having to spend a lot of time and manual effort within each social platform on the days you need to send out your social messages.
CoSchedule makes it so easy to create and manage Social Campaigns.
Once you create a new Social Campaign, you first need to connect the corresponding URL (i.e., where you’d like to redirect your audience once they click on one of your social messages). For instance, this can be the URL for a blog post you’ve written.
From there, you are presented with a ‘chronological ladder’ of sorts, where you can add each social message.
Click the ‘+’ icon on any available date, select the social media platform to which you wish to send your social message, and then go ahead and prepare the copy and creative. You can add text, images and videos, all of which are converted to be correctly displayed on the respective social media platforms.
You can also set a new custom date for each particular message from within this window.
When you’ve created your entire campaign, select the start date and change it from ‘draft’ to ‘published’.
Headline Analyzer
The Headline Analyzer tool is remarkable, especially for the purpose of preparing SEO-friendly headlines.
Spend some time developing alternate headlines for your blog or newsletter post, and then plug each one into Headline Analyzer to get an idea of how well each would perform in Google Search or be received by those who come across the post (i.e., how likely they are to read the post, based on the chosen headline).
As illustrated by the screenshot above, utilising the power of CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is how I landed on the Headline for this review.
ReQueue
CoSchedule allows you to create social messages once and add them to ReQueue (or, rather, a ReQueue group you create) which will then, based on your individual settings, fill any gaps in your social schedule with an appropriate social messages available in one of your ReQueue groups.
What this means is that you can create a single social message that is sent out to your selected social media accounts periodically using smart automation and scheduling.
In this way, you can potentially have a perpetually full social schedule, because CoSchedule will fill any gaps in your calendar with relevant and available social messages that it can find within ReQueue.
Analytics
You can also track your social messages and campaigns, all within CoSchedule, in order to get an idea of your performance across active social media accounts, as well as make any necessary changes to your social media strategy based on said performance.
How I, Personally, Take Advantage of CoSchedule…
I covered much of how and for what purpose I use CoSchedule above, so I will use this as an opportunity to wrap things up and hopefully allow you to make a more informed decision on whether CoSchedule is the right software for your needs.
As already mentioned, sign up today using this unique link, and you can enjoy 14-days of CoSchedule for FREE, meaning that you can try it out for two weeks before making a commitment.
Let me put it to you this way…
I do the majority of my project planning in Asana, so it’s extremely convenient that CoSchedule allows me to upload the relevant projects I’m working on to my CoSchedule Calendar by exporting them in CSV format.
However, I find it easier to just create a ‘Blog Post’ event directly in CoSchedule and add the necessary text, tasks, files as well as a ‘Social Campaign’ (if applicable) from within that event.
Then it’s just a matter of planning out my content, which I do within the ‘Blog Post’ event, come up with a captivating headline using CoSchedule’s ‘Headline Analyzer’, write & publish my blog post as well as finally plan out the ‘Social Campaign’ that I will use to promote my article.
It takes me about a day to get everything written, published and automated, which would have otherwise taken me a week.
I understand that you can publish your blog post directly to WordPress from within CoSchedule, but I currently use Ulysses to write and publish articles at the moment. However, I intend to test out CoSchedule for this purpose as, if it does a good (or better) job of it, it’ll be much easier to coordinate everything I do (relevant to my blog) through CoSchedule itself. I will keep you posted on this through updates, or a separate post… so, watch this space.
I also spend about a day filling out any ReQueue gaps and making sure I have a consistent flow of social messages promoting my posts, products, and brand.
Verdict
Before CoSchedule, I was often left dazed and confused trying to juggle all the platforms I needed to work through just to publish and promote my blog.
A lot of the time, I would just get frustrated and call it a day.
And, don’t even get me started on what I would do if I needed to reschedule, update or shift something around…
It gives me PTSD just thinking about it.
In conclusion, CoSchedule can save you a lot of time, effort, frustration (and potentially even money) by simplifying and automating your blog marketing schedule.
It is a fantastic Blog Marketing Calendar that I highly recommend and personally couldn’t cope without.
I intend to get a little meta in a future update on my experience with CoSchedule, and perhaps even give you an inside look and some behind-the-scenes insight into how I prepared for this exact article using the power of CoSchedule.
And just one last time before you love and leave me, you can sign up for a CoSchedule account today using this unique link and enjoy 14-days of CoSchedule for FREE, meaning that you can try it out for two weeks before making a commitment.
Whew, we made it!
Just wanted to pop back in one last time and extend a massive THANK YOU for reading all the way through to the end.
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