How CoSchedule changed my life.

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So. I’ve been blogging for the past 2 and 1/2 years. In that time I’ve changed from a free blogspot URL to my own URL; I’ve changed the name of my blog, I’ve changed from self-hosted Blogger to self-hosted WordPress… It’s been a huge learning curve and I am still learning new things every day. It’s definitely a journey!

As Bloggers, social media is incredibly important and I can’t tell you how many hours I spend a week scheduling and writing posts in order to share my recipes with you all.

Even if you hate social media, if you want to publicise your blog it’s a bit of a necessary evil! Now, on Facebook you can schedule posts, but you still have to go onto your page and write them all out.

I’ve tried other scheduling services for Twitter, to no avail; There was nothing that I could link to my blog and schedule everything from there. It always meant I had to go to specific sites/services to go and schedule my posts.

For the longest time, I’ve been spending what feels like eleven hundred hours a week sitting at my laptop writing and sending tweets and Facebook messages to push my posts. Yes, I have been sat at my laptop actually writing and sending as they’ve been sent.

This meant I was spending so much time on the computer that I was haplessly rushing around trying to do everything else I had to do, while basically living life around specific times which I needed to be sending tweets. It was a bit crazy…

So, the other week when I saw a post by my Pintastic Party co-host Madison I suddenly had a huge rush of excitement and hope that I could actually start spending more time making and photographing recipes to share with you guys!

The answer to all of my prayers is CoSchedule – THE social media editorial calendar for WordPress.

For $10 (around £6) a month, (you do get a 2 week trial period) you can transform how you schedule all of your social media and automate it all, but not in a “spammy” way!

You get a main calendar where you can drag and drop posts to whichever day you want – the best part is you don’t have to rewrite any social media posts, they drag and drop with the post!

As you can see, you can have as many or as few posts scheduled and they can go out at any time you want. If you write a new message you can choose to send the post between times (like 8-11am) or at a specific time, so it staggers the posts and they don’t all go out at the same time, I love this feature as it makes it feel more like I am sitting at my laptop writing them all!

There’s a link to share old posts and you can choose a text, image or link post – I prefer to use image posts as with a food blog I feel it’s important to show you what I’m sharing, we do eat with our eyes after all! This feature means that you can grow traffic to old posts as well.

This has been a major problem of mine in the past. I share recipes, publicise them for a week and then I don’t have time to go back over years of posts even though I know there are some great recipes in there!

With CoSchedule, I can choose any post and then schedule posts and forget about them, BUT they’re still being publicised. It’s truly wonderful!

My absolute favourite feature of CoSchedule is that when I’m writing a post I can scroll to the bottom of the page and write out ALL of my social media posts for that day, the next, the next week, even a month in advance!

Inside your blog post you get this window:

From here you can write as many posts as you want, to go out on any day you like!

For the above post I created a link post – on Facebook this means there is still an image, but on Twitter it would just be the link, so I usually schedule images.

You can also link Bit.ly and Google Analytics to your CoSchedule, so whenever you add a link, it automatically shortens it!

It really does allow you to save time and grow your traffic! I’ve already saved days of my life which would have been lost to social media in the past!

Because I am so dedicated to creating quality content, this means I’m spending longer in the kitchen testing and developing new recipes for you!

If you don’t want to create messages from within your blog post, then you can go to your main calendar and create any message with any links that you want – recently I’ve been using this feature to schedule posts for my entry into the UK Blog Awards.

It’s also super easy to add “team members” – I’ve added my OH, but we don’t have too much need for this feature at the moment, you never know when it will come in handy, but for the moment, it’s just for me!

CoSchedule is the perfect solution for you if:

• You feel like you lose entire days of your life to social media
• You want an integrated plugin which allows you to see everything you’ve scheduled in one place
• You want to push old posts as well as new
• You want to schedule posts, but don’t want them to seem spammy – CoSchedule feels very personal as you can write whatever you like!
• You want to start getting some time back to do other things!

Honestly, for $10 a month, I feel like it is TOTALLY worth it! It is amazing!

You can sign up here.

Here’s an overview video: