We use CoSchedule to plan our blog content and social media posts. Between CoSchedule’s user-friendly web interface, smartphone app, and unique interior features like “social helpers”, we have saved over 5-hours of digital marketing work during the week, every week.
Here’s how you can use CoSchedule to save time during your week, too:
What CoSchedule Is
CoSchedule is a planning tool that allows you to schedule content, social media posts, campaigns, events, tasks, and notes, then recycle the material for maximized use.
How CoSchedule Works
Why We Use CoSchedule
The Backstory
Before using CoSchedule, we would outline posts on paper or our phones’ notes app, draft sentences in a word document, and bounce between the blog and the word document to copy/paste/format until we reached a finished product. I’m exhausted just reading that!
That choppy routine doesn’t even include the social media promotion and graphics we’d need to coordinate to make sure the blog post was even read once.
We would get interrupted, or worse – interrupt ourselves with Facebook distractions or pausing for life activities like dinner and family time – and have to always refocus to remember where we left off.
After so many start-stops, and so many lost little to-do’s (like making the blog title graphic for Pinterest, or remembering to post on Instagram, or checking for SEO quality, etc.), we got blog burnout.
Blog burnout is the worst for online businesses. When we stop writing content, or start delivering content in an unpredictable manner, our brand image changes. Suddenly, we don’t look so reliable or authoritative to our audience… and we don’t need to tell you how that translates to customer relationships…
CoSchedule helps us maintain an authentic blog routine that keeps us on-task from start-to-finish.
If you’re already convinced you want to try CoSchedule, grab your free trial here.
How We Make the Most of CoSchedule for This Business
Setting Recurring Tasks Per Blog Post Category
Certain blog post categories require certain tasks.
For example, when I write a blog post on Working Parenting, my CoSchedule task list is slightly different than if I were writing a blog post on Productivity Tools. I share my Working Parenting posts in different social groups than I do my Productivity Tools posts. CoSchedule allows me to set my to-do list once for each category type, then just recycle the to-do’s as I start a new blog post.
[You can read how to set that up here when you’re ready.]Organizing Post Types by Color
We correspond our post types with the colors in our Trello to-do lists. [You can get a free Trello account here.]
For example, one of our Healthtrepreneur courses is The Healthy Money Course. We plan out the launch and curriculum in a Trello to-do list that is green. Then we click over to CoSchedule and plan out all of the related marketing content to help with the launch and year-round promotion. Any post related to The Healthy Money Course is marked green on our CoSchedule calendar, too.
If you’re Type A, you’re going to be especially obsessed with the simple aesthetics of that color coordination for your own products/services.
Planning All Social Media Content in One Sitting
One of the greatest “time sucks” of business is inconsistency.
There’s a big misconception about multitasking being the way to get things done. It’s actually the best way to not get things done.
Your brain can’t operate on multiple channels, and when you are shifting between multiple social media channels (and, be honest, lurking on other social media accounts as you go!), you’re giving your brain information overload and diluting your ultimate product.
We set a timer for 15-minutes at the beginning of every content session. In that 15-minutes, we come up with the:
- Blog post title
- Blog post outline + headings
- Blog post graphic
- Instagram graphic
- Social media captions
and load them into CoSchedule as we go instead of keeping these items written/saved in places across our computer.
Writing Rapidly with Social Helpers
The fastest way to create content repeatedly is to come up with a fill-in-the-blank, ready-to-go template. So, naturally, CoSchedule created this feature and called it “Social Helpers”.
Social helpers are reusable tags that will be automatically replaced with your specified content when social messages are sent and allow you to reuse content in multiple messages.
With Social Helpers, you won’t have to manually add the same text (or images) to each message you create. Reduce the repetition and auto-fill your entire social queue instantly.
— Using Social Helpers in CoSchedule tutorial
For example, you might post a new blog post every Monday morning. You might share the new post with just the title when it goes live, but repost the link with a variety of comments and captions to have multiple social media posts throughout the week.
You’re not going to do all of that work on one post, then just have 1 Facebook post to advertise it. Of course not! You’re going to repost and rework your wording so that you can get as many page reads as possible. That’s what CoSchedule helps with.
On your CoSchedule post, you can setup Social Helpers that look like this:
- Monday: title
- Tuesday: title + a personal comment
- Wednesday: title + a reader’s positive comment
You can type all of your post variations at once instead of thinking of each one-by-one.
Your social media followers are always reading unique posts, but your back-end formula for creating them can be the same.
Check out the tutorial in the link above after you grab your free CoSchedule trial to setup your own Social Helpers. Once you start, you won’t stop… trust us!
Pricing
Our Starting Choice
When we looked into the cost of hiring a social media manager, we saw the average price ranged from $20-$100/hour. Social media managers are worth their weight in gold, but for new companies just starting out with limited budgets, programs like CoSchedule are attractive for the unbeatable price point.
To start getting serious about our social media impact, we chose CoSchedule’s Individual option ($29/month).
One of our favorite CoSchedule features is the ability to add additional users when you upgrade to the Startup plan calendar. So when the time is right for hiring a social media manager, you’ve already gotten your marketing strategy in a collaborative calendar format.
Save an additional 5 hours/week with ReQueue
Our favorite CoSchedule feature is ReQueue because it probably tacks on another 5 hours of time savings for us, while saving the salary of a social media strategist.
ReQueue analyzes your best performing social media posts, then re-posts the content in the next optimal calendar day/time.
Ever think, “Crap, I thought I’d get more “likes” than this?” Well, you were probably right… it just wasn’t seen by everyone who could like your post yet. ReQueue fixes that engagement problem for you… Over, and over, and over again.
You can create ReQueue “groups” to organize “filler content” that will be smartly added to any gaps in your social media calendar.
For example, I have an “Evergreen Content” group that keeps my general website pages on rotation: About Me, Work With Me, Contact, Courses, Shop, Free Resource Library, etc. These are pages that I want to have shared often + since they aren’t time-sensitive, ReQueue can decide for me when those best fit into my current social media calendar.
This feature is included in the Individual Plan + you can try it out in your free trial.
Referral Program
When you sign-up for your free trial or full CoSchedule subscription using this link, we will receive a discount on our own CoSchedule subscription. The best part is that you can earn a discount off of yours by using your own referral link immediately, too!
Free Trial
We have been loving CoSchedule and would only recommend products we know boost business productivity far beyond their investment. Start your free trial by clicking here, then let us know what you think of CoSchedule in the comments below.
