You may have noticed that I really enjoy writing on my little space on the internet. But I’m first and foremost a photographer. And being a business owner and the sole employee for Green Tree Media Photography – sometimes it can be hard to find the time to write and share all these fun little posts with you! But the truth is – I have a secret weapon! I use an awesome wordpress plugin called CoSchedule to help me share my posts through all my social media forums and help keep me organized.

So what exactly is it? CoSchedule is a fantastic drag-and-drop editorial calendar for WordPress that puts your blog posts and social media messages on the same schedule. Okay so that still may not have explained it very well. Basically – you can write a bunch of blog posts at a time, save them as drafts and then drag and drop your posts onto the calendar to schedule them. Below you can see an image of what my CoSchedule calendar looks like and each of my social media shares listed below with the time they go live.

Now yes – there are other drag-and-drop editorial calendar plugins for wordpress that are free – but CoSchedule has an added perk because it gives you far greater control! For instance Sierra’s feature coming up… I was able to write her feature in advance and schedule it to share across all my social media platforms at specific times throughout the day. I could make it post customized messages without actually having to stop in the middle of my day and post something to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ or LinkedIn. Other plugins will share to all your social media networks too – BUT they will only share once, they share the same exact message, and can only be shared at the same time the post goes live.

So you can see on the image on the left that your control is basically to select which platforms to share to and then the same message gets shared to all of them at the same time. On the right – you can write a custom message for each post. You can schedule a specific time. You can even schedule to share the post again a month or a year later. This is something I haven’t seen any other wordpress calendar or sharing plugin be able to do!

Now this may not seem like a very big deal, but being able to quickly and easily share to my Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Linked In accounts has saved me a ton of time! One, because it’s easy and I can schedule it ahead of time. Two, because it keeps me from being distracted by actually logging into those accounts to share a post. (Which means I’m way more productive with the stuff that really matters instead of getting sucked into facebook.) And three, because sharing to all these social sites helps increase traffic to my online journal. And the hope is that if people like what they see here – they will call me and hire me!

So I was curious and wanted to see if there would be an actual difference between my free plugins and CoSchedule. I’m not one to promote something I don’t believe in, nor am I one to invest in something that isn’t worth while. So I started monitoring my stats. I started using CoSchedule on September 29th and you can see in the above graphic that all areas of viewership took a pretty big jump from September 29th onward! That’s not with me changing anything else. All I did was switch to using CoSchedule and actually scheduling my social media shares throughout the day. If nothing else – seeing these results is what really convinced me to go ahead and purchase this plugin for myself.

And honestly – it’s not that expensive – CoSchedule is only $10/month or $100 for a year and they have an awesome referral program. (Which all of the links in this post are to my referral page. So please use it if you decide to purchase.) And if you have more than one person contributing to a blog – CoSchedule has even more perks for you because it also functions as a blog management program. Helping you schedule posts between your team members and if you have more than one blog you post to – you can use the same CoSchedule account for all of them! (which I’m looking forward to now that I’m taking over my church’s blog too.)

If you want see it in action – I recommend taking a peek at this video they created: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK3un3Wt_Qo

And if you are a blogger – I hope you found this article insightful. I definitely love using CoSchedule because it’s saved me so much time and helps keep me organized. Have a fantastic day guys! I’m off to shoot a senior session!