So here we are in year two since I first shared my love of CoSchedule with you! I thought I’d go ahead and share a little more about this awesome plugin with you as well as some of the updates they’ve made. (If you missed the last post – you can check it out here.)

As you all know – I love writing here on the journal and sharing with you! But I also have a business to run and a myriad of other things to do. CoSchedule is the awesome plugin that makes it possible for me to stay on track, posting and sharing regularly! For those who don’t know, CoSchedule is an awesome wordpress plugin that allows you to share posts and social media messages. For myself, one of the biggest benefits is being able to write a bunch of blog posts in advance, save them as drafts and then drag and drop the posts onto my calendar to schedule them and share them across all of my social media platforms at once. I also love that I can schedule all my social media messages on this same calendar too! It makes it easy to see everything I have planned out and when it will go live.

Here’s a little peek at 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 calendar plugins for wordpress that are free – but CoSchedule has some added perks over these other plugins that make it the best scheduling plugin around!

Easy Planning
One of the things I love about CoSchedule is how easy it is to plan out my blog posts. I can create a bunch of different ideas for content and then drag and drop them on the calendar as it makes sense. If something comes up and I decided to move things around – no problem! I just drag it wherever I need it. It’s super easy to keep things organized this way and not miss a single post!

Full Control
While a lot of scheduling plugins allow you to automate the sharing to your social platforms, they are usually set up to share to all your platforms at once. With CoSchedule you have full control of what goes live and when. This is great because it allows you to pop up on various social media platforms throughout the day so you’re constantly being brought to the minds of your viewers. You can even let CoSchedule post them at the best times for you to get the most traffic! This was a new feature they added this year and I’ve been loving it!

Social Messages and Blogging All In One
There are, of course, a lot of options in social media sharing services. But I’ll admit – I love having it all in one place. I know people have to use two or three different services to be able to schedule their social media posts to all their platforms. But CoSchedule let’s me share them to all of them! They even added Instagram and have Pinterest working again this year! That means. I can write a blog post, a week or more in advance and schedule not only when it will be posted but when it and all my social media messages related to it will be shared on all of my social media places – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, and Pinterest! That’s a lot of sharing power in one simple plugin!

Valuable Sharing Data
CoSchedule also offers valuable insights into what people are most engaged in! They keep track of likes, shares, and comments for you so you can see what content your readers are most interested in. This has made it really easy for me to see what content keeps bringing people back to my blog so I have an easier time knowing what to write and share! You can see your all time most popular posts and even check out last year, last, month or last week.

Team Management
This particular addition doesn’t apply to me, but it does to some and it’s definitely a feature worth noting. One thing CoSchedule is really handy for is for blogs that have multiple authors. Think about it like a magazine… there are plenty of blogs out there that have multiple writers. Well, CoSchedule makes it easy to stay organized, share notes, and assign posts to different authors. If I had other people writing here with me – I would ABSOLUTELY be utilizing that capability!

Increased Viewership
Now this is all well and good, but ultimately the most important thing is increasing your viewership. The best way for me to show you the benefits here – is to show you some comparisons of my blog traffic.

Alright so here’s an honest peek behind the scenes to my blog traffic. These images were taken straight from google analytics so it would have been a pain to try and alter the data. So in the top image… You can see I’m comparing my blog traffic in October of last year to October of 2014 (the first year I had schedule). That orange line was 2014 and you can see how much my viewership has grown since adding this plugin to my blog. (It’s more than doubled!!!) If that’s not enough – let’s look at the second graph which compares my first year starting CoSchedule to now. You’ll see at the beginning of 2014 I had next to no one visiting my blog but after adding CoSchedule in March – that line slowly grew. Now look at the jump in the blue line! That’s from this past year. Now yes – it could be higher, but the fact that I’m reaching about 1500 people without even trying is amazing to me! Just seeing that difference continues to give me the confidence that CoSchedule does amazing things for my blog and is totally worth the investment!

Honestly – it’s not that expensive (the most basic package starts at only $15/month which is under $200 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.) If you want see it in action – Check out this video:

CoSchedule from Garrett Moon on Vimeo.

And if you are a blogger – I hope you found this little post insightful. I definitely love using CoSchedule because it’s saved me so much time and helps keep me organized.