Making the most of your admin time
I was chatting to one of my clients, Jill at Mojoco, the other day, about admin time savers when it comes to publishing and sharing articles. The idea for this short post came from that chat. It strikes me that some of these simple tips can easily be missed or forgotten. If you tend to write articles/posts in batches but then get too busy to spread the publishing of these over a number of days or weeks, this article is for you!
1. Scheduling WordPress Blog Posts
If you weren’t aware this was possible in WordPress, you are going to be surprised just how simple this is.
You’ve obviously used the “Publish” button before, so take a look just below that to where it says “Immediately”. Click here to select a date & time in the future and the post will remain in draft until such time. That’s it! If you have a batch of articles to publish on your website, you can spread them out according to your content calendar!
If you are wondering what timezone is used, header over to Settings->General in your WordPress admin area and you will find the timezone for your website there. You can change this if necessary.
2. Sharing Your Blog Posts on Social Media Automatically
Once you’ve completed Step 1 and scheduled a months’ worth of articles to publish automatically on your blog, wouldn’t it be nice to sit back in the knowledge that these articles will be automatically shared to your LinkedIn page, Facebook and Twitter automatically too?
Well, that is possible. But this next steps does require a Social Media Scheduling tool that has this feature. This is one of the reasons I recommend SocialBu and you can read more about my recommendation here.
If you have already signed up for SocialBu, follow these steps to add an RSS feed to your account.
1) Log into the SocialBu panel.
2) Click on ‘Automations’ -> New Automation.
3) Give the Automation a title.
4) Define when the automation should happen as “RSS feed has a new item” and paste the url for the RSS feed (for example https://yourwebsite.com/feed/ ). Choose whether you would like to post the item immediately or add it to a queue. By using queues, you can delay the scheduling, allowing yourself time to manually check what is going to be scheduled, if you want to.
5) Define what you want to post (such as title, image and link).
4) Select the frequency at which your new posts will be read. For example, if you post an article every day, you might set the frequency to every 12 or 24 hours. This determines how often SocialPilot will check for new content on your blog.
5) Select how many posts to send each time a check in made. If you write articles weekly and you are checking for new posts every 24 hours, you will probably only want to post one article at a time.
6) Add your regular hashtags. SocialPilot will choose 2 from your list.
Top Tip
You can also add RSS feeds from other websites to your Social Media account (you just need to find the feed url!). This is really handy if there are blogs you like to follow and share regularly with your audience.
