Blogger Series Chapter 4: The Ultimate Marketing Calendar

Today I have another super useful post for you in my influencer series. If you haven’t seen my other blogging tips yet, you can check them all out here. Today I’m talking about time management, and how I keep track of everything as a blogger, full time business owner, stay at home (homeschooling) mom of three, and wife to a (pretty handsome) busy doctor.

At any given time I’m involved in 20+ ongoing marketing campaigns, that is just the current ones, if you account for creating new relationships, and finding new sponsorships, keeping up with emails, staying involved on social, invoicing for old campaigns, and repurposing old content, you could say I have 100’s of projects constantly ongoing. How do I keep track of it all?? CoSchedule. I’ve been using it for over three years now. You can subscribe monthly, but every year I pay the full year up front because I have no doubt that I will continue to use (and love) CoSchedule all year long.

What is CoSchedule all about?

Gone are the days where businesses can ignore digital marketing. Any business or brand that wants a competitive edge must have some social media marketing savvy. But managing your social marketing, content creation, email campaigns, etc. can be SO time consuming.. Marketing your content involves a lot of strategizing, and planning. This is where CoSchedule comes in, the best marketing calendar for businesses, influencers and bloggers.

CoSchedule is a well thought out marketing calendar for businesses, influencers and bloggers that helps you plan your projects, create them, and promote your content. In other words, it is an all-in-one calendar that shows all your projects, tasks, social media messages, email campaigns, blog posts, etc. in one place. This calendar automates my social media posts and ReQueues (reschedules) my best content, if I want. Its integration with Google Calendar, various analytics, social media, and WordPress is a huge advantage. It is time-saving, helps grow your audience by automating social messaging, and it is fabulous for managing a team.

Apart from the above mentioned, CoSchedule marketing calendar for businesses, influencers and bloggers has the following amazing features that I love, and quite frankly couldn’t live without:

• Easy scheduling of social media (all platforms in one place, even instagram!)
• A lot of app integrations that make work easier to manage from one place, including popular platforms like Basecamp, Asana, Google Docs, Bit.ly, MailChimp, Shopify, ToDoist, and many more
• A drag and drop calendar interface to make managing tasks simple
• Automatic content rescheduling via ReQueue
• Management of Evernote content
• Works great with WordPress
• Task templates for projects that you do over and over again, including team member the task is assigned to, and how many days before or after the project date to assign the task, in the template

How Does CoSchedule work?

CoSchedule is the ultimate calendar that allows you to manage  all of your online content, campaigns, promotions, social messages, daily tasks, and schedule.

One of my favorite features of this marketing calendar for businesses, influencers and bloggers is that I can create customized task templates for every single project. For example, I have customized templates for a sponsored Instagram post. When I add this task template to my project, it automatically sets a task to shoot pictures two weeks before the due date, draft my caption 10 days prior, etc. I have created custom task templates for every kind of campaign I work on.

As soon as I get a new project, I plug it into the calendar, and it every task I need to complete that project is automatically scheduled exactly when I need to complete it. As I complete each task I can check it off on my calendar, and there is nothing like the feeling of checking a box off your list, right?! I can even drag and drop tasks and projects on my calendar if something comes up and I need to readjust dates.

Who needs CoSchedule?

CoSchedule is for users with a wide variety of different occupations and job titles, the similarity being anyone who wants to make their marketing management easy. It is especially useful for social media specialists, sales and promotions, communication specialists, podcast hosts, influencers, bloggers, and any business, large or small.

How To Use CoSchedule as a Blogger

As a blogger content marketing is crucial for drawing in traffic to your website. Production of quality work and a high ranking is equally essential. CoSchedule is a ladder to help you achieve this kind of success.

This is how I use CoSchedule as a blogger:

Social Scheduling

This is the best part of Coschedule. Management of several social media accounts isn’t easy. As a mother of young kids who need a lot of attention, I just don’t have time for keeping up with my Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram accounts.

I can still manage it all though, thanks to CoSchedule. All these accounts link directly to my calendar. I can create one social message, and publish it to all my different social platforms, at the same time. I can even schedule them to post at the best time, which means CoSchedule will automatically determine when the best time is to post for me. Once the post is scheduled it is hands off, I don’t need to do anything else.

ReQueue

ReQueue is a really innovative and unique automation feature. It makes social automation and repurposing old content that did well super easy. Want to have a message sent out several times over the next year. It’s as easy as clicking the ReQueue button! Or do you want to schedule motivational messages for every Monday? Set it up in ReQueue and it will automatically post for you. You can make it happen in three simple steps:

1. Begin by creating and scheduling your social messages
2. Add the best social messages to ReQueue
3. Finally, ReQueue automatically fills gaps in your schedule

Task Templates

Creation of new campaigns and projects often can be a headache, and time-consuming; however, templates in this marketing calendar for businesses, influencers and bloggers make it easy.

Creating a template is done just by applying four simple steps:

1. Create a template for the task
2. Fill in all the tasks for that particular project. Assign them to a team member and choose when you would like them to be scheduled
3. Save the template
4. Next time you create a new project apply it to the project and it will auto schedule your tasks

To sum things up, CoSchedule is the one and only calendar you will ever need to manage everything related to your business or blog. It keeps me on top of things, and gives my clients the false impression that I actually remember stuff. It makes me look like a professional, deadline meeting, kind of person. CoSchedule is my personal virtual assistant, and my second brain. I’m not lying when I say I couldn’t live without it.

Learn more and sign up here.