This past weekend, I attended the Fear Paradox Summit, an event geared towards helping women expand their minds and channel their fear into fuel. Every woman who attended said “yes” to embracing tough challenges and living out their dreams. It was a truly amazing experience: not only because of the workshops and activities, but the incredible energy that you can only feel in a group of women determined to rise.
One workshop I attended centered around building an editorial calendar for your business. During this session, Ashley Logan, CEO of Yakkety Yak Marketing, spoke to the importance of putting out weekly content. You can define four content buckets for your brand and blog on each weekly. But simply posting content to a blog or website is only the first step. Your effort in creating awesome, relevant content is only worth it if people are actually reading. You need to use social media, email newsletters and other tools to make sure the content you’re sharing is reaching the widest audience possible.
Overwhelming? Totally. However, I’ve found the following tools and platforms to be a serious help in automating this process and getting results when it comes to getting eyeballs on the content I spend precious time creating.
Buffer is my favorite tool for sharing social media posts to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I take about an hour or so every week and fill my social media queue for each network. Buffer also has an image creation tool called Pablo which makes it super easy to create quotable images you can share to your Instagram or Facebook page.
One technique that you can use to keep your social media queues full is to share content from other sites. Feedly is my favorite tool for discovering new content and keeping up to date on blogs I love without having to visit each site every day or sign up for their newsletters. It integrates with other tools like Buffer so it makes social sharing really easy.
I discovered this new tool in the last year. Once you publish your blog posts, Missinglettr will create a year of social media posts for you, filled with quotes and images based on your own content. You review the content, make any edits and then it schedules everything. Set it and forget it.
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) connects people with reporters. When journalists need sources for a topic, they'll post a query on HARO. You can subscribe to get updates and if you find a query you like, you can respond. It's a great way to get exposure and start being recognized as an expert in your industry.
MailChimp is an email marketing tool that you can use to start building your database of readers, and is free for the first 2,000 subscribers. You can set up a campaign in MailChimp to let your readers know when you have a new blog post or share new services or offers on your site. You can also create a free gift to deliver to new subscribers as a thank you for signing up.
This is hardly an exhaustive list, and every time-strapped entrepreneur has a different toolbox of platforms that help share their message. If you have a miracle app or service that’s working for you, tweet me at @techbizgurl and feel free to share with the larger @1871Chicago community.
