Firstly, thank you everyone for your kind words on yesterday’s post. I feel more invigorated about where my life is headed now that I have been able to stop convincing myself that I should be content with something that deep down I know I’m not. Now to just keep on pushing when the going gets rough…

Changing topics slightly, I want to take some time to review CoSchedule, an editorial calendar for WordPress that I have been trying out for the past two weeks.

[Disclaimer: I did sign up and already pay for CoSchedule after my trial was up, however by sharing this review I will get a discount on the overall price. I had already planned a review of it before reading the fine print and finding out about the referral program, but if you decide you must have it as I did and sign up through this link, then I will get a percentage off of the price. Even though I do love CoSchedule and would have shared this with you anyway, I want to be open in my disclosure.]

You guys, this thing rocks. I first heard about CoSchedule from Katy many moons ago and I put it on the back burner along with all the other things that I think will help my blog but never take action on. Then I started reading some of the articles on their blog about ways to improve graphics, write better headlines, and how to save time writing posts. I even created a separate folder for CoSchedule articles which is a big deal because I don’t often bookmark things. Basically, their blog is awesome.

But since this is a review of their editorial calendar and not all the amazing tips they offer freely to knowledge hungry readers such as myself, I will bring my focus back to that.

It takes me awhile to pay money for something. Call me a skeptic. After dancing around it for so long though, I realized that they had a free 14 day trial and I ultimately bit the bullet and signed up, knowing that I could cancel when it was done but that I probably wouldn’t.

There are many editorial calendars for WordPress and bloggers have different preferences based on what works for them. I had never used an editorial calendar in my life, although there was a brief time when I tried to do it on a Google calendar and got all kinds of alerts for posts that were upcoming that made me think that people were texting me (yay friends!). Basically, I didn’t use an editorial calendar because I was the type of person to sit down in the morning and try to figure out at that moment what I would write about.

CoSchedule Overview

• Drag-And-Drop Editorial Calendar
• Schedule Social Media While You Blog
• Save Time, Grow Traffic
• Easily Re-Schedule Old Blog Content
• Lightweight WordPress Plugin
• Automated Social Publishing
• Simple Team Communication
• All-In-One Publishing Solution
• No More WordPress Hacking

Pricing

• There are 5 different pricing structures based on your level of engagement (one blogger vs. an entire company, that sort of thing)
• Since it is little ol’ me, I chose the most basic plan:
  • $10/month or $9/month if you pay for a whole year up front ($108)

The thing I love the most about CoSchedule is that you can write your posts and schedule your social media all in one place, at one time. I used to write a post and then schedule it in Buffer so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it the rest of the day. The problem with Buffer was that I could only share my post a set number of times a day at predetermined times. With CoSchedule, I can schedule as many shares as I want at the times that I designate. There would also be times when I would forget to schedule tweets through Buffer because I was in a rush to take a shower or eat or take over the world. Whoops.

You can do your work from the site itself (above) or from inside WordPress (below).  You are able to drag and drop posts, tweets, and other shares to different days which is something that I couldn’t do in a Google calendar (at least not my liking). Since I am an extremely visual person I enjoy being able to see everything laid out in one place.

CoSchedule integrates seamlessly with WordPress and allows you to keep track of and schedule your shares all in one place.  After writing my post, I can schedule all my social media from within the same window, leading to less absentmindedness on my part while doing the aforementioned taking over of the world.

I am able to pick my categories and see stats about the post just by clicking on it. No, this is not an actual post of mine, but those stats sure would be awesome so let’s pretend it is.

In the section entitled “Top Posts,” CoSchedule keeps track of how many times your post has been shared so that you can see what posts receive the most traffic and from where. This allows you to go back and further promote those old posts with a few clicks.

Since screenshots may not do this calendar justice, take a quick 2 minutes to watch an overview of CoSchedule.

I have definitely found an increased audience after using CoSchedule. Since it has only been 2 weeks, I plan to play around with it some more and see how it can further decrease my time and increase readers to my site. I haven’t noticed anything yet that I have to complain about, but if I do I will be sure to update you.

One of the best things to come from using CoSchedule is that I have been able to effectively plan out future posts. I was never able to do this before, but even if I am not sure when I want to post a specific topic, I can at least write it down and save it in the “Drafts” section for easy dragging and dropping later on when I make a decision. Basically, it rocks (wait, wasn’t that how I started this?).

Questions:

• Do you use an editorial calendar?
• Do you plan your blog posts in advance?
• For non bloggers, what’s the last snack you had? I need inspiration!