In 2017, I completely messed up my online marketing and left tens of thousands of dollars on the table.
Most of my projects came from my network. As you might have noticed, I only wrote two articles for WP Mastery.
For 2018, I have two major tasks to revive WP Mastery:
Over the year, I refined the target audience of WP Mastery heavily - now focusing on CMOs, medium-sized businesses, and marketers who consult companies to improve their web presence.
That's the audience I'll promote WP Mastery to on social media.
Interested in the methods I'll use to not fail again?
First the first time ever, I'm creating a social content strategy for my brand. Until now, I barely even touched my fan page.
I'll use my personal fan page to promote the content on this blog because I want the WP Mastery brand to be closely associated with my personal brand.
While the organic reach of fan page posts is constantly declining, I'm not stupid enough to hope for one of my posts going viral.
Instead, I'll leverage the contents shared with Content Studio and boost them against custom audiences. Dennis Yu's $1-day Facebook Ad strategy is the perfect vehicle for that!
Inside Content Studio, I've set up my queue like this:
As you can see, I am publishing 23 posts each week, with varying density on each day. You'll also notice that I've set the schedule mostly following US timezones, which are 6-9 hours behind Germany.
That's simply because most of the readers of WP Mastery are located in the US.
It's important that you have a schedule like this set up, as otherwise, it's super easy to slack off.
With this schedule in my neck, I constantly feel the urge to fill up my queue with content.
This is the biggest mistake I made in 2017, I didn't not pre-write ANY content. Hence, I failed to prioritize writing blog posts, emails, or content updates on social media - project work always seemed more important.
In December 2017, I started pre-writing email newsletters for WP Mastery. At the time I'm writing this, I've got three weeks of emails (or six newsletters) scheduled in Mailchimp.
I will force myself to do the same with my Content Studio queue. I will set aside three hours each week, to fill up my queue as much as I can.
We'll see if three hours is enough or if I need more...
Luckily, Content Studio has the "Discovery" feature:
And you can easily inspect every post shown in the Discovery feature, to analyze how well they perform.
It makes finding content to share SUPER EASY. I mean, their search engine is seriously good.
This tool will be a game changer for me personally, allowing me to maintain a nice balance between promoting my own articles and content from other sources.
After all, if I were to only toot my own horn, you'd never follow me. I'd come across as arrogant and self-centered, which is the opposite of how I want to be perceived.
That's why I'm happy that composing my own status updates is as easy as 1-2-3:
As you can see, you can easily select the platforms you want to publish the content to, see a preview of how it'll look, and decide whether it's published now, at a certain time, or simply at to your general queue.
You can even rewrite content based on the platform. That'll allow you to write shorter updates on Twitter and longer ones on Facebook and LinkedIn. I didn't see that feature in other tools yet, so I appreciate it.
The function to automate posts was one of the reasons I signed up for Content Studio. I'm not planning to take the human element out of my social posts, but I want to become more effective with them.
I have set up automated social media campaigns on a different schedule than my regular posts so that they don't interfere with each other.
With that automation, Content Studio is scraping selected websites for articles on selected topics and adds them to the queue if they match.
I think of it as in RSS reader but for content sharing instead of content consumption. Let me walk you through the setup process - it literally took me less than 10 minutes.
The first step is to
First, select a name for the automation campaign. In this case, I want to automatically share articles about WooCommerce.
In the next step, you'll be asked to select the profiles you want to share the content on. As you can see, I selected my Facebook Group.
The third step is to select the sources for this campaign. I only want articles that include "WooCommerce" in the title and are from websites I know only publish highest quality content. If you don't filter by domain, it'll likely happen that you automate sharing posts that don't match your quality standards.
Now here's the really cool part. If you also have an account at RePlug.io, you can add YOUR OWN CTA to content on other people's blogs. Obviously not by hacking those blogs, but Content Studio will show a small, not-obtrusive, banner with your CTA. So you can add value to those other bloggers while also allowing your audience to easily go to your website. Quite cool if you ask me.
Next, you can set the schedule for this automation. This control when the updates are posted and I wouldn't go overboard here. This is the default schedule suggested by Content Studio, I brought it down to one post per day for this social media campagin - to not be overwhelmingly "active".
The last step in setting up the campaign is to decide if you want to review the posts before they get published. As I want to run this on autopilot, I did not check the box. We'll see if I regret it in the future, but I doubt (thanks to the filters in place).
At the time writing this blog post, I don't have much data to talk about the effectiveness of Content Studio yet.
My coworkers had issues with the organic reach of posts published via Buffer, but so far I can say that the status updates shared with Content Studio get even more engagement than my organically written posts.
I'm getting comments and likes on the content, which before was quite dead (at least on my fan page).
Regarding my I Use WordPress group, I can already see the engagement increase quite a bit. I totally neglected that group in 2017, and now the members start to respond to the posts published with Content Studio.
Since I might write another Content Studio review in six to twelve months, let me share my social stats - so that you and I have a reference point to see how my accounts grew:
I Use WordPress Facebook Group: 454 members
Jan Koch Page: 350 likes, 345 abonnements
Little Oak Page: 780 likes, 786 abonnements
Of course, there will be no way to directly attribute new likes to Content Studio. I'll also be running ads on those profiles, which will lead to likes and more engagement. But it's nice to have these numbers written down for comparison in the future.
For now, I'm super happy with Content Studio. I can definitely see it increase my social following and helping me save time with publishing social media content.
If this review got you interested in Content Studio, you can get your free trial here.
