It’s a big, overwhelming world of content out there. Blogging, tweeting, Facebooking (is that a word?), and on and on. Who has time to keep up with it all?

Luckily there are ways to make your content generation much easier. One of the most effective is automating and scheduling your content updates. (Of course, time-sensitive material can and should be posted as soon as it’s ready.) Here are 3 tools that we at MWD Web use frequently.

WordPress

Oh no, that next blog post is supposed to be online tomorrow morning! What will I write about? How can I make it interesting? Why do I have this crisis every week?

For some time now, WordPress has featured the ability to schedule your posts in the future. What this means is, you or your writing staff can sit down and bang out two or three posts in a small window of time, and set them to publish automatically at specific dates and times of your choosing. If you’re maintaining a minimum of 1 post per week, you can queue up a whole month’s worth of posts in less than an hour. This post, for example, which will be published on August 31 at 9am MT, is being written on August 9.

Install one of the handy scheduling calendar plugins for an easy-to-use point and click system.

Social Platforms

Attracting a following online is the main goal of social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. This requires that you say something interesting, on a fairly regular basis. That’s great, but what if you’re not always ON those networks? Most of them have no ‘post later’ feature built in.

HootSuite is our favorite scheduling platform. The free version gives you 6 ‘streams’ which you can monitor and update. A stream doesn’t necessarily mean an account; with Facebook, for example, you can set up your personal wall and your business page, and those would be two separate streams.

As of this writing, HootSuite interfaces with the aforementioned Twitter, FB, and  G+, as well as others such as LinkedIn, foursquare, and WordPress.com.

Our most common task through HootSuite is to schedule a tweet to go out the Monday following a new blog post. It’s also a handy place to monitor all your company’s social accounts, all from one dashboard. They also just recently rolled out a new auto-scheduler that automatically picks the most opportune time for your update to post.

Emails

If you have a mailing list, you need to keep in contact with them. Much like WordPress and HootSuite, email providers such as Constant Contact, Aweber, et al offer the ability to compose your newsletters as far in advance as you’d like, and schedule the blasts to go out on your own timetable. This is handy for a regular newsletter, a drip campaign, etc.

---

Using these techniques and others, you can just carve out a block of time once or twice a week and get your latest round of content queued up, and then it’s off your plate for a while. Or, schedule several posts in advance! Just keep in mind that content marketing, particularly social, is more about listening than talking, so don’t make the mistake of just blaring your message out to the wide world and expecting to not have to listen in turn.

How do you use automation to market your business?

Photo by Robert S. Donovan