Setup weekly content automation days
When I'm working on any kind of single project I'm becoming bored pretty easily. I'm sure that a lot of people with empathizing with this feeling. When a project is fresh and new everything is interesting about it. However, when the newness is gone and you're actually doing the day-to-day routine of just hardcore work, it can become pretty boring.
I experienced this, especially during my project management days. Currently, I'm engaged in 5 projects:
- 2 projects where I'm doing software engineering,
- 1 project, where I'm doing project management,
- this blog,
- personal consulting business.
You can only imagine the number of tasks, schedules, group chats and tools involved in all of them. From a logistical standpoint, this easily can be described as A TOTAL MESS! And you'll be right. For about 6 months everything went shenanigans, with staying awake till 3 am and major insomnia issues.
Things started to take a turn when I revisited one of my favorite books 4-hour workweek by Tim Ferriss. I read two years ago, and at that time I was not working for myself and this was an interesting read, however, right now I looked at the book with a different point of view.
How to organize a day or even a week, so you can spend less time planning and more time on actually doing stuff you like? When you're doing your own business 90% of a time you have to deal with small things, like remember to follow up on an email, schedule an interview, do social media posts, promote the new blog post, etc. The answer to this almost rhetorical question is automation.
What processes can you automate?
- creating a meeting,
- sending a follow-up email,
- posting on social media,
- tasks/deadlines reminders.
With this post, I'm going to share the routine I've created after a few trials and errors. This is how I'm automating simple processes of content creation for this blog!
I'm an avid user of Hootsuite. I'm loving it every step of the way, as you may know from my post on how to manage social media without being on social media.
Choosing the social media platforms that are necessary for your business is not that easy. There are a lot of places you can register, launch, be part of the community to put your product on the surface so your potential customers can find you. However, being on each of them as a person who does this half of the time, or hustling is not a good idea. Sure you'll meet a lot of peers get a lot of valuable information and feedback, but at the end of the day, it's better to focus on 2-3 platforms that are priorities and make most out of them (sorry Gary V).
How Hootsuite is going to help? Well, here's an example of one of my weeks:
I'm using my twitter account, personal LinkedIn account and my company LinkedIn account. These are the social media channels that bring the most value and traffic to my website.
Currently, I'm using Saturday as my content day, with this kind of schedule:
1. I'm writing 1 or 2 articles for the week. I have a predefined list of topics from which I choose. On average it takes me around 2 hours to write a single article.
2. I'm creating 2 - 3 small posts based on that content, for social media.
I mainly post on LinkedIn as it gives me a big boost right now. On average it takes me around 10 - 15 minutes to figure out what kind of content I'm going to put out.
3. I'm creating covers for the stories, mainly searching through the web and making it look cute using Canva. This is the hardest step because Canva has too many beautiful templates, so I kinda get sucked into the world of design (even though I have a pretty bad eye for it :) ). On average this takes me around 30 minutes per blog.
4. I'm figuring out the perfect time to post the content, with the help of google analytics.
If you ever noticed before, on the first page of google analytics you have this kind of chart that says when exactly your users visit the most.
For example, this picture is showing my visits through the month and it's pretty clear that for some reason users tend to visit mostly on Tuesdays during the daytime (6 am - 4 pm).
So, if I wrote two articles that weekend I'd try to post at least once on Tuesday, and the other one on Saturday or Sunday when I'm sending my newsletter.
Next, I'm scheduling the article using Wix's scheduling tool.
Wix is a CMS I don't really enjoy, but it has one of the best SEO tools. So, even if I'm scheduling the post I get total control over the link, the heading, and short introduction, that's why posting ahead of the time never really was a problem with this blog.
On average this takes me around 5 minutes.
Before I started to automate the process on average it took around 3-4 hours to promote my blog post on social media and review the results.
Based on the timings I'm scheduling my social media posts ahead of time on Linkedin and Twitter.
This process leaves me with 1 day of content creation and automation, which means on the other days I'm not distracted by my blog activities.
Analytics
I'm using Hotjar and Google analytics for my blog. I'm checking them both on the same content creation day, but also I'm getting a weekly automated report from Google analytics.
Here's how you set up the report:
1. Create a dashboard
In google analytics, you can create different dashboards based on the information you want to see.
My dashboard is created around the traffic sources and session durations, so I can optimally segregate time and focus on the platforms that bring me the best quality traffic. Also, I have set up a Google Data Studio report. You can read more carefully about the process of setting up the dashboard in my blog on how to create a product analytics dashboard in Google Data Studio.=
In the top of your dashboard click on the "Email" button
Here you just need to add your email, and you'll be getting the report on your analytics, so you don't need to think about your numbers all the time.
Coming up next, a blog on traffic sources and how to manage your content across all the places you can have an online presence.