WordPress Fun | Faith & Tech

In recent months I have acquired three things I now use for social media, the first Amplifr.com, which replaced my yearly subscription to Hootsuite. As I am not selling a product and because I have a habit of not blogging as often as I should, I can’t really afford to pay yearly fees in order to schedule my social media posts. AppSumo gave me a deal on Amplifr for a lifetime membership and I jumped on it. Rather than pay yearly for what Hootsuite was doing, I could essentially accomplish the same thing using Amplifr. I am able to post content way ahead of time. I try my best to make sure when I post something that is in going out in the future that it doesn’t have time bombed information, stuff that is only important at the time it was published and may have no relevance in a week or two when it finally lands on my social sites. This has worked pretty well.

My only real complaint is it doesn’t break out each social media site by when it would be the best time to post to them. Instead, it shows me the best time as a collective.

So today at 1 pm would be the best time to post, the best time to post to what? Twitter, Facebook? LinkedIn? It doesn’t say. So I post and I hope for the best. Also, it counts my Personal Facebook account posts as well. As that isn’t my true platform, this information isn’t useful. I would like a way to exclude my personal account.

Next, I use a plugin for WordPress called Social Warfare Pro. Sadly this is a yearly charge type thing and I don’t have a lifetime membership so this costs me money.

What Social Warfare does is make it easy for my readers to share my content on social media. It gives me options to highlight something I would like to post as a quote and to designate a picture for each post and platform (though creating optimally sized image files for each Social Network is a pain).

Here is an example of the interface for it and working on verbiage on what to have it post if someone clicks on my sharing links.

It also shows how many times something has been shared to different social media platforms and it works with Pinterest so you can optimize an image for Pinterest.

This works pretty well and I am pretty excited when I get high share counts on a post. Sharing means caring, remember that for any blog you are a fan of.

Lastly, I am now using a product called Missinglettr which creates social media campaigns and reports older content at intervals to get more potential readers. It perhaps shares my old content too much but I think it is a learning process on my part that I still need to work on. It recommends hashtags for me to use and shows me the popularity of various hashtags to show if they are good picks or not. Additionally, it will allow me to turn my posts into postings for Medium.com. I don’t publish over there enough so I like this option. The algorithm and I have some meeting in the middle to do in order to tweak it and they have asked for feedback which I have provided. I believe this will become a very good product.

The key for me is that I need to post more often so that it has content to send out. Rehashing really old blog and podcast posts may not be as useful if the content is somehow dated. So I will keep plugging away and see if it accomplishes my needs.

In this Episode:

We talk about why Blogging is important and how you can get started and what it takes to get people to actually follow and read your blog. We are joined by our Special Guest: Amaryllis Turman, who is the blogger-in-chief of The Opinionated Woman’s Musings, a reviews and musings website whose following is building quickly. She talks about how she got started, what platforms she used along the way and what works for her to get her following and to keep growing it. She talks about how she builds relationships with her followers and readers as well as connecting with Authors and publishing companies that help drive readers to her site. And unlike yours truly, she is very consistent in her postings and she talks about how she keeps her schedule. And what about a “blog tour” to get more traction to your blog?

We also talk about writing, creativity, and how much creative juices are our daily allowance. And finally tales of a voracious reader. What kind of books do you read?

Editor’s Note: Chuck was off on his own adventures so sadly he wasn’t on there.