Contrary to popular belief, social media has not replaced blogging. Social media is huge but blogging is still an excellent tool to create an audience, advance your career, and content marketing to sell products (to name just a few).

The problem with posting your blog posts on social media once

As I cover in my book, social media is complementary, not a replacement for blogging. You should promote the long content you produce on your blog on your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The trouble is that you’ll typically only do it once per post. And guess what? These social media platforms will only show your status update including your blog post to a small percentage of your followers/friends. So let’s say that you are fairly popular and have 4,000 followers on Twitter. When you post about your shiny new article, Twitter might show it to, say, 20 people.

If they really engage with it by liking and retweeting it, then the post will have a wider reach on Twitter, otherwise, only a small fraction of your followers (and an infinitesimal percentage of the rest of Twitter) will ever see it.

Some content might have a short lifespan. For instance, a sale that will end at midnight or in a few days. The overwhelming majority of your content, however, will be evergreen or have at least a year’s worth of life in it.

So it’s a shame that it’s only shown to a handful of social media followers.

Repeatedly sharing on social media is tedious

The obvious solution is to promote the same blog post on social media multiple times. Sure, you’d want to space it out a little and not post the same article every single day, but it’s a great way to expose your blog content to more of your followers.

This approach maximizes the number of people that will come to your blog from social media, without aggravating anyone. After all, social media algorithms will not show your posts to the exact subset of followers each time and you are not promoting the same post every day.

Furthermore, if you don’t post too much on social media in general, this will help your social media properties look a little more active, making them more appealing to prospective new followers.

The problem lies with doing this in practice. If you try to do it manually, you’ll burn out quite quickly. Let’s say that you have 10 articles that you want to promote regularly and that you want to post each article 10 times. You are looking at writing a different description for each, adding the right link, perhaps a different image (if your post as multiple)… 100 times.

Let’s say that you publish 10 articles in 2 months. You are now tasked with handling another 100 social media posts while in the middle of posting the existing 100. It quickly becomes untenable.

Missinglettr comes to the rescue

Missinglettr has been a godsend for me. I try a lot of social media tools every year. The majority I find somewhat useful and then quickly forget about. They are useful to an extent, but I don’t really extract enough value out of them to justify investing time let alone money.

This is not the case for Missinglettr. It’s the most useful social media service I use and I’m so glad to have come across it.

What Missinglettr does is take your feed and creates repeated, spaced out social media campaigns from your posts. You have full control in determining what these posts will look like and say, as well as how frequently they’ll be posted.

I use it for both my Programming blog and my Plant-Based diet blog and it has brought me thousands of extra visitors to them.

How Missinglettr works

For each site I added to Missinglettr, I connected their respective social media properties. For example, I connected Programming Zen to my Twitter and my LinkedIn accounts, while I connected Plant-Based.org to its Twitter account and Facebook page.

Every time I publish a new post on either of these two sites, a draft campaign will be generated on my behalf on Missinglettr and I’ll receive an email to approve, make changes, or reject it.

First, a series of hashtags will be autogenerated from the content. I usually end up keeping some, deleting others, and adding a few, sticking to 5 hashtags or so in total. These hashtags will appear beneath each social media post for this particular post’s campaign.

Next, you’ll get to customize how each post will appear on social media. The description, image, or image made out of a quote extracted from your post are all customizable by you, but they are also automatically generated to save you time.

So if you don’t like the quote image on Day 14, you can flip through other quotes extracted from your post, or enter your own. Or you can switch to an image instead.

The embedded Tweet below shows an example of a quote image:

By default, Missinglettr gives you a good mix of quote images and images extracted from your post, but again, this can all be customized to your liking.

The tweet below shows one instance in which Missinglettr picked up a photo from the post:

Usually, I only need to do minor changes. You can change the length and frequency of the campaign, but in my case, I set my social media posts to go live on Day 0, 3, 7, 14, 30, 90, 180, 270, and 365 of the post being published. As a result, I get nine pre-populated social media posts that I can either approve or customize and then approve.

This is extra traffic on autopilot, while still ensuring that the content on social media is presented in the way I approve of!

Statistics are provided for each campaign while they are in progress and once they are completed so that you can see how effective they have been in reach your existing social media followers and new audiences.

At $7 a month (if paying annually, otherwise $9) this is a no brainer and I would highly recommend it to any serious blogger.

The post Missinglettr Review appeared first on Technical Blogging.

The secret is to share both your own content and other useful resources as you come across them.

You’ll want to increase your odds of encountering said useful third-party content. Just as you will want to make the process of sharing that content as painless and automated as possible.

It’s still important to have a degree of manual interaction with each platform to create genuine connections with other users. Just be careful to not let it become a time sink.

Discovering content worth sharing

The best way to come across great content to share on social media is to pay attention to what other people in your industry are sharing. Follow relevant people on social media and rebroadcast (retweet/share) their best content. Become a human filter of the greatest, most useful content for your industry.

Participate in online communities relevant to your industry. Programmers will, for example, find luck in communities such as /r/programming, /r/webdev, Hashnode, Dev.to, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, and so on.

Listen to podcasts and subscribe to YouTube channels by influencers within your field.

Finally, take advantage of good ol’ RSS feeds. Subscribe to a variety of blogs and publications to have fresh content to share.

I’m partial to Feedly for reasons that will become clear later in this post, but any feed service or client will do. You’ll want to install an appropriate browser extension. This way you’ll be able to subscribe to sites you find interesting, with just one click. In my case, I use Feedly Subscribe Button for Firefox.

Use Buffer to queue up articles

There are a gajillion social media tools. I like the simplicity of Buffer. It allows you to queue up content you intend to share on a multitude of different platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn).

It also handles the scheduling of content in the queue, so that it’s not shared all at once. This ensures a constant stream of fresh new content for your followers, without long periods of radio silence.

Once you install the Buffer extension for your browser, you’ll be able to quickly add any page you wish to your social media queue. You simply click on the Buffer icon in your toolbar while visiting a post or page you intend to share.

It removes the inertia of having to manually share updates across platforms, making you more likely to do so in the first place.

Other tools are alright as well, but if you don’t have a favorite yet, I highly recommend giving Buffer a try.

Automate Your Social Media with IFTTT

You’re now sharing your own content, retweeting/sharing from the best influencers, and using the Buffer extension to share useful resources directly from your browser.

If you want to take it to the next level, you could automate the process of adding to Buffer articles from your RSS feed client. This is where Feedly and IFTTT come into play.

IFTTT allows you to automate certain actions when a certain trigger is executed. In our case, you’d want to define an applet within IFTTT, that involves both Feedly and Buffer.

You’d set up a Feedly-related trigger that adds a given article to Buffer. In my case, I decided to create a Social board in Feedly. Whenever I add an article to that board, it gets shared on social media via Buffer.

There are two catches. The first is that Feedly requires a paid account for this integration to work. The second one is that Buffer can only connect one social media account within IFTTT. So if you have Twitter, LinkedIn, and a Facebook Page in your Buffer, you’ll have to choose which one will post the articles you add to the predefined board (e.g., Social).

In my case, I chose the Twitter account within Buffer.

The advantage of connecting Feedly to Buffer, instead of connecting it to Twitter directly (bypassing Buffer altogether) is that posts get scheduled. This way you can select, say, 10 articles within Feedly in the span of two minutes, without immediately posting all 10 to your social media account, overwhelming your followers.

Doing all this still takes some time, but automating your social media posts goes a long way. It really shortens the time and effort involved from when you encounter something interesting to you sharing it on social media.

With a bit of discipline and a few minutes each day, you could easily become a must-follow account.

The post Automate Your Social Media Posts appeared first on Technical Blogging.

The shortest answer I could give is that today YouTube is as important as having a blog.

Here is why:

• YouTube, which is owned by Google, is the most used search engine after Google itself.
• When a quality video matches a query that someone searched for on Google, that video will be returned with the rest of the web results… at the top. I don’t have conversion statistics, but I can only assume a sizable percentage of viewers will click on the videos both due to their location in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and the nature of the content (watching a video takes less effort than reading an article). In other words, YouTube is an easy SEO shortcut to the top.
• Humans are highly visual animals. People are much more likely to watch a video than read an equivalent article.
• YouTube goes out of its way to promote your channel and videos if they consider them to be interesting and engaging. This helps you reach a potentially large audience for free.
• Playlists let you keep the viewer engaged with your content and message.
• Unlike Facebook, which will only allow you to reach a subset of subscribers unless you pay for a broader audience, once you have a YouTube subscriber in place, you can easily reach them every time you post a new video.
• Video can tell so much more about your product and the company behind it (even if there isn’t a product that’s being sold per se).
• With more people canceling their Cable subscriptions in favor of smart TVs, media boxes like the Apple TV or Chromecast, or even tablets, expect to see far greater numbers of folks tuning in to watch video content on such devices.
• Social media is very keen on video, as it works well for people who are in “surfing mode”. Videos also tend to be shared more often than textual content.
• YouTube allows people to link to their external sites on their channel page, in video descriptions, and even within video annotations. So you can certainly send people to your YouTube channel via your blog, but you’ll also get a wider audience to learn about your blog through YouTube.

This blog audience can be broadly divided in the following categories, which at times can overlap:

• Professionals interested in advancing their career via blogging.
• Freelancers interested in finding clients via blogging.
• Startup owners interested in promoting their startup via blogging.
• Company owners or workers interested in promoting products via blogging.
• Non-profit or open source developers, interested in promoting their non-profit projects and initiatives via blogging.
• People interested in making extra money online by sharing their knowledge via blogging.
• People interested in making a full-time income via blogging.

Replace “via blogging” with “via YouTube” and you’ll quickly see how applicable YouTube is to each one of these types of readers.

I would recommend that the same type of content you use for blogging also shows up in your YouTube channel. A freelancer for example, will need to showcase their expertise and offer solutions to problems that their customers might have. That’s as true on their blog as on YouTube. In fact, if available, calling your YouTube channel the same as your blog is definitely not a bad idea either.

You could then leverage the strengths of each type of media and opt for articles about particular problems and videos for others. A screencast is sometimes easier than trying to explain things in writing, for example.

Interestingly, while I have read and studied extensively this subject, I don’t have a personal YouTube channel for this or any of my other blogs. This, however, is something that I intend to fix soon.

On that note, one of the best courses I have ever come across on this subject is this one on Udemy, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to give YouTube a go or to take their channel to the next level.

The post Is YouTube Worth Your Time as a Marketing Tool? appeared first on Technical Blogging.