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Laura Pence-Atencio of Social Savvy Geek

Laura Pence-Atencio

Speaker & Online Marketing Strategist at Social Savvy Geek

Through marketing automation Laura has grown her audience to over 200k on various platforms. (Her favorite being Twitter!) She helps her clients to implement systems that quickly grow their audiences too.

Article

How Using Two Calendars Can Save You Over 24 Hours A Week

I’ve had a lot of different careers from banker to member of the national guard. My last job before online marketing was as a financial advisor so I’m very data driven when it comes to my marketing.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Laura’s success

 Using two calendars to manage marketing

Result if you follow the steps in Laura’s session

Save time on social media posts and calendar management by using Event and Content Calendars and CoSchedule Templates

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Well, I should also mention that the other reason you want to have this calendar, so you keep from under committing or over committing yourself, because you don’t want to have all of your events in one month, and then you can’t possibly keep up with them all. And it helps you spread things out and keep organized throughout the year and in a manageable process.

Because if you put five events in March and zero in June, well, you’re not going to get any good result because you’ll be overextended at one point and then you can’t follow up properly. So you want to keep all your money nicely evenly spread out.

And it doesn’t always work that way in practice, but in theory, you want to do it. But then you know, if something pops up, some, like opportunity that wasn’t on your calendar, you could pause, some things that are not tied to an event, and put that in there and then move on.

But I used to use just spreadsheets and traditional editorial calendars, and it was better than nothing. But it was really kind of clunky and a little bit more time consuming than it should have been. And then I don’t remember how I found out about CoSchedule, they probably found me online and I clicked on something because you know, that’s how we do.

But I’ve been using CoSchedule now for at least a year and I have a love affair with them. Yeah, I love co schedule. It’s my favorite thing. But they have it set up so that you can use your calendar within their scheduling program and it works with WordPress.

So you can drag and drop things around. You can plan out your whole week, month, quarter year in there. You can put stuff into a queue that doesn’t have a schedule that you can drag in later if you need some backup content, but I find that it works a lot better for me than using a spreadsheet.

Yeah. So just with the current co schedule, what’s like the main goal or benefit of using that? Like, why is it so much better than Excel?

Well, I’ll tell you, because they have templates. And templates make our lives more efficient and easier. So once you go in to publish a blog post, and this is for WordPress, it allows you to sync up all of your social channels to it.

So I’ve got Facebook, business Facebook, LinkedIn, company LinkedIn, several different Twitter accounts because I love Twitter. And it’s also got Instagram, which doesn’t post to Instagram, but it copies it all to clipboard and allows you to go into Instagram through their app.

And you can schedule your posts that you’ve planned out in advance in about 30 seconds. So it’s really easy. And it also through connection with buffer allows you to post to Google Plus. So it connects to all the places. Oh, and also Pinterest. So connects all, yeah.

Yes. So, I was just gonna say that you mentioned buffer then I was just thinking like, co schedule sounds like it does everything that buffer does or any of those other kind of social media posting places, plus a lot more with, you know, post a lot more WordPress.

Yeah, you still need buffer. You still need buffer, you can’t get rid of buffer. So you need buffer to work with CoSchedule. And co schedule is not a free tool, but I’ll tell you why it’s worth more than I’m paying.

So all your social things are there and you can connect RSS feeds to it as well. So if you have a podcast or blog and you want to integrate that you can, but you publish your article or set it up to publish in either in CoSchedule or in WordPress, you can go in and schedule out all of the social posts that you’re going to follow up with. And they’re different for different purposes, but you can create several templates.

So let’s say, just a regular blog post that is about whatever your primary topic is, you would, the next day afterwards, send it out to your favorite social network or you’ll send it to LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter. And then the day after you publish it, you would send it to your LinkedIn company page, and you would send it to your Twitter again, because I mean, just keep sending it to Twitter and you would also send it to Google Plus.

And then a week later, you would send it out again and say, Hey, have you seen this blog article, you know, and it’ll pre fill the title and the link for you. And you could just take, change your wording. And then you could do a month later, and you’re all still in the same, you’re just setting up a template, you just hit plus, you schedule it out, and then you go down.

And it’ll ask you do you want to do a year later or custom date, you can just set it up, however, you need yours to be set up. And then you hit publish, when I had a queue, so you can say save queue as template. And the next time you have a blog article, you say, apply template and you’re finished. It’s ridiculous.

And then if it’s an evergreen, something or other, you can do that again, but do it a year later and three months later, you can you can set it up however you like. And it also gives you the ability to go in for optimal sharing for an evergreen. In put the proper size image with each individual post, so you have a vertical for Pinterest. And you’ll have, you know, a Twitter size picture.

And I go into Canva and make the blog post images. I went to school for graphic design. So I can do that. If you’re not a designer, even if you have the tools, you shouldn’t, it’s putting that out there.

Yeah, fair enough. I think it’s fantastic. And this is why you know, marketing automation really is all about setting something up once and then yeah, it’s a template, in this case, and then just replicating the template each time, you need to do this task.
You don’t have to go through that process of having to set up that whole, you know, do this step by step thing. It’s there, it’s ready to go. I think that’s fantastic. Great.

And I use different ones for, as I said, a typical blog article that has a short life like something that’s time sensitive, like if it’s you know how it come on, see in 2017? Well, I don’t want to replay that in 2018. That makes sense. But then I have a template for evergreen posts where they’re just going to keep going and going.

And then I have one for events. And it’s a six week, you know, set of tasks that will happen or publishing that will happen. And then I have one for guest post if I am posting elsewhere, but I want to share it. And so it’s a different template for that, because I don’t necessarily put much emphasis on that.

So you can have a bunch of different templates that fit all your purposes. And once you have one, you can just go in and modify it as you need. So it’s really simple. I actually found that I saved with these templates about 25 hours a week. I replaced an intern. I didn’t get rid of the intern, mind you. They’re just doing more useful work.

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