In my last post on writing, I talked about the tools I use to improve my art. I guess this time it will be good to go through the marketing tools I use to support my writing. Consider this as a preview before we go deep into each one of these tools.
Feedly
I’ve been using Feedly for a while now. At first, I thought of it as not more than a news aggregator. Don’t get me wrong, it fixed my morning routine after the demise of Google Reader, but I didn’t think of it as a marketing tool.
These days instead I have a fixed schedule that I respect on all my Social Media. To be able to post compelling articles every day I need to be on top of things. I follow multiple blogs and writing-dedicated websites. What Feedly does for me is to aggregate the content of all those websites and present it to me in a single place. It does this while showing only the new content I’ve yet to read.
Feedly also stores the articles that interest you on the side so that you can read them later or classify them using boards.
It’s even possible to add filters to remove the posts you already know you wouldn’t be interested in.
Buffer
Ok, now we have a system to collect all the interesting stuff we want to read and potentially share. All we need is a system to shares such articles on our Social Media.
Most definitely we don’t want to just blast out all we have and then stop posting again for a while. That wouldn’t work.
If we want to get all the material we collected (and our own one) and post it on Social Networks using an efficient schedule, Buffer comes in handy.
Buffer is a social media management platform used by many companies and agencies. I love it because compared to the competition it’s quite intuitive and simple to use. It also has a free tier that allows you to get started without having to pay anything.
In Buffer, you can easily create a schedule for each social media channel you want to post on and add all the content you want to produce into a queue. The platform will push out the content automatically following the schedule you specified.
The most practical way to schedule posts is to use Buffer’s browser extension that will sit close to the URL bar staying always ready for you to plan your content.
Facebook Ads (and insights)
Once our content is on social media, it’s our job to make it reach our target audience. To this day, I still didn’t find anything as effective as Facebook Ads to do so.
The platform is quite simple to use. You just need to define an audience that you believe would be interested in your content. Having this, just write a message to accompany your ad and pick a budget. It can be as low as $5 a day. Facebook will do all the remaining work for you.
Your work at this point will be to monitor your results and make sure they make sense. We will go through how in the next marketing post.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter has a similar tool to monitor the effects of your marketing strategy.
It is definitely a less evolved tool than its Facebook counterpart, but it can give you an indication of how effective you are being with your content on Twitter.
I hope this gives you enough of an overview of these tools to make you curious and use them. In the next few posts on marketing your writing, we will go deep into each of them and see how to use them in the specifics.
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