One of the most time-consuming elements is sharing your blog posts or distributing it. As you know, each time you post, you need to share the blog on your various channels or submit it to other sites or repurpose images.These things take time but there are ways to make this process a whole lot easier.

It’s not just a one click thing, though, there are one or two steps involved, but it will help save you a chunk of time so you can get back to creating even more content.

Some of the tips below talk of automating some steps, one thing to bear in mind when you start implementing these things is never to create 100% automation. You don’t want the same posts on different channels, it looks lazy, plus it will make you look a little robotic over time.

The primary goal is to ensure you are promoting your content across different channels and tailoring it where possible to fit there in the quickest way possible. Plus avoiding repetitive tasks.
Below are a couple tools and plugins that will help you with sharing your blog posts. Some are free, but one or two of them have a price (I’ve marked that for your reference)

Sharing your blog posts on Medium (free)

I love Medium; it’s such a simple, goodlooking platform. It’s also a great traffic driver and can help with Seo.
I have a self hosted wordpress blog rather than having everything on Medium, as it’s not good practice to be dependent on one platform for all your content. (You are in control if it’s your domain and host) But I also wanted to ensure my content is on the channel. So I installed the Medium / WordPress plugin to help me make sure my content is being placed over there as well.

The cool thing about this plugin is that is cross promotes as well. As in ‘This post originally appeared on X’ Or “this post appears on medium” with a link created.

Some things to note, though, your blog post will automatically publish to medium when you go live on WordPress, however, if you make any changes to the original WordPress post, it will not reflect on the Medium version.

Also, you would need to head over to medium to add tags and any other optimisations. Check your images too; sometimes they don’t copy over.

You can download the plugin from here. For installation instructions and a bit more info check out this post from Social Media Examiner

Sharing your blog posts via IFTTT

What would an automation blog post be without a mention of IFTTT? For those that don’t know IFTTT means If This Then That. In short, you are using prebuilt or creating your own recipe triggers to make things happen. So with that in mind, IFTTT provides loads of recipes to get shit done. In this case, we are looking at WordPress publishing to other channels.

By hooking up your channels and your WordPress blog, IFTTT will post to multiple channels as soon as you publish the post. To give you an idea of the recipes you could use check out these, they are clickable if you want to use them

Install IFTTT on your phone too, that way you can be notified that the recipes have executed. Don’t just stop at the ones I’ve added above, see what else you can combine WordPress with or make your own. Check out loads of other WordPress recipes here

Sharing your blog posts through Co-schedule social campaigns (Paid)

I started using COSchedule some time ago, and I love it. After digging a bit deeper, you will find its a whole lot more than just a social console. When you click ‘add new’ there are a series of options, one of them is to create a blog post – it hooks up to your word press and creates drafts and more right in your dashboard. But that’s not the only cool thing. Below your post, there is an option to add a social campaign. You click, and it gives you options to schedule posts to over a series of days or weeks or months. With this quick scheduling tool, you can create multiple posts to drive traffic to your blog plus test headlines, repurpose posts, across all your included channels.

You can use Co-schedule to plan your blog posts and add them to a calendar; this view is available within your WordPress dashboard once
you install the plugin: here – bear in mind you need a CO-Schedule account to use it.

See that “Add a social campaign” button? If you click that, you get this:

This allows you to quickly plan a series of posts to promote your blog article. Make sure you mix up the calls to action and try different headlines to see what works.

As you schedule each day, COSchedule gives you the options as to what channels it should appear on. For instance, you only want Twitter to repeat but Facebook only once.

It’s great to have it all in one central place as well, as you build these schedules it all feeds into your calendar where you can easily make edits or drag and drop to other dates.

Sharing your blog posts with Requeue (paid)

Talking about Co-schedule, there’s another great plugin called Requeue. You can use this when scheduling your posts in the above process but also on any new posts you create. In short, it is is an easy way to repost your content. It works out when to do it or finds days you don’t have content and posts it. You can create groups of content too – for instance, a bunch of evergreen content, or a Sunday only content etc. One thing I find a lot of bloggers do is create a great piece, share it on their channels and move on, they don’t use it again. You should repeat it, obviously not saturating, but at irregular intervals. This way, not only is your great content being reposted but there’s a chance new audience members are seeing this.

Next time you schedule a post or use the social campaign system, make sure you switch on Requeue.

Speed up the spelling check with Grammarly (free / paid)

This is my saviour, I’m not a bad speller, but I make some stupid mistakes, in my grammar too. Grammarly is a standalone app but has extensions for Safari and Chrome so you can have it running in your WordPress editor. When writing a new blog post I always just write. No stopping for editing, just keep the flow. Editing stops the creative process and you lose your train of though. Once you have finished writing work your way through it’s list of recommendations, plus grammatical errors. It even suggests replacements for overused words. (I look very professional.) I just find it to be a nice looking, fast and easy to use spellchecker. It takes me about five mins to know my posts is good to go. Its great for when you are posting social updates directly from your browser too. This way you are saving even more time when you notice a typo and have to edit the post.

On the paid version there is a great function that allows you to choose the sort of document you are writing. This then helps with the syntax, grammar and more. For instance it could be a very corporate post or technical, you could choose business and then ‘article/blog post’ , the tool then changes the grammer and word suggestions to reflect the type of content you are creating.

Quickly create each channels correct image size with Canva magic resize

Canva is great for quick turnarounds. Plus the fact it has predefined sizes for your images and what channels they are going on. It also has a function called magic resize. Which is amazing, when it works. Say for instance you create a header for your blog post and want to use it on the likes of Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Just go to ‘File’ and click ‘magic resize’ and choose the options you need and it will create copies all resized for your selected channels.

One thing to note, sometimes the alignment can go out so keep an eye on it.

Sharing your blog posts on harder to automate channels with Next scripts

This is another plugin that I initially used for auto submission to StumbleUpon. I always recommend submitting content to stumble upon as it provides you with some traffic but also helps you get discovered over time. (Turn on your real time google analytics when you do this, quite cool to see instant traffic – bear in mind that these may be users just flicking through sites so may effect your bounce rates)

Next scripts covers automated stumble upon submissions but also a lot of the harder to automate social channels. Including the likes of Flipboard, Reddit and scoop.it

Get it here

Check out the channels it covers, it includes some automation for the IFTTT recipes I entioned above.Here’s a description of all the channels it covers:

App.net – Autopost to your account.

Blogger/Blogspot – Autopost to your blog. HTML is supported.
Delicious – Auto-submit bookmark to your account.
Deviantart.com – Autopost to your blog. HTML is supported.
Diigo – Auto-submit bookmark to your account.
Evernote/postach.io – Auto-post to your Evernote account or postach.io blog.
Facebook – Autopost to your profile, business page, community page, or Facebook group page. Ability to attach your blogpost to Facebook post. Ability to make “Image” posts.
Flickr – Autopost images to your photostream and/or sets. Tags are supported.
Flipboard (with third party API library) – post to your magazines.
Instagram – (with third party API library) – Post your blogpost’s featured image to your Instagram account.
Instapaper – Auto-submit bookmark to your account.
Google+ (with third party API library) – Autopost to your profile, business page or community. Ability to attach your blogpost to Google+ post. Ability to make “Image” posts.
LinkedIn – Autopost to your account. Ability to attach your blogpost to LinkedIn post. Autopost to LinkedIn Company pages and/or Groups (with third party API library)
LiveJournal – Auto-submit your blogpost to LiveJournal blog or community. “LiveJournal Engine” based website DreamWidth.org is also supported.
MailChimp – One of the most popular email marketing tools. You can send your blogs as email campaigns to specific subscribers.
Medium – Autopost to your profile or publications.
ok.ru (Odnoklassniki) Autopost to your group/page. Ability to make text posts, image posts, share links.
Pinterest (with third party API library) – Pin your blogpost’s featured image to your Pinterest board.
Reddit (with third party API library) – post to your subreddits.
Scoop.It – Autopost to your “Topics”. Ability to attach your blogpost to scoop. Ability to make “Image” posts.
SETT – Auto-post to your Sett.com blog.
Stumbleupon – Auto-submit bookmark to your account.
Telegram – Autopost to your channel, group or chat.
Tumblr – Autopost to your account. Ability to attach your blogpost to Tumblr post. HTML is supported.
Twitter – Autopost to your account. Ability to attach Image to tweets.
Plurk – Autopost to your account. Ability to attach Image to messages.
vBulletin – Auto-submit your blogpost to vBulletin forums. Could create new threads or new posts.
vk.com (vKontakte) – Autopost to your profile or group page. Ability to attach your blogpost to vk.com post. Ability to make “Image” posts.
Weibo – Biggest Chinese Microblogging Service. You can post your messages and images.
WordPress – Auto-submit your blogpost to another blog based on WordPress. This options includes WordPress.com, Blog.com, etc..
XING – Post text messages or share links.
YouTube (with third party API library) – Post messages to your YouTube channel feed. If blogpost has youtube reference, it will be attached.
Yo – Send notifications to your subscribers.
500px – Autopost images to your account.

There’s more coming too. Granted this plugin covers the Medium and Linkedin auto posts too, however, I already had plugins installed for that so don’t use them via this tool.

Always make sure you are not over automating things, I purposely left out things like auto responders on Twitter to share your content as you need to do this manually. There is nothing worse than some bot always tweeting the same thing at users that may have mentioned your topic or similar subject. Steer clear of that sort of automation. The plan with the above tools is to make sure you are getting your blog out to relevant channels and quickly, instead of having to move from tool to tool or page to page.

With the correct setup and not 100% automated you can create a pretty efficient machine that will give you lots of time back to continue cranking out those blog posts. It doesn’t hurt to try a few and switch on and off where needed, till you eventually have a robust system that helps with sharing your blog posts

If you have any other suggestions, let me know in the comments below.