It may seem overwhelming to have a website, and make blog posts, and trying to build up your online and social presence. Especially for the small company where you may be an employee of one or a few, and have to wear many hats. In order to grow and keep up with the rest of the world you want to take advantage of social networking as a way to get your message out, and maybe build up some linking to your site, but how can you manage it all yourself?
I find my time is seriously limited, between my day job, my extra activities, and also wanting to make sure I have a good online presence, it becomes hard, and almost impossible if I try to manually deal with all the tasks. Fortunately there are some tools that make managing my online life a little easier. The first being content management, and secondly managing my social networking which I use to help drive traffic to my content and communicate with people.
Content Management
As I said my content management system(CMS) is one of the things that without I couldn't do any of this. But it's more than just having a content management system, it's also about using it effectively. I personally use DNN (formally DotNetNuke) for managing this site. It provides me with some nice tools, most notably the ability to manage content, provide a security layer, and analytics. For example as far as content goes, anyone who has been following my activities may be familiar with many of my sites. This site which has been around since the late 90s, and my old wwwcoder.com site. I consolidated all my sites into santry.com, but a major problem with that was handling the merging of content without losing my "link juice" that wwwcoder.com built up. With DNN, and some simple code writing to match up the old article structure, and my blog content on santry.com, I was able to quickly write a module do all that (of course after I merged the content from the two sites).
Another big thing is since it is a CMS, with a large ecosystem behind it, I'm able to purchase a module to handling blogging (Ventrian News Articles) which really provides the bulk of my work. For example, with Ventrian, I have my syndication files created as soon as content is published, this way my RSS feeds are distributed to include my podcast over to iTunes, and a mobile app that I'm currently working on. No need to manually generate this. Another great feature is being able to sit down and do a lot of writing and then setting it to post whenever I want. Scheduling helps target social network too, as you'll see from my social networking tools, as soon as my article is published it then gets posted to my social media outlets automatically.
Once my templates are all set up in Ventrian, it really streamlines my posting. From laying out the header graphics on the homepage (and using CSS, I can have the CSS conform my images so I don't have to worry about making them all the same pixel dimensions, etc.).
As I said, using a CMS, managing content is so simplified, I can only remember the days of FrontPage 98 (yep, the first book I co-authored) development and think "Wow, I did that?!"
Social Networking Tools
It is essential now to utilize social media to not only get the message out your content, but also to influence the search engines and rankings. Doing some keyword searching on Google, I find my LinkedIn profile or Google+ posts will show up higher than the content they point to on my site. So I make sure everything is updated. And I don't have to worry about having to do it myself. I schedule it, and some is done automatically. Here are some tools I use all the time:
- AddThis - I think AddThis is a great add-on for your site. Even though it isn't handling distribution, it's making it easy for people who read my content to share it. And if I want to post, I use it, since it's there.
- HootSuite - This is just an awesome tool and a must have for your toolbox. I can schedule my social media posts out as far as I want, several times per day. There are some great features provided for free, and some enhanced features if you want to pay a fee. It can read your RSS files (which are generated by the CMS) and then post to your social networks as soon as you schedule the article to display (yes, all done automagically!).
- Dlvr.It - This provides for free what Hootsuite doesn't and that's posting my articles as soon as their published to my social networks --- all automatically!
- Klout - Klout has changed dramatically from being just a score, it makes it easy to post topics of interest from my iPhone. Take note, you don't want to just post links to your website content all the time, you're building an audience and they may be interested in related content from other sites. Be generous and post anything of interest.
- Your Phone - Of course the other side of social networking is network, and that means communicating with people. Social media isn't just a broadcast mechanism, it's a communication mechanism. Be sure to use to communicate with others, and your phone makes this incredibly easy. You should have some tweets that include an "@" sign to people which shows you listen, and communicate and not just hog up the screen with endless posts from your site.
- Paper.li - This just adds more content to my social media outlets. It checks who I follow and then posts to Twitter some topics of interest into a paper format. I get a lot of retweets and interaction from folks who are included in my paper. Like I said social media is about communicating, not just broadcasting.
With these tools, I can manage my blog in just a few minutes a day, or schedule out weeks at a time. For all you know I may be on a beach right now disconnected from all Internet access. :-)
I'm interested in learning about what tools you find indispensable, feel free to share them in the comments below.
Manage Your Own Mobile App, Podcast, Sites, and Social Networking In Five Minutes A Day
So that's how I do it, granted it takes some time to get this all set up. It's one of the things I specialize in, so you can either do your research and figure it out all on your own, or hire me to do it for you. :)