Top 5 Problems All Bloggers Face and How to Overcome Them with Nelio Content

If you’re interested in building a loyal reader base, the best thing you can do is publish, publish, and publish. The more content you share in your blog, the fresher your topics are, and the better-looking and more interesting your posts are, the easier it’ll be for you to engage your readers. But this is easier said than done, isn’t it?

Today I’d like to present you some of the top 5 problems all bloggers face and how our new product, Nelio Content, can help you to overcome them all.

Problem 1. “I Can’t Write Posts Consistently, but I Want to!”

This is probably the problem that most bloggers struggle with—how to publish new content consistently. You shouldn’t publish new posts “when you feel like it”, but write and share them on a predictable, fixed schedule. It doesn’t really matter if you publish twice a day, three times per week, or once a month (even though “the more, the better” ?)—as long as you find the pace you’re comfortable with and stick to it, you’ll be good.

So, how can you achieve this consistency? How can you force yourself to write more often? Is there a magic recipe for it? Unfortunately, there isn’t, but there are a few tips and tricks you can apply.

Content Marketing is a strategy aimed at planning, scheduling, creating, and promoting your content. Its goal is to help you be more productive and efficient at your work. One of the first tasks you should do to implement this strategy in your blog is to plan your upcoming posts beforehand. That is, you need to decide the topics you’ll be covering during the next few weeks, the posts you’ll write about them, and when you’ll publish each individual post.

Editorial Calendars are probably the easiest way to successfully implement your Content Marketing strategy. They offer a unified and global view of all the elements that are relevant to your blog‘s success. Having such an inventory of all the posts you already produced along with your scheduled content helps you to identify opportunities for addressing uncovered topics and repurposing your content.

Nelio Content features a simple, elegant, and extremely functional editorial calendar. As such, it shows all your upcoming posts in a single location, along with any related tasks that should be addressed or the social messages you scheduled to promote them (more on these two later).

The editorial calendar makes content creation and management easy. For instance, its built-in drag-and-drop functionality allows you to reschedule –or even delete– your content quickly and efficiently:

or you can create and schedule new content with just a couple of clicks:

Problem 2. “I Don’t Know How to Reach a Broader Audience”

The next problem most bloggers face is how to reach a broader audience. Once you’ve been able to find your own pace and write consistently, you’ll have to make sure that your target audience finds out when new content is available, so that they come and read it. From my experience, there are three channels you should take care of in order to let your readers know you’re writing new content:

1. Search Engines help you reach to new readers. Your content should be relevant to search engines such as Google or Bing. That is, if people search for certain terms, your blog posts should appear among the results and, hence, people will know you exist. One of the most famous and widely-used plugins that’ll help you in this endevour is Yoast SEO, which will help with your SEO strategy.
2. Newsletters help you keep in touch with your current reader base. There are several services and plugins (for instance, Mailchimp or MailPoet, to mention a couple of examples) for running email campaigns. When your readers subscribe to your newsletter, you’ll be able to notify them directly in their email inboxes of any new content you publish.
3. Social Media is yet another form of communication between your readers and you. Moreover, because of its “social” and “public” facet, social media allows new users to discover your content through Twitter retweets, Facebook likes, and so on.

If you want to run a successful blog, you’ll have to address the three channels I just described. In my opinion, the former two are pretty well covered by current solutions—plugins such as Yoast SEO or MailPoet are widely used and extremely reliable. Social media, on the other hand, is a different story. You probably already know you should use social media somehow to promote your content, but you’re not sure what’s the most effective way to do so. In fact, promoting your content on social media effectively brings us directly to the next problem…

Problem 3. “I Spend too Much Time Sharing Content on Social Media”

Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn are social networks with an enormous user base and, hence, there’s plenty of people there that might be interested in your blog. Only if you could reach them! Well, truth is, you can! That’s why you should be promoting your content on social media ?

I bet you already have an account in Twitter, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn. In other words, you’re halfway through your Social Media success! Just use these social channels to share your content among your followers and friends and you’ll be closer to your goals.

Some of the problems I had in the past, and I’m sure you’re facing them too, are:

• “I spend too much time switching tabs. That is, I’m writing a post in WordPress, I copy the title, I change the current tab in my browser and go to Twitter, I paste it there, I go back to WordPress, I copy the permalink, I return to Twitter, I paste it there… Then I have to open a new tab with Facebook and repeat the process. And then do the same with LinkedIn… OMG!” ?
• “I schedule my content to be automatically published, but I don’t know how to schedule its promotion. I usually wait until the post is published and, then, I manually share it on social media”. ?
• “I’m using third-party tools to schedule my content on social media, but then again, I have to copy-and-paste stuff from WordPress to this tool… which is too time consuming!” ?

See the trend? If you write content in WordPress, it only seems fit to promote it directly within WordPress, doesn’t it? Your marketing efforts occur isolated from your content—this disconnection between what you write and how you promote it results in your wasting time with unnecessary tasks, such as copying stuff around.

Our plugin solves all these problems once and for all. Nelio Content brings Social Media to your WordPress dashboard, so that you can decide how and when your posts will be promoted when you’re writing them, bridging the gap beautifully. Our plugin allows you to tweet about your newest post, share a Facebook status update, pin an image from your Media Library on Pinterest, or post a message on LinkedIn quickly and efficiently.

If you connect your social profiles to Nelio Content, you’ll be able to use them directly within WordPress and content promotion will become just another step in your content creation workflow. There’s no need to open multiple social networks and share your messages manually on each website. You won’t need to use external apps to schedule messages either. Nelio Content integrates social message creation and scheduling within WordPress, making it super easy to reach broader audiences.

The user interface for crafting your social promotions is easy-to-use and intuitive. You only need to select the social profiles in which the message should be shared, write the message, and schedule its publication date and time. You can even tell Nelio Content to share this messages when the post itself is published—this way, if you reschedule the post from one day to another, all the scheduled social messages that you planned for promoting the post will be rescheduled automatically to match the new publication date.

You can even use the plugin to promote old blog posts with just a couple of clicks. This way, it doesn’t matter if you don’t publish fresh content every day—you can feed your social timelines with the interesting articles you wrote in the past.

Problem 4. “I’m a Content Editor and I Don’t Know how to Manage my Author and Contributor Team”

Another common problem among larger blogs is team management. In other words, if you run a blog with several authors and contributors, it’s not always easy to know who’s working on what or which tasks are pending and who’s responsible of them. Things as simple as talking to your team members around a certain post can become a nightmare if you have to email people or use external tools.

Nelio Content also addresses and solves these issues gracefully. The editorial calendar we saw at the beginning offers a clear view of all the important deadlines of any given month. That is, you and anyone in your team can quickly see when a post has to be ready for publishing.

Our plugin also introduces Editorial Tasks as a simple mechanism to assign activities with a specific due date to members in your team. These tasks are visible in the editorial calendar and in a new box in the edit page. Keeping track of all the relevant work has never been this easy!

The plugin also includes a discussion area. Through Editorial Comments, editors and authors can talk about a certain post without using external tools. These discussions are always there, so you can revisit them at any moment in the future and check which decisions or assumptions where made.

Problem 5. “I Want my Site to be More Engaging, but I Don’t Know How”

A usual problem we can never get rid of, isn’t it? Writing beautiful and engaging content is the ultimate goal we all pursue, I think. But there are no magical solutions to fix it! ? Luckily, there’s a lot of things you can (and should do) in order to get closer and closer to it.

In my opinion, the best way to succeed with your content is to work with passion and professionally. You should take care of all the aspects of your blog—how fast it loads, how beautiful it looks like, how well it works on mobile phones, how professional and well-documented your articles are… Considering all these aspects and trying to improve them all, little by little, are the only way to succeed!

Nelio Content analyzes the quality of your post and warns you if something’s missing. For instance, it checks if your post is missing a featured image (so that it looks more beautiful), if it contains links to your own blog (to create a strong internal link structure), if you added references to external posts (which add credibility to your claims and offer alternative points of view for the reader to look into), if you tagged and categorize the post (so that content can be easily found)…

As you can see, our plugin is no more than a companion that looks into your content and helps you take care of its details. None of these checks is crucial or mandatory, but your addressing them is a way to improve, even if it’s only by a small fraction, the overall quality and appearance of your blog.

Nelio Content

I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.

Panozk

WordPress.org

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The All-in-One Solution You Need

Before creating Nelio Content, we considered using other tools and plugins that might serve us too. For instance, we looked at Edit Flow as an option for integrating an Editorial Calendar in our WordPress sites. But, as Jeff perfectly described in WPTavern, the plugin hadn’t been updated for over 2 years! Sure, sure, it was updated a few months ago, now, but look at the changelog—two tiny bug fixes and new internationalization Strings ?

On the other hand, there’s plenty of tools out there to promote your content on social networks, being Hootsuite or Buffer two well-known examples. But, as I already described, none of them fitted our needs properly—you have to keep switching tabs and copying-and-pasting stuff around! And if you’re thinking about some of the plugins available for tweeting your content or sharing it on Facebook… we also thought we could do better.

If you try very hard, you might be able to find a setup that works for you—use this external tool here, install these three other plugins over there, connect this and that using ifttt… What’s great about WordPress and the web in general is its endless possibilities! But if your’re like me, you’re probably way past all of this and you want things that just work out of the box.

I believe Nelio Content is a great plugin because it unifies all the tools you need. You don’t have to bloat your WordPress installation with multiple plugins and hope for the best. You don’t need to learn external tools. You don’t have to spend your time in finding creative ways to automate your tasks. Nelio Content takes care of all of this.

The only requirement we have for this plugin is the following: “all the features included in Nelio Content should either automate a task or help you complete it faster.” And I think that, right now, we’re nailing it! ?

Other Problems?

Do you have other problems that I didn’t include in my list? Do you think Nelio Content should assist you in other tasks? Let me know in the comments!