How to Schedule a Post in WordPress

Posted on February 4, 2016 by

Here’s a quick how-to post detailing how to schedule a post in WordPress. Essential knowledge for regular bloggers, those that host blog tours, or if you’re going to be away from the computer for a few days. It means you can simply set up your post, then forget about it until it goes live. (Please note: Occasionally, WordPress will miss schedule with a post, so please keep an eye out for that. But it’s incredibly rare.)

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1. Log into your WordPress site as you would normally, then navigate to create a new post.

2. Write your post as you would normally.

3. Under the ‘publish’ box, click ‘edit’ next to the part that says ‘publish immediately’ and you’ll see a series of pull down lists and boxes where you can enter the date and time you’d like the post to publish. Fill them in with the date and time you want to schedule your post for.

4. Click ‘OK’, then click the ‘schedule’ button.

5. You’re all set! Navigate back to your ‘posts’ menu, and you’ll see your scheduled post sitting above your already-published posts with a message next to the post title saying ‘scheduled’ and the date over on the right hand side so you can see at a glance when it’s scheduled for.

If you found this article useful, please consider sharing it with others. Thank you!

How to Schedule a Post in Blogger

Posted on December 30, 2015 by

Here’s a quick how-to post detailing how to schedule a post in Blogger. Essential knowledge for regular bloggers, those that host blog tours, or if you’re going to be away from the computer for a few days. It means you can simply set up your post, then forget about it until it goes live. (Please note: Occasionally, Blogger will miss schedule with a post, so please keep an eye out for that. But it’s incredibly rare.)

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1. Log in to your Blogger blog as normal, and click to create a new post.

2. Compile your post as normal. Then, when you’re done, click ‘schedule’ on the right hand side and it will open up this drop down menu. Select the date and time you want the post to go live (be sure to double check the time zone your blog is set up for, if the post needs to be live at a certain time), then click ‘done’.

3. The drop down menu will close, and the date and time you selected will be stored, ready to go. Click ‘publish’.

4. You’ll then be pinged back to your list of blog posts. Right there, in the list, will be your scheduled blog post, sitting there ready to go for whenever you’ve set it up. Voila!

If you found this article useful, please consider sharing it with others. Thank you!

How To Tag Another Page on your Facebook Page

Posted on November 24, 2015 by

Tagging is a great tool on Facebook – it’s a way of sharing the love, encouraging people to go and check out other pages relevant to yours. The pages you tag will also see that you’ve tagged them, and will hopefully respond in kind. It’s also rumoured that Facebook looks favourably upon pages that tag other pages. Obviously they change their mystical algorithms all the time, but it can’t hurt to try…

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So here’s how:

1. Navigate to your page (and remember I’m talking about your business/fan page here, NOT your profile):

2. Start compiling your message, but stop writing just before where you want to tag another page:

3. Input the @ symbol and start typing the name of the page you want to tag. Various options will start popping up as you type. Make sure you choose the correct one – as you can see, I’m given two options here as there are pages with similar names. Select the one you want and a link will be added to your message:

4. The link is added to the page you’ve selected. You can then continue writing your message. When you’re done, click ‘Publish.’

5. You’ll then end up with your message, with the other page tagged as a live link. Hover over it for more information on the page, and click through to test out your new-found page tagging skills!

NOTE: It can sometimes be tricky to tag pages if they have an unusual name, or there are lots of other similar pages, and so on. A tip that sometimes helps is to go to the page you want to tag and look at their address in the search bar of your browser. It doesn’t always work, but if you input the name however you find it written in the search bar, that can help Facebook to find and tag the correct page. If a page hasn’t set their dedicated URL – for example http://www.facebook.com/lucyfelthousewriter and still has the default one, i.e. http://www.facebook.com/lotsofnumbersandgobbledegookhere it can make things seriously tricky. So avoid that on your own page, and make sure to set up your dedicated URL ASAP.

If you found this article useful, please consider sharing it with others. Thank you!

How to Schedule a Post on your Facebook Page

Posted on October 13, 2015 by

(Click any of the screenshots in this article to enlarge them)

NOTE: A Facebook page is different to your Facebook profile. This article applies only to pages. You can’t schedule on profiles.

1. Navigate to your page on Facebook.

2. Compile your message as normal in the Status box.

3. Click the little white down arrow next to the Publish button. Click Schedule.

4. Select the date and time you want the post to go live. Click Schedule.

5. And you’re done! Up until the time your scheduled post goes live, you’ll see a box towards the top of your page where you can access your scheduled posts.

6. Click See Post to view all the posts you have scheduled. From here you can also edit or delete them if you wish.

Happy Scheduling!

Lucy

Creating a Universal Amazon Link for your Book

Posted on September 10, 2015 by

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It’s a pet hate of mine when authors post book links and only include an Amazon US link. Yes, it’s the biggest market. I get that. But there are lots more of us all over the world who shop at Amazon and might want to buy your books – so make it easy for us – and yourself.

First step – sign up for BookLinker. Create your account, and when it’s all sorted and ready to go, carry on reading.

1. Navigate to your page on Amazon (it doesn’t matter whether it’s UK, US, CA or wherever…)

2. Select the entirety of the link in the address bar, and copy it (just like you’d copy and paste anything else)

3. Open a new tab/window, and navigate to Booklinker.net. Then go to the ‘create link’ page. Paste your link into the space provided, and hit ‘create universal link.’

4. You’ll then be prompted to select a prefix from the drop down menu on the left. Do that, selecting your preferred prefix. Then type your preferred suffix in the box next to it. When you’re happy, click ‘create link.’

5. That’s it! It really is as simple as that. You don’t have to worry too much about remembering the URL, because it’ll always be stored in your BookLinker account. All you have to do to access the menu is use that little blue box with the three white lines in the top-right hand corner.

6. Now go on… share your link with the world! People will click on it and automatically be directed to their local Amazon store. And the best part? Log back into BookLinker afterwards and you’ll be able to see statistics for where in the world people are when clicking your links. You’ll be surprised…

As well as for books, this also works for your Amazon author page. And, for those of you that are members of Amazon’s affiliate scheme, be sure and visit the ‘My Account’ page, scroll down and enter your affiliate tags to increase your earnings potential.

Happy Linking!

Lucy

What Is Thunderclap and Why Use It?

Posted on October 21, 2014 by

I’m sure some of you have seen messages and notes about Thunderclap floating around the web and wondered what it is. I know I’ve had several clients ask me about it, which is why I’m writing this post.

Basically, it is a free promotional tool (though there are paid options you can explore) to help you get the word out about something. For the purposes of this post, I’ll use books as an example, as it’s what I deal with.

You sign up for a free account at Thunderclap.it, and follow the simple instructions to set up your campaign. Use graphics from your book if you can, as that way you’re increasing visibility of your book to those that click through to support your campaign. Spend some time crafting your message, adding some relevant hashtags if you’ve got room – bear in mind that this message will go out once and hopefully to an awful lot of people, so you want it to have punch, something to really make people want to click on the link you’ve provided. I’d also recommend only opting for 100 supporters the first time around – it sounds like a small number, especially if you have lots of social media savvy friends, but it’s tougher than you think to get people to click that link.

Once you’re happy with what you’ve done, submit your campaign and wait for Thunderclap to approve it (you can speed this process up by paying, but I’ve never done this). Then, when approval arrives, the really hard work begins. You have to get supporters.

Supporters are the whole point of Thunderclap – they’re the ones that are signing up to send out your message on the date and time you’ve selected. I think, since Thunderclap is fairly new, that people may be shying away from supporting Thunderclaps as they don’t fully understand what it means. So, in a nutshell, here goes: supporters are pledging to help you, by donating a Tweet, a Facebook status or a Tumblr post (or indeed, any combination of those three). That’s all. They’ll see the message they’re pledging to send out, hit those support buttons, and, providing you get enough supporters to “tip” the campaign, their social media account/s will automatically send out the message on the date and time you’ve selected.

The point of all this? Well, since we’re talking books – it’s to drive sales. If you have an upcoming book, you can set something up in advance to go out on your release date – then you’ve got a while to promote the Thunderclap, get your supporters and then you’ll get a big boost on social media on the day, which will hopefully get people clicking those buy buttons and pushing you up the respective retailer charts. Cool, huh?

There is more to it than just getting the supporters, though. Sorry to complicate matters 🙂 Ideally you need supporters that Tweet/share/Tumble about books in your genre – so in turn their followers/friends/etc are more likely to be interested in your book. Also, it goes without saying that the more followers/friends/readers your supporters have, the more people are likely to see your message once it goes out. So if you can attract people with a large reach on social media, all the better.

But to keep things simple, maybe start out small, and once you’ve dipped your toe in the Thunderclap water and seen how it all works – you can be more adventurous next time.

Bottom line: make sure you’ve crafted a powerful message to go out, that will catch people’s eyes and make them want to click. Then sit back and (hopefully) watch your sales increase.

Want to see how it works from a supporter’s angle? Here are three Thunderclaps you can sign up for (and I’d be grateful of your help):

Timeless Desire – M/F erotic romance story

Little Boxes – contemporary romance novel

To Rome with Lust – erotic romance novel

I hope this has helped you. Feel free to share far and wide on the web, to help people gain an understanding of how it works. If I get lots of questions and queries, I may do another article at a later date with more specifics.

Happy Promoting!

Lucy

Why Use Triberr?

Posted on March 13, 2014 by

Hi everyone,

I’m writing this post due to popular demand. I’ve had several clients ask me about Triberr, what it is, why they should be using it and how much time it will take up. I’ll do my best to answer these questions, and probably more, without writing a blog post that will be the same length as my latest novel 😉

Here goes…

1. What is Triberr?

Triberr is a type of social sharing site where a user will join “tribes” that are relevant to the content they create on their blogs. So, for example, I’m in several writing, erotica, erotic romance and romance-type tribes. Once a user’s account is set up correctly, their blog’s RSS feed will automatically add each new post into the streams of people who are in the same tribes as them. The idea of this is that because people in tribes share similar interests, the posts they will see in their streams are things they will want to share with their own followers. Which brings me neatly onto point #2.

2. Why should you be using it?

Because it increases your reach. Massively. At the time of writing this post, I have 5,653 Twitter followers. So when I go into Triberr and approve other people’s relevant posts (this is key for me. I don’t want to alienate my followers by Tweeting stuff about children’s books or young adult), they will automatically be Tweeted onto my account. Not all at once, but at intervals set by me, which are half an hour.

Imagine this reversed. Because each of my blog posts are fed into Triberr, they’ll appear on my tribemates’ feeds and they’ll share them. So without Triberr, my Tweets would be seen by 5,653 people and probably then by others because my followers have Retweeted me. But with Triberr, my blog posts are automatically fed to the Twitter feed of every tribemate that approved my post – and because I’m in tribes that are relevant to my work, this is most of them. So, depending on how many Twitter followers each of my tribemates has, you can see how much my reach increases. The biggest reach of the tribes that I’m in is 452,533 people! That’s HUGE!

3. How much time will it take up?

Not much is the short answer. If you simply join us as a member and don’t have a tribe of your own (there are currently enough tribes out there that you don’t need to worry about setting up your own), it’s a quick and easy thing. Now I have everything set up correctly, I probably spend ten minutes per day approving relevant posts. I know we’re all busy people, but this is a tiny portion of time compared to the potential benefits. Because if you’re seen to be active, to be approving other people’s posts, then they’ll approve yours, too. So where your blog posts might have only reached 6,000 followers beforehand, with Triberr this is multiplied many fold with a small amount of time on your part.

I realise this is a really, really short piece which doesn’t go into the nitty-gritty of setting up Triberr, finding tribes and so on, but as I said I didn’t want to write a novel in a blog post 😉 . Ultimately, even if you’re not technically-minded, once Triberr is set up, it’s just a matter of going in once a day, going to your stream and hovering over that share button for each post you want to share. Technology does the rest for you. If you don’t want to share a post, then click the hide link. You’ll soon get into a rhythm. Once your stream is empty, give yourself a pat on the back and move onto the next item on your to-do list. But don’t forget to watch traffic to your site increase, especially if you’ve taken the time to write engaging blog post titles – something I personally am working on improving, and am already seeing results.

So, there’s Triberr in brief. If I end up with lots more questions and feedback on this post, then I may well write another article in a couple of weeks about the more nitty-gritty side of things. Alternatively, you could just pay me to get you set up on Triberr then sit back and reap the rewards 😉

P.S. If you’re an erotica or erotic romance author and want to get started – come check out my tribe.

Increasing Reach on your Facebook Page

Posted on August 30, 2013 by

Here’s a handy tip for increasing reach on your Facebook page. “Reach” is Facebook’s word for how many people have seen your posts in their timelines. And I’m talking “fan” pages here, not profiles.

Normally, if you’re promoting book buy links, blog posts, etc, you’d type your message and the link into the box, then hit “post.” It’ll then go out and a percentage of the people that like your page will see it. To increase that number, give this a try:

Instead of posting the link in the same box as your text, try writing your text, then saying you’ll include the link in the comments. Post it, then post your link as a comment on that particular post. See screengrab:

Click to enlarge

I’ve tried this myself, and in the statistics of my page, it’s roughly tripling the number of people that see my posts. So it may take a few seconds more, but it’s worth it for that many more users to see what you’re posting.

I’m not 100% sure why Facebook do this, but I suspect it’s a) because they don’t want people linking out of Facebook, taking traffic away and b) because they want you to pay to use that “boost post” button. Can’t blame them for wanting to make sure cash out of page users, I suppose, but it’s pretty annoying as that’s the only way users are supposed to promote things, as opposed to on their personal profiles.

Give it a try. I hope it helps!

Using Twitterfeed to Promote Blog Posts

Posted on April 25, 2012 by

Do you spend ages Tweeting, Facebooking in LinkedIn-ing (think I just made up a new word there) your blog posts? Perhaps you contribute to several other blogs, as well as your own, and all that social networking takes up too much time. Time you could be using to plot, write or edit your next book!

Never fear, Twitterfeed is here. In a few simple steps, you can be letting Twitterfeed do all the hard work for you.

1. Go to Twitterfeed.com and sign up for an account.

2. Add your first feed by clicking ‘create new feed.’

3. Add the feed name and the URL, then click ‘test rss feed’ to make sure it works.

4. Click ‘advanced settings.’ Check each of the settings to make sure they’re what you want. The most useful I found, particularly if you contribute to a group blog, is ‘post prefix.’ That way you can add text to show that it’s from a blog you contribute to, but not necessarily your post. For example, I prefix with ‘From BlogName.’

5. Continue to step two. You now have three available services; Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Follow the steps to add the Twitter account you’d like to feed the blog posts to. Then repeat the same steps for Facebook and LinkedIn. Pay particular attention to the Facebook settings, as you have the option to post to your regular wall, or you can post to a page, instead.

6. When you’ve selected all the services you want to post to, click ‘All Done!’ and you’ll receive confirmation that your feed is set up and ready to post automatically.

7. Click to go to your dashboard, and you’ll see the feed you just set up, ready and raring to go. Simply repeat from number 2 on this post to add more feeds.

And there you have it! Effort free blog post promotion for yourself and your fellow bloggers!

What You Need To Know About Blog Tours

Posted on January 4, 2012 by

What is a blog tour?

A blog tour is a way to publicise you and your book. You write guest blog posts or answer interviews which are then posted on carefully chosen host blogs on a set date.

What are the advantages?

It’s great publicity which boosts sales! As you’ll be appearing on a different blog each day you have the chance to gain yourself new readers, let existing readers know about your new releases and get your work added to those all important to be read lists! You are given the opportunity to speak to readers and engage with them, increasing your chances of them checking out your books.

What is a guest blog post?

A guest blog post is where you write something that will be of interest to readers, whether it’s about your writing process, your characters, your inspiration, etc. These are then posted on a host blog along with your book cover and buy links to make readers aware of you and your work.

What should I write about?

See How To Write Guest Blog Posts for more information on this.

Should I write something new for each stop on the tour?

You don’t have to, though it’s highly recommended. Some tour hosts will insist that your content is unique as sending the same thing out to more than one blog has several drawbacks: the search engines penalise for duplicate content, meaning your post is less likely to be ranked highly; it looks like you can’t be bothered to write new content; there may be people following you on each stop of your tour and they won’t be happy to see the same posts appearing and with each new discussion you have more chance of drawing in different readers as you’re giving them a new ‘hook’ and making them interested in you and your work.

What happens after the post is made live?

The post will be publicised on social networks as outlined in the Blog Tour Packages information, but you will also need to publicise this yourself. Send emails to your friends, post something on your own blog and send out links via your own social networks. The more visitors you have, the better. Also, you must check back periodically to see if there have been any comments on your piece and answer them and any questions where applicable.

How long does a blog tour last?

That’s up to you. Packages range from one week to four. For more information, visit the Blog Tour Packages page.

What do I need to supply for a blog tour?

See Blog Tour Requirements for a list.

Your prices are all in GBP – does that mean you only work for UK authors?

No, though I’m in the UK so you’ll need to pay me in GBP. Use a free currency converter to find out the rough cost in your currency. Then you can use PayPal to send funds to me in GBP.

I want in. How do I go about booking a blog tour?

Visit the Blog Tour Calendar & Sign Up Page to find out what dates are available and send me your information.

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Category Archives: Hints & Tips

How to Schedule a Post in Blogger