Blog post written. Click publish. Done. Right?
Not if you actually care about how much traffic you get to your blog posts.
Too many content writers just hit publish on their post, and then adopt an ‘if you build it, they will come’ approach.
This is not what I am about personally and what we are about at Martini Technology. I want to show you a way that you can automate your content amplification efforts and still maintain a good level of quality.
Automate your content amplification
Before you get started, there are two things to note:
- Make sure you read and implement the tips given in this post. You’ll need four website headline variations for your blog post (minimum).
- This is done with a WordPress focus, however, you can apply the principles to any other blog CMS.
OK, so this system involves:
- Take your winning headline and use that as your blog post title & H1
- Your remaining headlines become your social media messages that will be used for automated sharing over time
- Using a few tools to automate this content delivery to your social channels
- Sit back and relax or get on with other work whilst your content is continually reshared over time
How does it work?
Instead of just sending your blog post to your social channels once, at the time of publishing like most social media-WordPress integrations. This system will then reshare your content at set intervals after the original publishing time.
It even works when you schedule posts to be published in the future.
| Standard integration | This automated content amplification system | |
| Post time | ✔️ Time of publishing | ✔️ Time of publishing ✔️ 3 hours later ✔️ 1 day later ✔️ 7 days later ✔️ 30 days later Plus others if you’d like |
| Ongoing | ✔️ Reposting every 30 days |
Each social post is different, so there can be something different that may appeal to different people, or at least, you’ll have a greater chance of getting more traffic by the shear fact that you’ve posted more times.
Now this is pure content amplification automation!
For an additional few minutes before publishing, you can share your blog post every month for the next year. Click To TweetWhat tools do we need?
There are two ways of doing this, one that uses a monthly paid-for tool called Coschedule and one that uses a couple of WordPress plugins.
Before you get started though, one of the WordPress plugins has a free and a paid version, starting at $39 per year. The difference is the free one will only use the blog title as your social media message, whereas the paid one allows for different messages to be posted for the same blog post.
The first way, you can head to their website and try it out yourself if you’d like. For this post though, I’m going to focus on the second one.
Buffer
Start by getting yourself a free Buffer account. Unless you want to post to more than three social networks, then a free Buffer account will be absolutely fine for our needs.
If you’re not familiar with Buffer, it is a social media scheduling and posting tool that takes feeds from RSS & certain tools, then posts them to the desired social networks when scheduled.
In Buffer, you’ll need to connect your desired social accounts. For example, we’ve connected our Twitter, Facebook page and LinkedIn page.
Then head to the settings section to set up the desired times that you would like to post anything that comes via your Buffer feed. These times are up to you, whenever you think you’ll hit the right times with your audience.
I’d also recommend that you head to the settings page and enable UTM tracking for Google Analytics. You’ll need to do this for each network you attach.
Whilst you’re at it, you may want to download our free UTM link builder template.
Once you’ve got this all set up, all we need now is to connect your blog to send posts to Buffer to then be published.
Hot tip: Buffer doesn’t limit the number of post sources you have, so feel free to add more, like in the bonus trick below.
WordPress plugin: Advanced Custom Fields
If you’ve decided to just use the free solution, then don’t worry about this plugin and skip to the next section. Otherwise, read on.
You need to install and activate the Advanced Custom Fields plugin.
This plugin is what we’ll be using for our subsequent social media messages that we’ll use to share our content.
Once it is installed, head to your WordPress admin page > Custom Fields > Field Groups and create a group. I used the title Social messages for posts.
Give the settings a review to make sure everything seems logical. For reference, this is what we use:
Then, add minimum four new text fields with the following attributes:
- Field label: Message #, e.g.
Message 1 - Field ID: message_#, e.g.
message_1 - Decide how many messages will need to be required when publishing a post. I’d recommend your first two messages, with anything further being optional
- Given Twitter’s 280 character limit, I recommend that you set the character limit to
255so you have space in the message for the link (23 characters) with a bit of breathing room - Click Update to save your changes
When you’ve got this setup, you should now see a metabox for your social messages below the main content section of your WordPress post editing screen. Something like this:
Now that we have the ability to add our different social media messages on our post, all we need to do now is to connect this up with our Buffer account.
WordPress plugin: WP to Buffer
Now is the time that you need to decide if you are to use the free or paid versions of the WP to Buffer plugin. Starting at $39 per year, you can:
- Post more than one message per blog post
- Post to more than Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
- You can repost older posts over time
- Do other things, but they are less relevant for our purpose
FYI, we don’t make any money if you decide to use the paid version, we just recommend it because we use it.
Free version
If you will be using the free version, then install and activate the plugin and head to WordPress admin > WP to Buffer > Settings and connect your Buffer account.
Head to the posts section, then you can add further posts after the initial publication date.
As you cannot edit the message used, you would be advised to have at least seven days between each social post, especially as Twitter doesn’t let you have the exact same tweet within a seven day period.
I’d suggest for each post:
- Post immediately
- Post at a custom time, 7 days & 5 minutes after publishing
- Post at a custom time, 14 days & 10 minutes after publishing
- Post at a custom time, 21 days & 15 minutes after publishing
- Post at a custom time, 28 days & 20 minutes after publishing
So now, once you’ve clicked publish on your blog post, you now have five new social posts, designed to amplify your traffic.
Paid version
Similarly, once you’ve installed, activated and verified the plugin with your licence, you need to head to WordPress admin > WP to Buffer Pro > Settings and connect your Buffer account.
Then go to the posts section. Here you’ll need to select the advanced custom fields that we set up earlier.
Then, set up each message similar to the below, just adjusting the delay as per the recommended or your desired posting schedule.
The recommended posting schedule, as mentioned above and assuming you’ve gone with four custom fields for messages:
- Post immediately
- Post 3 hours later
- Post 1 day later
- Post 7 days later
- Post 30 days later
If you’ve got more messages, then add them in at different times on the schedule.
You should also go to WP to Buffer Pro > Settings > Repost Settings and activate this.
Make sure you look at the settings in the post tab to ensure that you don’t flood your followers with the same content all the time, so set something like a minimum of 30 days before the same content can be reposted.
And voila, your posts will now be shared via social media, from now into eternity, assuming your site stays up and no connections or plugins expire.
Bonus trick: add further curated content to you Buffer feed
I mentioned before, that you can have multiple sources that feed into Buffer. They just limit how many posts you can have queued up to post to your channels.
In order to seamlessly automate curated content to one of your social channels, take a look at Quuu. Their free plan allows you to post to one of your three social networks in Buffer.
Here, you can select what topics you’re interested in, then select what social network that you’d like to post this content to, then sit back and relax and watch the content go rolling out.
If you found this post on content amplification useful, we’d really appreciate it if you’d share it online. Thanks in advance 😃!
Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash
