Posts Tagged "WordPress"

Arkli: Finally, a Social Media Manager I Can Get Behind

Posted by Erin Blaskie on Jul 11, 2011 in blog | 13 comments

A few weeks ago, I was approached by Mike Potter of Arkli.  He wanted to get me on the phone to show me the latest and greatest in social media campaign managers.  I nearly blew him off.  I get a TON of requests to review and look at web tools and most of them end up being a tool that will not provide value to my day-to-day life.

Mike and I scheduled a time to chat and he started showing me Arkli in action via webinar.  It was probably the fifth or sixth minute in that I wanted to just tell him, “Stop talking. Where do I sign up?!”  I begged Mike to let me be the one to share the tool with the world because seriously, you’re all going to thank me later… and I love mint chocolate anything and my shoe size is a 7.5!  Just saying.

Arkli is a tool that lets you manage your social media campaigns.  I know, I know.  You’ve seen and heard it all when it comes to managing social media right?  Wrong.  SO wrong.

What Arkli Does

Arkli lets you import all of your social media accounts, your blogs, your e-mail marketing program (they have a short list right now but it does include MailChimp*!  Win!), your YouTube account and your Google Analytics into the interface. Once all of your accounts are in the system and setup, you now have the ultimate power tool in your hands.

Arkli connects seamlessly to WordPress to allow you to craft a blog post.  Then, with the click of a button, you can turn your blog post into a Tweet using whichever account you want.  Then, with the click of another button, you can turn it into a Facebook update.  Then, you can retweet yourself from a different account (yes, with the click of a button) and you can have it all tracked in their nifty built-in statistics tracker.

Not only that, the tool has ways to manipulate current websites for your full advantage.  For example, let’s say that you want to have a blog post hit your blog next Wednesday but there is a YouTube video that you want to embed in the post too.  Well, you can use Arkli to upload your video to YouTube BUT it won’t appear on YouTube until the time and date specified.  It’s automagical.

In the past, bloggers would have to schedule their post in WordPress, setup some Tweets and Facebook status updates in Hootsuite, upload their video to YouTube but make sure it is set to private, set a reminder for the day the blog post is due to make YouTube video public, edit the WordPress post to have the proper YouTube embed code and hope you remember to do it before the post goes live.

Who Would Benefit from Arkli

This tool is going to benefit anyone that uses social media and blogging.  Having the ability to preschedule your blogs in the same location that you generate your Tweets and Facebook status updates is a huge time saver. 

Here is my short list of who will benefit from this:

• Bloggers (when you get asked to review a product/service, being able to setup the entire campaign and share it with your sponsor is a professional way to present yourself)
• Social media users (allows you to provide more value, more often with less time and money spent)
• Business owners (setup product / service promotions via Arkli)
• Affiliate managers (imagine setting up your entire event/product promotion in Arkli and then sharing that with your affiliates so that they can setup their own promotional pieces off of content you’ve already built?!)
• Joint venture partners (finally you’ll have one place to create content and share it with a succinct message)

A Peek Inside

I am pretty convinced that the description above is not going to be enough… you won’t be able to see the full awesomeness of the tool without seeing the inside.  So, I’m going to show you how easy it will make your life in the following screenshots.  These screens were taken as I was writing and scheduling this blog post and associated media.

Following screenshot shows the social media campaign interface once you’ve added a blog post to it.

The next screenshot shows the Twitter / Facebook additions.

As you can see, it is super simple to create social media updates from your existing content.  In fact, I copy and paste from my blog post to create the updates so that I do not lose the integrity of my message.  In the Tweet (above screenshot) section, you can see that I have a retweet option as well which means my other social media accounts can get in on the action too.  Thus multiplying my reach.

As you build your campaign, your reach figures increase at the bottom of the screen.

This is a great way for you to see just how many people will be reached with your own outreach.  This doesn’t take into consideration the number of people you have reading your blog but it does include all numbers from your social media accounts.

The Advanced Functions

Arkli also has some advanced functionality that I am really enjoying.  

The first one that I love is the ability to share campaigns.  What does that mean?  Well, let’s say you are writing a blog post like this one.  A review of a product / service or maybe even an interview or perhaps a podcast.  Whenever your post is involving other people, you can share the campaign with them ahead of time and if they have an Arkli account (even at the free level!) they can, from your campaign, schedule their own retweets and tweets.

The second thing I am loving is the statistics that I can see and review per campaign.  If I am doing a blog post and I want to see the reach, clicks, etc. Arkli will compile that for me.  Not only will I be able to see the statistics within the program, I’ll also get an e-mail at the end of the campaign which summarizes how well it did.

What’s Missing

Now, it wouldn’t be a fair review if I didn’t point out a few things that are on my wish list for Arkli.  However, Mike has been super receptive to hearing these ideas and has promised to add in the suggestions that will add true value for multiple users.

1. A calendar of scheduled items — there is the main campaign calendar which shows you the overview of what is going to post when but when you are inside, editing a campaign, there isn’t a way to see this easily.  For now though, opening your campaign calendar in a separate tab works for me.
2. A way to upload photos within the blog editor — right now I am uploading photos via my own blog in a separate tab and then just using the add full image URL function for images.  They did have the functionality to upload an image present but it’s disappeared again so I can’t wait for that to come back.
3. An indexed list of past, present and future campaigns — I’d love a simple list, off the calendar grid, that showed the list of past, present and future campaigns so I could easily click through to edit them.  In fact, it’d be awesome if the list showed the campaigns, had an edit button next to it and beside that a stats button for easy access to the stats.

To Close

Arkli is a tool that I am going to be recommending to ALL of our clients immediately.  In fact, I don’t want to work on anyone’s social media campaigns unless they are using this tool.  It is seriously that awesome.

If you have any questions about Arkli, its functionality or how I use it, please leave them as a comment.  I’d be more than happy to answer them!

Oh, now is the time that you run, not walk, over to Arkli’s website and sign up (at least get your free account going so you can play with it!)  If you like it, love it or are indifferent, comment that too!  Would love to be able to pass more feedback on to Mike and the team at Arkli.

Visit Arkli’s website here.

Follow Mike Potter (guy behind Arkli) here.

* I have used an affiliate link here.  If you prefer not to click through my affiliate link, simply Google the tool referenced.  Your karma score may go down a wee bit but in the grand scheme of things, we can still be friends.  Promise.

How to Embed YouTube Videos Into Blog Posts

Posted by Erin Blaskie on Jul 28, 2009 in Business Tips, How-To, Videos | 10 comments

This blog post will be short and to the point.

It will show you how to embed YouTube videos into blog posts.

• Create a New Blog Post and Switch to HTML View

• Copy the Embed Code from YouTube

• Paste Into the HTML View of Your Blog Post Editor

• Post!

Questions?  Post them as comments.

A Quick All-in-One SEO Plugin Check-In

Posted by Erin Blaskie on Jul 23, 2009 in How-To, Marketing, Web & Technology | 0 comments

You might remember that I am doing an experiment with All-in-One SEO Plug-in for WordPress.  If not, read that post here first.

So, I wanted to check in… two days later (and I’ve been barely blogging as often as I was) and the results are already looking pretty good.

Before

Two Days Later

So, we’ve increased our rank by 200,000 or so in the past two days and people are spending 0.1 seconds longer on the site.

Very cool… Stay tuned for more results as time goes on.

How I Created a Blog in 1 Hour

Posted by Erin Blaskie on Jul 21, 2009 in blog, Events, How-To, Videos | 4 comments

Another video in the series. Watch me design a blog site in 1 hour.

Check out the blog I designed in an hour at www.BloggingSOS.com.

Does All-in-One SEO Actually Help Blogs? #bdb09

Posted by Erin Blaskie on Jul 21, 2009 in Internet Marketing, Resources, Web & Technology | 4 comments

In my last Blog Design Bootcamp 2.0 class, the question was asked about how much SEO I do and which plug-ins would I recommend.  Now, I’ve never done a day of SEO in my life aside from just using WordPress tags and categories that make sense and writing on topic.  Seriously.  Never spent a dime.

Interestingly, my websites never seemed to suffer due to it.  Check out www.bsetc.ca on Alexa:

Now, since this blog is already established, I’m not going to try to work any Alexa magic on it with All-in-One SEO. In fact, I’m going to use this very blog you are on right now.  This blog is new — not even three weeks old (I just imported a lot of old posts to it from other blogs in an effort to consolidate my blogging) so here is the Alexa rating screenshot for THIS blog.

So, for the next month, I’m going to implement All-in-One SEO and see where my Alexa rating is in one month. Then, I’ll check it in three months.  Now, to be fair… I’m going to have a lot to do with my own Alexa rating through the use of tags, categories and frequency of posting here.  I know this and will take this into consideration.  I also have Google Analytics so I can see how people are coming to the blog and rule out some of my own traffic generation via social media and the like.

If you use this plug-in, what have your results been like?  Are you measuring or testing traffic?