Missinglettr: Easily Drive Traffic To Your Blog Posts

I was asked to give a short talk on blogging on Tuesday evening at the WordPress Glasgow meetup.

Amongst the things I talked about was tools and plugins that I find useful for blogging.

One tool I’ve been using since May this year is Missinglettr for blog promotion.

What does Missinglettr do?

The name doesn’t really give it away, but Missinglettr’s job is to automate the social promotion of your blog posts to save you time and deliver more traffic.

In effect, it’s like Hootsuite or Buffer on steroids. Imagine your post being promoted on social media over the course of a whole year!

.@Missinglettr is like Hootsuite or Buffer on steroids. Imagine your blog post being promoted on social media over the course of a whole year! Click To Tweet

As of today, I have had 877 clicks through Missinglettr campaigns. That’s 877 site visits I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Missinglettr plans and pricing

Visit Missinglettr.com to sign up for a plan.

As an individual, you can sign up for free to try it out, or take out a 14 day free trial of their Personal or Business plans.

Pricing is also available for teams. I was lucky enough to get lifetime access to their Small Team plan through AppSumo, normally $65/month.

The more expensive plans have advantages:

• Connect more social profiles
• More control over branding
• Upload custom images to your social content
• Post analytics
• Create campaigns for past blog posts as well as new ones

Onboarding at Missinglettr

I was really impressed with the way Missinglettr onboard new users. Everything was explained in a step-by-step format.

Watch the video

View a short video explaining how Missinglettr works.

Create a profile

Upload your profile photo.

Link your site

Tell Missinglettr the name, type and URL of your site.

That’s enough to let Missinglettr discover your content, but there’s still a little bit more work to do.

Your social profiles

To send content to your social networks, you need to enter and authorise the social profiles you want to use to promote your content.

Social networks supported at the moment are:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. LinkedIn
4. Google+

Pinterest is coming soon.

Hashtags can be sent out with your content. You have the choice of turning them on or off for each social profile.

Your schedule

Choose your timezone and the days of the week you want to send out social posts.

You can exclude days e.g. weekends.

You can also blacklist certain dates. For example, I’ve decided not to send any content out on Christmas Day. I reckon most people will be scoffing Christmas dinner, opening presents or logging on to the winter sales that day!

Then pick the times you want to send posts.

I don’t think there’s a limit on the number of times you can send a post in one day, but use common sense. It’s more appropriate to send out more content for e.g. Twitter than other social networks. Remember people will get bored if all they see from you is your stuff!

How does Missinglettr produce your social content?

When you publish a new post, Missinglettr detects it and automatically creates a new social campaign for you automatically.

You’ll get an email saying that your campaign is ready.

That’s your cue to log in and review it.

Review your Missinglettr campaign

Each campaign has 3 steps:

1. Add hashtags
2. Review content
3. Approve campaign

Hashtags

Missinglettr will suggest hashtags based on your content.

The more popular a hashtag is, the more red blobs it has. Missingletter suggest using 1-3 hashtags. I usually delete most of the suggestions and use one or two. In this instance, I just kept #WordPress.

Review content

This is the fun part! Missinglettr has auto-generated your social posts. Here’s where you can check and amend the content.

The content is set to run on the following days:

• Day 0 (the day your campaign starts)
• Day 3
• Day 7
• Day 14
• Day 30
• Day 90
• Day 180
• Day 270
• Day 365

The first few posts have wording such as:

• Check out our new article!
• Hot off the press!
• In case you missed it

Use the arrows to alter the suggested content, or the Edit content link on the bottom right to write your own words. This is a good idea if you are adding an older post.

For items with image quote bubbles, use the arrows to change the quote:

You can also use an image instead of a quote. Images are picked up from your post and you can cycle through them. If you’re on any of the paid plans, you can upload your own images too.

Finally, if you don’t want images or quotes at all, use the “Just Text” option.

On the left-hand side, you can see the social profiles you’ve connected.

Unfortunately, you can’t post to Facebook automatically. You need to manually assign content. Initially you’ll see a red dot on the Facebook profile. Simply click on the F icon and you can auto-add your content or write your own and the dot will change to green. Remember to do this with all your posts!

All done? Click the Finished? Final step button to finalise your campaign.

Approve campaign

Almost done!

If you want to change the start date, or have the campaign stop on a specific date, you can do it here.

Also, if you need someone’s approval to run the campaign, you can enter their email address to have them review it before it begins. This is handy if you’re managing someone else’s social media.

Now Activate Campaign to start your drip marketing campaign, sit back and relax…

What could Missinglettr improve upon?

I have found a few glitches with Missinglettr, mainly to do with campaign setup.

Speed of campaign generation

Content is usually picked up pretty quickly after publication, but occasionally it takes more than a few hours.

One way around this is to add your posts manually. You’ll still have to wait a little while for the campaign to be generated for review, though.

Posting times

I’ve also found that depending on my posting schedule and when I add posts, my social posts haven’t always been sent when I expect.

When I publish a new post, I want it to be shared as quickly as possible. Occasionally the start date has been pushed over to the next day.

I would love to have a “Share Now” option – like Buffer has – to override the schedule.

I see that you can write individual posts in Calendar view by choosing the Add New Post option. I’m not sure if this overcomes the scheduling issues.

Alternative text for images

Another feature I’d like to see is the opportunity to add alternative text to images. Both Twitter and Buffer have enabled image descriptions as a feature. It would be nice to see Missinglettr add this to their product development roadmap too.

Verdict

Overall, I’ve been fairly happy with Missinglettr. It’s straightforward to use and a real time saver.

The Missinglettr team are actively developing the service. Recent improvements are listed in their changelog and their roadmap lists what we can expect in the future.

If you have any questions about the service you can reach a team member through Intercom chat while logged in.

Have you tried Missinglettr? Or do you know of a similar service? Let me know in the comments.

Category: Software & Tech Tags: blogging, scheduling, social media