Often, one of the hardest parts of managing a blog or content strategy is simply sticking to a consistent timeline.
Working in content marketing, you probably already rely on scheduling tools, especially if you have hundreds of posts to manage. So, why not have this capability built straight into your WordPress website?
SchedulePress is a WordPress plugin that allows publishers to create automated publishing schedules. You can specify the number of articles to publish and at what time for each day of the week.
Publishers can manage schedules using the visual calendar and automatically publish to social accounts.
That may sound like just what you need, but there’s a lot to consider before investing in SchedulePress.
Among others, you need to consider the usability, pricing, and whether or not you’ll find the features useful. We cover all of these aspects in the sections below.
Quick Navigation:
- Who is SchedulePress Pro for
- How to Use SchedulePress Pro
- How to Create a Manual Publishing Schedule
- How to Create an Automatic Publishing Schedule
- How to Use the Missed Post Scheduler
- How to Enable Social Sharing
- How to Use the Schedule Calender
- Conclusion
Who is SchedulePress Pro for?
SchedulePress Pro is for anyone who regularly publishes a large amount of content.
That makes it a superb option for content writers, editors, and marketers as well as strategists, blog owners, and community managers.
If you run a hobby blog or small business website, you’ll still find the free version useful. It comes with a visual schedule calendar, management dashboard, notifications, and social sharing tools.
However, if you manage a busier schedule or larger amounts of content, you’ll want to invest in one of the premium packages.
These come with advanced features, like an automatic publishing schedule, social sharing, missed post scheduler, and dynamic social templates.
If you have a single site, the Individual plan is an affordable option at $39 with 1-year of support and updates.
If you manage multiple websites for yourself, or on behalf of clients, you’ll want to consider the Business or Lifetime Unlimited packages.
Both allow you to use SchedulePress on an unlimited number of websites. The Business plan costs $149 for 1-year of support and updates and the Lifetime Ultimate plan $279 with no renewal required.
Top Features
- Automatic Posts Scheduler: SchedulePress’s main feature is the ability to schedule posts to be automatically published according to a weekly schedule. This eliminates a lot of manual work keeping track of deadlines and publishing posts yourself.
- Missed Schedule Handler: Posts sometimes miss their publishing slot due to oversight or technical glitches. If you enable this feature, it will automatically pick up missed posts and schedule them for the next available slot.
- Schedule Calendar: SchedulePress comes with a visual calendar to quickly give you an overview of your publishing schedule. You can create and schedule new posts right on the calendar and customize it using drag and drop capabilities.
- Auto Social Sharing: If enabled, SchedulePress will automatically publish posts to your connected social media accounts as well. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn accounts and SchedulePress will automatically tailor posts for each platform using dynamic social templates.
How to Use SchedulePress Pro?
Ok, so you probably can’t wait to use this SchedulePress to make scheduling your posts quicker and easier. First, you’ll need to buy SchedulePress and install it on your WordPress site.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll see you can access SchedulePress from the lefthand menu and that the dashboard looks like this:
Next, we’ll go through how to use some of SchedulePress’ most important features step-by-step:
How to Create a Manual Publishing Schedule
From within the SchedulePress dashboard, navigate to the “Manage Schedule” tab. Here you can find both the Automatic and Manual scheduling tools.
To use the Manual Scheduler, just enable it with the toggle:
Now, you can start to manually set dates and times when content should be published. To do that, simply choose a day of the week from the “Select Days” dropdown and a time from the “Select Time” dropdown.
When you’ve chosen a date and time, click the “Save Schedule” button and it will add the date and time combination to the weekly schedule.
You can have multiple publishing times per day. For example, here we chose two publishing times (3:00 and 5:00 PM) for Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays as well as one publishing time (6:30 AM) for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays:
Remember to click the “Save Settings button at the bottom of the page to save your changes.
You can set individual posts to publish during one of your manual publishing slots. To do that, open up the post in the WordPress editor.
In the righthand settings menu find “Schedule at” and then check one of the publishing times. Click the blue “Schedule” button and you’re all set:
You can set specifically set individual posts to publish during one of your automatic publishing windows. To do that, open up the post in the WordPress editor.
In the settings menu find “Schedule at” and then select one of the publishing times. Click the blue “Schedule” button and you’re all set
How to Create an Automatic Publishing Schedule
You’ll find the Automatic Schedular just to the left of the Manual Schedular under the “Manage Schedule” tab. Enable it with the toggle (which will also disable the manual Scheduler)
The Automatic Scheduler works a bit differently. You have to specify how many posts you want to publish each day of the week.
Then, you set a time period during which SchedulePress will randomly choose and publish the posts.
How to Use the Missed Post Scheduler
Once again, go to the “Manage Schedule” tab inside of the SchedulePress dashboard. If you scroll down, you’ll see the “Activate Missed Schedule” toggle below the “Manual Scheduler” tool. Just enable it by clicking the toggle:
If a post was not published at its scheduled time for any reason, SchedulePress will now automatically publish it during the next available window
How to Enable Social Sharing
To enable social sharing, you will need to connect SchedulePress to your social accounts. To do this, go to the “Social Profile” tab in the SchedulePress dashboard.
Here, you’ll find tabs to connect your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn accounts. Click the toggle to enable social sharing for each option you want
Click the “Add New Profile” button to start connecting to social account. You will need to generate an access token to connect your accounts.
You can find a link to detailed documentation with step-by-step instructions for each social platform:
Remember to click the “Save Settings” button when you’re done.
How to Use the Schedule Calender
To open the calendar, just go to SchedulePress -> Calendar from your WordPress dashboard.
This is where you can get an overview of all your scheduled and unscheduled posts as well as some quick links to manage these posts with the help of a visual calendar:
If you mouse over a scheduled post, you’ll see some quick options. You can go edit the post in the WordPress editor, quick edit it in the calendar, delete, or view the post.
To the left, you’ll see all your unscheduled posts and be able to create new ones.
Posts can be dragged and dropped to different dates or moved between the schedule calendar and the unscheduled posts.
You can create new posts by clicking “Add New” on the specified date. You can then add a title, content, and the time it should be published at:
This will also create an actual WordPress post that you can find under “Posts” in the WordPress dashboard.
Conclusion: How to Create a Publishing Schedule With SchedulePress Pro
So, this is our step-by-step guide to help you get up and running with SchedulePress. By following this guide, you’ll be one step closer to being able to manage your hectic publishing schedule with ease.
Once you have SchedulePress set up, you will be able to automatically publish posts to your blog and social media accounts, reschedule missed posts, and be able to manage everything from a handy visual calendar.
How do you manage a busy publishing schedule with a large amount of content on your WordPress website? Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences below.
If you found this guide useful, help others as well by sharing this post on media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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