Table of Contents Best travel hashtags for Instagram Every quarter I go back to my last 3 months checking what’s happened in my Social environments. Have I been using the best travel hashtags for Instagram? How can I improve my work and my reach this year? In the last quarter, I have been quite happy with the … Read more
In the last year my Instagram followers went from a thousand to almost 40K. Am I happy? Yes, I am because I can show my photography work to more people. It’s also an injection of self confidence in what I love to do, which is making photos around the world. Does it mean that you … Read more
Table of Contents Travel blogging for money – An analysis on 50 well known travel blogs Travel blogging for money is today’s chimera. Who has not dreamt to spend the life travelling and writing and/or photographing the world. Can you actually do it? Is it possible to live a life on the go, as a digital … Read more
Sometime it is a good idea to go back to your website and check the performance. It is like doing a step backward, or taking a pause, to make 2 steps forward. I was checking my website and it was getting too slow. I could not understand why. It is a photo blog and, by its definition, there are lots of images, however newspapers online load up almost immediately.
I started digging on the website performance and I found out that Google has new rules and it rates websites not only on content but also on loading speed. Being visible on the internet is not an easy task and being slow is today considered to be a bad indicator not only for your visitors but also for the search engines
I spent few days on my website and, well, I found out so many things I could actually improve. Not an easy task in few cases, but the end result is quite amazing. I have reduced the loading time by almost 80% and more, in some cases. All the changes
PostCron – Plan your marketing on Facebook and Twitter
Managing all the connections and links with the social networking can be time consuming. Meanwhile I quite enjoy post-processing, I find the social side of that laborious. Do not keep me wrong here. I like talking with other people through Facebook, but keep writing on a daily basis posts is “challenging”. Sometime I have few comments ready to be published, or few pictures but I do not really want to publish all of them in one go. I looked for different solutions in the market. I wanted an app to schedule my posts, so that I could prepare few of them in advance, from time to time.
The initial criteria’s were quite standard:
Had to be free, at least for the start. If I like it I will keep using it, otherwise, sorry I move on. If I see a good result, than I can upgrade to a next level
Had to be almost ads free. I did not want to add advertisement to my friends page. That could be quite dangerous. A link back is ok of course.
Had to be simple, very similar to Facebook, just with the schedule button, date and time, that’s all I needed
Had to include photo posting, essential for my photoblog
I looked around and I found different application available. The market is somehow saturated of web based apps or even mobile apps, both Iphone and Android.
I started my research based on what was offered first for free. That was an easy way to cut a part of the market. I believe that every software should be modular. You install it, you test it, and you start working. You need a new functionality, you pay a little premium and you get it. You see good results coming from the tool? Ok, it is time to move to the next level.
I found few software that took a long time to load on my web browser and with questionable results at the end. I just wondered why sometime it is so difficult to write a simple code, or better say a simple web page. And that it where I was most fascinated by PostCron. This is the main page of this site:
This is not a copy and paste of part of the monitor, cutting of all the ads.
No, this is the full page, as simple as that. Once you write and schedule your post, they come out below and, in case you have many of them, you can do a quick search through them. This is quite useful if you tend to post a good amount of articles. In case you have more fan pages, a simple drop down menu helps you selecting the desired one, both when you post and when you search back a publication.
Publishing a status, a link or a photo is exactly the same as posting on Facebook, which means the learning curve for this application is about four seconds, just because you need to select the fan/person page. And that is exactly the same if you want to create a Facebook ad.
Another feature that most of the other apps were lacking, was a real photo posting. If I schedule a photo posting, I want my photo to go in the default album and the comment related to it. I do not want the photo posted in somebody else database with my link on my fan page pointing another site, I do not think it is fair. PostCron is fantastic in that, because works as on Facebook leaving the photo in my default album.
I am still missing one functionality in PostCron, but I have noticed that is next to come: posting of a new album.
I usually post on a weekly basis an album on the last 7 days of photos. At the moment I have to go on Facebook and follow the usual process. I would rather prefer to do that on PostCron. I can do it in advance, have a regular schedule on Sundays. Now I am forced to do it when time allows me, maybe Sunday, maybe Monday if not Tuesday. I am really looking forward to it.
Overall, PostCron is a real nice and easy app. If you have similar needs, give a try and let me know.
