How to use WordPress + Google Docs to help you collaborate more effectively on your blog

Who writes directly in WordPress?

Bloggers: Do you draft posts in WordPress or somewhere else first then import into wordpress?

— Devesh Khanal (@deveshkhanal) January 28, 2016

Not many people it seems.

Good content requires collaboration: drafting, comments, reviews, editing, etc. Even natural-born writers need editors. Perhaps more importantly, content marketing is not about creating content for content’s sake. Rather, it’s about publishing content that’s in the sweet spot between your audience’s pain points and your company’s objectives. It’s both an ongoing creative process and an exercise in marketing and conversion. Content marketing is also inherently collaborative and requires multiple talents and teamwork to succeed.

When it comes to creating blog posts and essays, Google Docs is ideal: most everyone has a Google account, which they’ve learned to use early on. It’s equipped with great collaboration features that have built-in notifications, it’s easy to use and makes things easy to share.

Despite its strengths, however, Google Docs has two major limitations:

Deadlines mean nothing to Google Docs

Google Docs has no notion of time, and doesn’t help you to keep track of deadlines. This is a major drawback for managing the blog post creation process from start to finish. If you’re on a deadline, you need to handle each blog post as a small project. You need to retro-plan from the publishing date all your milestones: final review, formatting, optimization, editing, comments, drafts, etc. If you don’t do that, you’re likely to miss publishing dates and will end up with a blog that’s not consistently updated, which is one of the most common causes for failing at content marketing.

Keeping track of deadlines is a concept that seems a lot simpler than it is to actually do. Even if it’s only a few people who are involved in a project- whether it’s just you and your boss, you and your freelance writer- there’s a lot of coordination that has to take place. From emails and phone calls to discussions or meetings, there’s a lot that goes into ensuring you’re on track. Even if it’s just you, it’s easy to get caught up in all your other daily tasks and accidentally miss an important step.

While Google Docs is great for a lot of things, it doesn’t connect what you’re creating with when you should publish it. This means that there is no way to add a date or to visualize a small project plan on a timeline.

Copy/pasting Google Docs into WordPress doesn’t work well with images and formatting

Anyone who’s serious about content marketing will want their content to have a minimum of optimization and to look good once published. Formatting and using visuals are therefore two important things.

Formatting doesn’t play nice when copy/pasted into Google Docs. The result is often a visually unappealing mix of inconsistent styles brought from your Google Doc but that are the ones of your WordPress blog.

Images are simply left out. So if your post uses a series of images to emphasize your point, you are forced to re-upload each individual image into WordPress and end up doing twice the work.

Making Google Docs, WordPress and any other CMS work hand in hand with Scoop.it Content Director

If you’ve suffered from the above problems, you’re not alone: we’ve experienced the same challenges ourselves, right along with most of the marketers we’ve talked to. That’s why we’ve come up with a solution that makes Google Docs, WordPress or any other CMS such as HubSpot work nicely together by integrating Scoop.it Content Director with Google Docs.

Scoop.it Content Director already synchronizes with your WordPress, HubSpot or Drupal CMS. Its smart calendar provides you with a continually-updated view of all your content day-by-day and week-by-week, helping you to effectively project-manage your entire content plan from a high level. In May of last year, we added one more level: we introduced easy-to-use workflows to enable collaboration post-by-post so you can plan and validate drafts and work with contributors who don’t have publishing rights. While we originally considered adding document management features, we felt that it would ultimately be better to leverage what people already use to manage their documents instead. Why re-build existing features in Google Docs that people enjoy using?

We decided to integrate Scoop.it Content Director with Google Docs to solve the two previously mentioned problems.

1. You can now attach (or even create) a Google Doc to a draft in your content calendar.

You can find out more details in this knowledge base article. In the meantime, you can get started by simply creating a draft and then selecting ‘Attach Google Doc’ to establish the connection:

And enjoy the best of both worlds:

• Review, comment, edit your blog post in Google Docs
• Manage deadlines in your smart calendar

2. You can now publish Google Docs into WordPress automatically

Scoop.it Content Director already knows how to publish to your CMS, allowing you to use it for things like sourcing and transforming third-party content into curated posts. With the Google Docs integration, once your draft is ready to be scheduled or published, you can validate it to have Scoop.it Content Director automatically format it for WordPress, matching your template’s style guide and including your beautiful images.

At Scoop.it, our mission is to help you publish content, so we hope you’re as excited as we are to have a powerful system that integrates with Google Docs to enhance your collaboration efforts.

Written on Google Docs. Published to WordPress through Scoop.it Content Director.

Want to work smarter and start generating real results from your content marketing? Find out how to use the new Scoop.it Content Director to help you become a smarter marketer!