How to Optimize and Automate Your Work

Andrey Novoselov Andrey Novoselov
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Travel blogging is an enjoyable and exciting job, but the grind is real. There are articles to write, photos to edit and posts to publish on social media. Our affiliate described her best tips on automating post-photo and video processing, optimizing images and making her articles more attractive to search engines with half the effort. The plugin samples we mention are for WordPress drafts, but the ideas can be replicated on any platform.

How to optimize and automate your work using a travel blog

Image Optimization and Photo-Processing Automation

These tips are for all travel bloggers – whether you have three photos or three-hundred photos in your blog.

How to Prepare an Image for Publication

  1. Make color adjustments and remove gravitational instability to emerge horizons. It will instantly look more professional with these simple manipulations.
  2. Add your watermark.
  3. Resize the photos to make them a better fit for your blog’s page size. Heavy images slow down load times and affect bounce rates as a result. As behavioral factors get worse, search engines will decrease your website’s rankings.
  4. Change the file name to something friendly and recognizable, utilizing keywords. For example, change “DSCH1234” to “palm-on-the-beach.” Google recommends describing the essence of the picture in its <title> to make it possible to rank it in the search. Read detailed recommendations for image optimization on the Google support pages.
  5. Add meta-tags for images like <title>, <alt> and <caption>. Search engines use <alt> to rank
  6. Compress your images to make them load faster. You can use the WordPress plugin, Kraken Image Optimizer, to optimize images automatically after they’ve been loaded. It is paid, but a free version is available to try it out on a few images.

Automate Post Processing in Adobe Lightroom

Lightroom is an easy yet powerful tool that allows you to process your photos in batches. It can also align horizons and support presets.

The must-have checklist for processing photos in Lightroom

  • Upload your photo set.
  • Process your first photo and write its key phrase in the <caption> and add a short description of the photo in the <title>.

Automate post processing in Adobe Lightroom

WordPress identifies and records the information from the <title> and <caption> fields by default, but leaves the <alt> attribute empty.

Automate post processing in Adobe Lightroom

You can use the Automatic image ALT attributes plugin or add a small part of the code in functions.php file to automatically fill in the alt’s field:

add_action( 'add_attachment', 'set_image_meta_upon_image_upload' );
function set_image_meta_upon_image_upload( $post_ID ) {
if ( wp_attachment_is_image( $post_ID ) ) {
$post = get_post( $post_ID );
$image_title = preg_replace( '%\s*[-_\s]+\s*%', ' ', $post->post_title);
$image_alt = preg_replace( '%\s*[-_\s]+\s*%', ' ', $post->post_excerpt);
$image_meta = array(
'ID' => $post_ID,
'post_title' => $image_title,
'post_excerpt' => "",
'post_content' => "",
);
update_post_meta( $post_ID, '_wp_attachment_image_alt', $image_alt );
wp_update_post( $image_meta );
}
}
  • Use the settings from your first processed photo as the preset to sync the settings of the whole photo series.
  • Export the photo set and use the preset with the size setup and “watermark” replacement. Then, you can individually change the name of each photo.

Export

Automating Video Clip Production

Manually editing video clips may not be worth your time and effort. Using smartphone and desktop apps can be more convenient because they can compile clips and select soundtracks.

Here are a couple free video editors to consider:

1. Adobe Premiere Clip for iOS and Android

Adobe Premiere Clip

Add visual effects like light correction or slow motion to the video clip you’ve picked up in the editor. And “Smart Loudness” is a feature that will smooth volume differences between videos.

2. Quik for iOS and Android

Quik

Crop and rotate photos and videos, and add geo marks, captions and emoji to your clips. There are even hundreds of free soundtracks to choose from in its music library.

Here are a couple paid video editors to consider:

3. Filmora

Filmora

The annual subscription price starts from $40 but the editor has free trial. You can edit videos easily with a variety of effects available.You can also add titles, animation, screensavers and record screens. Additionally, you can conveniently upload pictures for the clip from Facebook, Instagram and Flickr..

4. Movavi

Movavi

This editor costs $19, but you can also try it for free. Movavi can screen-record videos or get them from external devices like TV-tuners, so you can fill in the frame of the selected movie in the clip.. This editor is a crowd favorite due to its simple user interface.

Check out these online services for voice-over audio. They convert the text into audio tape:

How to Automate Your Work With Content

You’ll have to write your own articles, but it’s possible to (and recommended) to automate SEO optimization and track “broken” links.

Optimizing SEO for Your Articles

Install the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress to optimize articles for the search engines. It will allow you to look through the snippet’s preview, track the number of key words in the text and add meta-tags. It will also create an XML sitemap and “breadcrumbs.”

Optimizing SEO for your articles

Having Content on Hand

Keep up with the articles that you’ve already published. . The “broken” links appear when partner offers close or because of resource locking. You can monitor spam and links posted by commentators that may try to raise money from your blog.

Install the Akismet plugin to filter spam in comments. It automatically locks anything that looks like spam. You circle back through logs to unblock the normal comments or manually block ones that the plugin misses.

Check out our picks for plugins that work with links:

Here are plugins that work with affiliate links: Affiliate links and Pretty links.

Plugins are similar – they can help you can reduce links using your domain name as well as set redirects 301/302/307.

Learn more about redirection and links settings here.

Automating the Distribution of Published Articles

Here are plugins you can use to share your published article across your social platforms:

  • Social Network Autoposter. It’s compatible with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Medium, MailChimp and other services and social media.
  • IFTTT is the “Swiss army knife” of cross posting. It works with Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, Pinterest and many other social platforms.

Use Templates

We’ll conclude with one main piece of advice – reduce your daily grind by automating to the max!

  1. Make PSD-templates to create capital images for your blog articles, social media and YouTube.
  2. Prepare templates if you write similar regularly.
  3. Make templates for video clips you edit manually. Even adding the blog logo in the video editor can save a lot of time .
  4. Collect checklists for standardized actions so you save time and reduce mistakes in day-to-day tasks.

In the comment section, share your experience on how you optimize and automate work with travel blogs.