Story Chief Reviews

Had to come back and post here. This is hands down the best, most valuable offer I ever bought from Appsumo. Paid for itself in 1 week. Saves me hours of time.

ONLY thing that could make this better would be LinkedIN Articles.

Using it with WordPress as main account and all social media accounts point to it. Absolutely amazing!

Such a great tool, if you produce any kind of content - this will drastically improve your life!

Simple, easy to use, does everything it promises to do!

With more than 10 tacos this aint no Chief but a General. The versatile nature of this tool on my writing has more impact than I've ever had with any other software.

Before Story Chief: writing a blog post in WP with Divi building -> took hours. SEO adjusting, tweaking, sharing via email, facebook, twitter, linked in, google plus.... I didn't even do most of the things on the same day because I had clients to tend to!

Now I write a blog post in Story Chief, designing is so much easier and quicker, adjusting SEO, posting it everywhere and more places than before in so much less time. Thank you for making my work easier and quicker!

I was looking for a platform, this is just perfect, once I connected all my channels, now I have to do is create good content, publish and see all traffic coming in.

I had been sitting on the fence with Story Chief. What sucked me in at the 11th hour was watching either the video or the webinar replay and seeing it had a tool to tally the SEO score and readability. I already have WebTextTool, which is fairly robust in the scoring department, but I really liked the look of the Story Chief editor better. So, I thought, for $98 (I stacked two deals), I would get another tool similar to WebTextTool. The SEO score tool with Story Chief is pretty basic, which was a little disappointing to me because that was what attracted me to the product.

Some might rightfully look at my comments and charge me with nitpicking because of all the other wonderful things it does, but I was hoping for a robust SEO scorer in a better editor.

I wish I were able to give it 3.5 tacos, but I would rather err on the side of caution. I am looking forward to exploring the other features.

I’ve been playing with this for a few weeks now and I’m completely in love with it. You don't have to worry about shelfware with this one. This is a very polished app that you can start using right away. It’s already saved me a ton of time in the content creation/distribution process and I’m just getting started with it. I’ve begun rolling this out with one company I work with that has a 10 person content team where all writers are responsible for different campaigns and blog content. They currently use a common process of Dropbox Paper to write everything together, then copy/paste to WordPress and do the SEO and then separately post to Medium. They also post to all the social media channels from a separate schedule and also add to a MailChimp newsletter. This app literally fit almost perfectly into their process already and replaced a big chunk of it while making it 20 times easier. It also provides more insight into which campaigns are getting the most traction. I’m glad SC rolled out the sideloading of images into WP this week, so far it's working great.

My favorite parts of StoryChief are:
- How easy it is to post to Medium. I was previously using MissingLettr for this, but StoryChief allows you to have a lot more control. Ex. We have a Medium publication and want to post to that publication as the specific author of the article, you can do that with SC very easily. It’s great.
- Getting the views and analytics on an article or campaign level is great. It’s the first time I’m seeing views/reads across all platforms including social media.
- The team I rolled it out to so far absolutely loves the content calendar and being able to sync it with their Google Calendar
- ACF integration

Some things I’d love to see added are:
- Adding comments for the Article Title (I’ve been told they’re working on this)
- Some sort of basic task or to-do lists functionality. So you can assign tasks outside of content to individuals. For things like assigning the featured image to your design team, it would be nice to ping thing.
- It would be nice if the scheduled time indicated less than a day in advance. I had a post scheduled for a few hours from now and it still said will be posted “a day from now”
- It would be nice if you could add an author that doesn’t have a StoryChief account. If the post was ghost written to be published on a site as an author, but they won’t actually be involved in the writing or editing or posting. (Ex. CEO)

I definitely stacked a few of these, can’t wait to see how SC grows in the future.

Just got to say the team at Story Chief are amazing! They added SEOPress support to there WordPress plugin within a few days and now today support to sideload all your blog images on to your WordPress site :) That shows me that the team are going the extra mile to support the appsumo community and make Story Chief the best it can be :)
I'm only just starting to use the app but the benefits are really helping me create better things for myself and my clients.
Thanks to the whole team!

Frankly I just activated my double code stacked account and havent yet played around. Yet the fact that Story Chief is worked out cleverly & thoughtfully is motivating enough to drop 5 tacos since 6 is not possible. Canonical urls to take care of not penalising you for duplicate content. Thats clever & thoughtful. So one feels reasonably confident these guys will keep bringing in clever & thoughtful improvisations. This one feature is a blessing enough to straight grab 5 tacos out of my hands!

I don't normally leave reviews but I had to take the time to say I love Storychief!

Pros:
-Incredibly helpful and friendly staff!
-AMP (I can't understate how big this is and how much people underestimate this as the future of all websites!)
-SEO blogging tool is surprisingly good! I copied the test first blog template (that scores 100% in Storychief) over into Webtexttool and it also achieved 100%! Not a definitive test but I'm happy to write all my blog posts on Storychief!
-Design/Layout: it's such a slick design. It might be considered minimalistic but it looks very professional.
-Fully functional: lots of tools on Appsumo can be rough around the edges (which is fine for LTD) but this tool is ready to use straight away!

The only thing I would like to see is an inbuilt comments section. You can't have a blog without letting your audience give feedback and interact! Medium has this and if you Storychief wants to take them on, this should be the first feature to be added. I know there is an option to integrate a comments from another vendors software but I'd like this to be inbuilt.

Overall, Storychief is the gem of this years deal!

This is the tool you need for inhouse or agency content marketing!!!!!!

Not seeing the value when you have several clients on several channels. The cost will go way up if I needed an account for each client which makes no sense after speaking with the staff.

I decided to take a look at Story Chief today because I wasn't quite getting how it was different from something like MissingLettr or SocialBee, both of which I love, when it comes to distributing content.

My first impression having published my first this morning is I like it and can already see how and where it differs, which I'll get onto in a moment. You can see my first creation here: https://marilyn-devonish.storychief.io/can-you-really-see-your-future-in-the-now-and-create-it

It took about 30 minutes to create.

The story editor is very slick and super easy to use when it comes to inserting pictures and videos, as one would expect in this day and age. One of the features I wasn't expecting and love is the ability to add a CTA form within the post using just my email address; no MailChimp or Zapier integrations required.

Where it differs from MissingLettr because I've seen this come up in discussion threads is that ML is drip feeding your Blog over a period of 365 days. From what I've seen so far, although hitting the same platforms, it's a manual publishing process with SC should you want to same content to go out several times, however I've only been using the platform for an hour so there is much more to be discovered.

One of the key initial differences between Story Chief and SocialBee is the fact I can publish across multiple channels at the same time with SC and write different intro text for each whereas with SB it uses the same soundbite/intro content across all platforms unless you schedule them separately.

Another useful piece of functionality is the SEO information both in terms of improving what you are writing, and an easy way to track the stories progress after publication. I also like that on the published piece it tells readers how many minutes it will take the read for those out there who are not PhotoReaders!

The WordPress plugin and connecting my social media sites was easy, and from what I can see you can also add a custom domain.

Very early days however so far I very much like what I see.

Marilyn Devonish

The three main advantages of this service:
1. Sending your article with one button to all your channels (blog, social networks, RCC and so on)
2. Analytics and integration
3. Customer service at the height - will solve your questions issues with lightning speed

Prosperous development and prosperity of the service and its team

Further development: even more distribution channels and more social networks (Instagram, Vkontakte)
And the development of the functions of the text editor

Right now I sent out my first story / blog post via Story Chief. On my (new! and personalized) Story Chief blog it looks like that: https://blog.selbstbewusst.eu/ (in German language, so I will not sell you anything besides my experience ;-))

I used to use Zapier to push my YouTube videos to my blog, to Facebook and to Twitter (or posted them myselve to the named directions). But that had not enough "power", and I was not motivated to invest more time.

Now, with my first Story-Chief-Post I reached 6 different platforms at once with included links all pointing to my main blog. And, besides deciding where the included links should point to, I had nothing to do with changing some links in order to have them all pointing to my main goal. That saves a lot of time, is fun and the typical errors one makes by changing those links are gone forever. Gone together with clients on could not gain because of not working links.

Although sharing to Google+ directly is, as far as I know, not yet possible, the included "Google+ sharing Button" helped me to put it to Google+ as well with only one more click.

Publishing the same content with one click to multiple channels and with links (automatically, if choosen) pointing to your main / choosen destination - GREAT, GREAT, GREAT.

Right now there is only one option I searched for (and did not find): Beeing able to copy the in Story Chief written text to use it for my newsletter. But I found a workaround: I took the published post from my WordPress blog and copied that as a newsletter - that worked great.

Although I am writing blog posts since 2000 I had never that much fun to distribute it only by clicking one button (after setting up the choosen channels ONCE) and doing a little bit of SEO work inside of Stoy Chief.

Statistically seen I will earn the 98 $ (of course I bought the full package!) today and with my first "new" post. And tomorrow I will earn some money... ;-)

As a conclusion: In my opinion / after my experience...
* Story Chief is easy to use (where it is more difficult there are greatly written tutorials with pics)
* My motivation to write has skyrocketed again
* My range grows
* While I am writing this review visitors are reading my post (thanks to Google Analytics real-time)
* Finally I will regularly post to my social media channels (through only one click!!!)
* No more logging into each and every social media platform, figure out how to post, do it on this platform in this way and on the other in another way, beeing frustrated of burning my time...

The two context sensitive menues (one for formatting text, the other for including media such as pics, vids...) are time saver as well: No scrolling up or down to find the menu. Just mark a piece of text or hit enter, and the corresponding menu opens right beside the cursor and where your eyes are pointing to in a naturally manner (without beeing forced to search the menu and then to search again the place where you are working right now.

As the title says, it is no doubt one of the best tools for writing a story or posting a blog the best part I like about is the SEO feature to make your content Search Engine Friendly and help you with ranking even if your site lacks that.

If you, believe me, I normally don't and have missed good deals by underestimating them but this one I didn't even try it but bought 2 right away as it was recommended by Salesflare and it was well worth the money.

Good Luck guys

Until now whoever dabbled in "SEO content syndication" that brings any meaningful results, knows how hard it is to build each piece of the puzzle, and then keep everything working flawlessly.
It's a mega task and no wonder so many "Fiverr" deals are just for that - to build an "IFTTT Content Wheel"; and they still do a crap job most of the time.
Typically for a proper content syndication, you are looking to push your s**** to:
- Social Media (FB/TW)
- Web2.0 (WP.com/Blogspot)
- Bookmarking (Pocket/Pinboard)
- Doc storage (G-Drive/Evernote)
- Aggregators (Paper.li/Feedburner)
- others
Just to give you an idea - I'm looking at 8 properties linked to StoryChief, 27 on IFTTT and 5 on Zapier. This is just one account.
The main challenge I found is to feed proper versions of RSS to your different properties. Also, a standard IFTTT/Zapier(free)-setup won't provide the rel="canonical" injection to avoid duplicate content risk.
To set it all up, and to work out all the kinks with your custom website theme takes tremendous effort and focus. But wait...
NONE of it is a problem with StoryChief. It is an ULTIMATE content syndication tool.
But by no means they have everything nailed. Here's a little breakdown of what I like and what needs more attention:
PROs:
- 1-click integrations
- easy interface: you log in, you drop the story, you post, you rank
- briefs for your writers - this is a superb feature I'll be using
- SEO widget - I think it is white-labelled Yoast - just exactly what I need
- also, you can edit the content and it gets fixed across the other blogs
- and, you get blog.storychief.io DR40-subdomain for your content!
- the system is fast, reliable and the customer service is super-responsive and has gone extra-mile for me on multiple occasions

Not-There-Yets:
- the content on sub-blogs (Medium/Blogger) does NOT link back to the primary source (my main blog)! The workaround is to put a manual annotation to each new post on SC and then manually remove it from your main blog - this HAS to be on top of the list to fix - what a bummer...
- Tumblr and Weebly are missing!
- SC does not respect my custom WP template and pushes content to a default WP text box - manual intervention is needed and the whole automation shebang misses its target
- The "Matchmaking Beta" is "alpha" IMO - I've requested a writer and nobody responded for a few days - no way to see the progression stage or anything. The response was after my escalation and the quote I received for 750w article was... Let's just say I could have easily produced 10 quality 1000w articles for that price. Guess I'll have my VA's learning SC dashboard for now.
- Dozens of integrations are missing and I doubt they'll ever replace the IFTTT/Zapier need entirely - but the list of essential channel types has to be expanded

All in all, StoryChief Team is a clever and resourceful bunch and I have faith in them.
I was only able to afford 5 deals stacking this time... what a bummer... :P
25 tacos.

Have been using Story Chief for 4-5 days now and can safely say...

It's THE BEST AppSumo deal I've ever purchased!

And I've purchased some real good ones ;)

BONUS POINTS for:
- clean writing environment that's got me focused and VERY efficient
- top notch SEO & Readability tool that's clear and simple like the Yoast plugin (only you don't have to login to your Wordpress website to use it)
- auto-save every second
- version history
- Ambassador program: you can send an email to your friends with sharing links for your post
- fast image upload. MUCH faster than via Wordpress. A HUGE time saver for me!
- the Editorial Brief tool that reminds you to clarify what, who, why, for
- editorial calendar. I realize this is a fairly basic function for such a tool but these tools are usually soooo expensive!
- Find story creators. Haven't tested this yet but am very excited about this option and can see how easily writers and reviewers can integrate.

IMPROVEMENTS I'd like to see:
- more call-to-actions. At the moment it's limited to basic email capture form if I'm not mistaken. Would like to offer PDF download in exchange for newsletter subscription.
- evergreen posts (I see it's on the roadmap. Very cool!)

Ok, I've been so excited about this product that I actually looked at the job offers they advertise on their website!!

Well done AppSumo and StoryChief. A match made in heaven :)