Word Pigeon
Starts at $7.99 per month
Pros
- Extremely easy to link and use
- Saves a lot of time in publishing content
- Makes it easy to collaborate with other team members in building content
- Excellent support
Cons
- More integrations apart from WordPress are needed
- Integration with Yoast or Rank Math plugin essential for direct publishing
Regardless of the type of industry, in any online business, content marketing has proved by various studies and sources to be one of the most effective in terms of bringing the highest ROI.
While advertising needs money and a lot of testing, quality content marketing demands time, and a lot of that.
It takes a lot of time to build and scale high-quality content that serves as a digital asset to bring in traffic consistently even years after you have written a post.
Therefore, any tool that helps in saving time for an individual or a content building team will be a welcome addition to the tech stack.
StoryChief is my favorite tool for automated publishing of content as it has excellent collaborating features, can automate blogs & social media content and has a lot of integrations to keep everything running seamlessly.
WordPigeon looks to be a simplified and stripped-down version of StoryChief with one channel of content syncing and publishing in focus - Google Docs to WordPress blogs.
Is it good to use and will it save your time on blogging as promised? Let's find out in this review.
Sign up and linking Google Docs with WordPress
It is an undisputed fact is WordPress is a platform of choice for blogging irrespective of any industry. WordPress is fantastic in a desktop environment.
However, one of the biggest issues is when you want to write on the go and that's where Google Docs comes in. A lot of content writers use Docs to write their posts and once completed, copy it into WordPress.
Try exporting your Google Docs
Apart from being mobile-friendly, the text editor is also significantly better in Docs. However, there is an issue.
While copying from Docs to WordPress, you lose a lot of text & image formatting and it becomes a huge pain to format it all again.
What if there is a tool to publish directly from Docs without going through this whole copying process? That's exactly what WordPigeon promises to achieve by linking Docs with your WordPress website.
The sign-up process is pretty much straight forward. Just link with your Google account that you are going to use Docs with and allow the permissions.
Once you sign in with your Google account, the next step is to link your WordPress account to Word Pigeon. Although the process is quite simple, there is a neat little tutorial on how to do it.
Just install the Word Pigeon plugin that is available in the WordPress plugin repository.
Then, head over to settings in the WordPress dashboard and you will be able to see an option named Word Pigeon options. Clicking on it will take to the page to connect the API key.
Head over to Word Pigeon, click on WordPress sites and add your WordPress website domain you want to connect.
Once the site is added, a public API key will be generated in the next step. Just copy this API key and paste it in the WordPress site.
The final step is to either manually add a folder in Google Docs for Word Pigeon or to let Word Pigeon add a folder for you.
You might receive a security alert message from Google, but it shouldn't be an issue granting access as you are only allowing permission to manage files and folders that are built with Word Pigeon.
The entire process is fairly simple and will not take more than 5 to 10 minutes to complete.
How does it work?
As soon as the WordPress site and Google Docs account area connected, you must be able to see the folder built inside Word Pigeon in your Google Drive account.
You can write new docs files in that folder with your preferred text and image formatting.
These docs files should automatically appear in your Word Pigeon account when you click the Docs icon on the dashboard.
From here, you can either view the document and edit it further or export it directly to your WordPress site.
The document can be exported either as a page or a post. You can also select if it has to be export as a draft post or publish directly from Word Pigeon.
The document I tried exported instantaneously as a draft in my WordPress sites' posts list and more importantly, will all the text and image formatting intact with no need to change or modify.
Support
The team offers live chat support both on the main website and within the app dashboard.
The co-founders are really active and got a response within a few hours every time. The support documentation and tutorial videos are adequate to cover the linking of Google Docs and WordPress and also on how to export the documents to WordPress.
There is also a public roadmap on the features and integrations that are planned to be added.
Pricing
There are 3 plans in total with the difference being the number of Docs files that can be exported.
The free plan covers 5 exports while the $19 a month unlimited plan allows the export of an unlimited number of files.
For a limited time, there is a lifetime deal for Word Pigeon that starts from just $49 that is paid one for a lifetime subscription.
Conclusion
Coming to the original question, will using Word Pigeon help to save my time?
Well, if you are a huge content marketing team publishing content across various channels like your own self-coded blog and social media platforms, I would still recommend checking the paid plans of Story Chief.
However, if you are an individual blogger or a small team of content marketers using WordPress as the blogging platform, Word Pigeon will definitely save tons of time for you and your team.
Word Pigeon does one thing and does that one thing exceedingly well. The simplicity of the tool is its strength and it is worth a try.
Google Docs is miles better than the WordPress interface as an editor and the collaborative features working with Docs will save a ton of time for your team.