Imagine a world where Heath Robinson style contraptions genuinely exist and even the most complicated tasks can be achieved without you even having to get out of bed, or even be awake.
Blissful huh? Well we’re not far off that in digital terms, thanks to IFTTT, a tool that can help you automate thousands of time consuming tasks, by connecting all your online channels and triggering any ‘event’ you desire through a simple switching-on of a ‘recipe’.
Introduction to IFTTT
IFTTT stands for ‘if this then that’. If an event happens (this) in one channel, it will trigger an action (that) within another one.
So if you post an image on Twitter, you can automatically turn this into a blog post on your WordPress site. If you publish a status on Facebook, you can automatically turn it into a tweet. If you arrive in London, you can automatically email yourself a map of the Underground.
There are thousands of these recipes, which you can browse on the IFTTT website, or you can create your own using one of the 300 channels on offer. These also work great on iOS and Android phones.
The ones I’ve given as an example above are fairly straightforward, but there are many different and more complex recipes on offer that can help anyone in whatever industry they work in.
Here I’ve pulled together some of the more helpful recipes for those in search and content marketing…
Get a digest with every top SEO post on Reddit
Reject Spammy SEO Sales Emails
Tweet my WordPress blog posts
Post new Tumblr blog to Wordpress
When I Like someone’s image blog post on Tumblr, repost the image in a blog entry on my own Tumblr
Create Wordpress blog posts from an Evernote notebook
Every time I upload a (Read more...) video, create a post on my Wordpress blog
Save the Instagrams you like in a Dropbox folder
Share your latest Wordpress post on LinkedIn
Whenever I write a new post on Blogger, share on LinkedIn
Save popular posts in r/TodayILearned
Save every tweet to Google Drive
Save new Twitter followers in a Google spreadsheet
Share your Instagram pics as native Twitter photos
Never miss breaking technology news from NYTimes
Schedule posts within Google Calendar
Search for ______ GIFs and view them as a daily digest
Create Twitter lists around a hashtag
Remind yourself to write on Medium every Saturday at 9am
Remind my followers to check their analytics and if they are crap to contact me (I do SEO)
Save all of your liked videos in a spreadsheet
Set up a content marketing radar station
As Chris Lake detailed last November, you can set up a content marketing radar station using Slack, Twitter advanced search and IFTTT. Click on the above link to read the full details.
This article was originally published on Search Engine Watch.
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