Blogging is a tremendous task. It is time consuming, as much as it is rewarding. It can help you to make new friends, meet new people, and even helps you to build your very first business, as long as you’re looking to do so. We strongly believe that blogging offers more than just the ability to learn how to write efficiently. Professional bloggers do more than just submit posts.
On average, a blogger will try to submit at least one unique post per day, in order to maintain a healthy ratio of visitors, as well as the growth rate. By itself, it’s not that difficult. But, once you begin to consider the additional tasks required; like promoting the post, sending it out on social media, getting in touch with other bloggers, replying to comments, etc….
You begin to understand that blogging is definitely a lot more than just writing posts. You could try to compromise, by using 3rd party plugins; but quite often, even those tend to break down, or at least slow your site down by a significant margin. How can we solve this problem?
Meet IFTTT – If This, Then That
IFTTT is a service that lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement “if this then that”. It has been backed by some of the most influential venture capitalist firms in the World, and the most recent investment spoke of $30M magnitude. This service is only starting its journey, yet is already loved by millions of monthly users.
It probably is one of the most simple services that we’ve come across. It literally does what it says: if this, then that. So, how can it help us to make our WordPress workflow better? Luckily, quite a few people have already built IFTTT recipes for us to use when it comes to automating some time consuming tasks. Lets take a look at them!
Email to WP
The mobile web has experienced a significant growth in the last couple of years, and now a very large proportion of internet activity happens exactly on smartphones. By using this recipe you can send a ‘tagged’ email to IFTTT, which will then convert the email into a WordPress blog post, and submit to your activated blog.
You never know when you might need this functionality, it might be great to use in places with lower internet connection capabilities, or when it’s necessary to do live reporting on the go.
RSS to WP
The days of purchasing expensive auto-blogging tools and plugins are long gone, and not just because Google hates that stuff, its because there are recipes like the one right here available. We can think of numerous uses for the RSS to WP recipe, but the one that sticks to our mind the most is a simple way of keeping up to date with what’s the latest in your specific niche.
WP Posts to Google Drive
WordPress backup plugins can often eat up a lot of memory of your server, and if you’re working with a ton of posts, sometimes things can crash or something else unexpected happens. Be safe, use this recipe to automatically back your WordPress posts to your Google Drive account, which is free to open.
WP to Facebook Page
The following few recipes are going to be related only to social means, but it doesn’t mean that it makes them any less useful. This recipe will automatically update your Facebook page with your latest post when it is submitted. You’re able to avoid having to install (or even pay) a plugin to do this for you.
WP to Google+
Same here, but with the exception that all of the Google+ auto-posting plugins that we have seen, actually require a hefty payment, supposedly because it is hard to build a plugin that does auto-posting for this social network, but as you can see – IFTTT does it nicely, and for free.
WP to LinkedIn
Quick and easy way of submitting your newest posts to your LinkedIn profile.
WP to Twitter
The last recipe on our list is for submitting newest blog posts to Twitter. Once again, very easy to setup and works like magic.
The Benefits of IFTTT
It goes without saying that this platform has got a lot of potential. It does everything itself, remotely. It removes the need to activate memory-heavy plugins that end up slowing down your pages, and in turn giving the user a bad experience. It doesn’t just help those who’re bloggers using WordPress. It has got hundreds of ‘channels’ available that can help us to totally change the way we interact with some of our favorite tools.
All the big names are supported on IFTTT. For social networking you’ll find Facebook profiles, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, and Twitter. There are Google services like YouTube, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk. You’ll find sync services like Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive, plus blog services like WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogger. They’re all there, just do a quick search!
Image Sources: Screenshots IFTTT