Blog

Let’s face it. We don’t have as much time as we need. There’s always a new platform to be posting on, a new gadget to be using, a new Insta-Face-Snap-Tweet wave that we’re missing.

How can we find the time to focus on those things that matter the most? How can we stop being busy and start being productive? Can we automate much of the grunt work of SEO, content marketing, and social media managing?

While this isn’t a self-development post, it will show you how to automate your heavy lifting in a way that can still get you traffic, eyeballs, conversions, customers and lets you focus on what matters most: your business.

So YES! The good news is that you can automate most of the chores that takes up much of your time. And you can do this using two amazing tools out there: SEMrush and IFTTT.

So let’s see how this works and how you can apply it to your business right now.

Using IFTTT to Automate Your Promotion

First, let me ask you a question: Should you automate your social promotion?

You will post to many social media profiles using this strategy. And some of you might not be entirely sure about automating those kind of posts.

And that’s completely fine and understandable when you have a team in place, or a social media company that you can outsource your promotion to.

However, many entrepreneurs can’t focus entirely on this aspect of promotion or don’t have the resources to do this in the initial phases on their businesses. So how do you grab the benefits of being “all social” even if you don’t have a team in place? (And you don’t want to spend 12 hours a day posting kitty pictures on Instagram.)

That’s where IFTTT comes to play. IFTTT is an amazing free online tool that will allow you to automate your entire life. Not only your business day to day activities, and social promotion (as we’ll see below), but literally your whole life.

For example, you can tell IFTTT to send you an SMS every time The Weather Channel sends out a storm alert in your area. Or setup a recipe so that your intelligent light bulbs in your home turn on when it’s past 7 p.m. There’s an endless set of recipes you can program on IFTTT. And you don’t have to be a coder to make this work!

But hold on for a minute. Wasn’t the main idea here that I showed you how to automate your social promotion and content marketing using this tool? What this have to do with intelligent light bulbs?

After much researching and studying, my team and I have put together a strategy that allows you and your business to harness the power of IFTTT to automate your social posting and put your content promotion on autopilot.

Here’s how it works:

Set Up IFTTT

First off, you’ll need to open an account on IFTTT.com. It’s completely free and it will only take you a couple of seconds. Once you do that, you’re ready to start adding channels to the service.

These channels are basically your social profiles. These are the ones we usually use for this strategy:

Facebook Page Google Plus Page Twitter Blogger Tumblr Wordpress Diigo Delicious Medium

What happens if your company or your business doesn’t have some of these profiles? Go ahead and set them up. You won’t need to manage them or to even post content to them, unless you want to and the system will work even if you don’t have all of these profiles.

Now, once you’re done opening these profiles, you’ll need to activate them on IFTTT. You can do it on your Channels section. You’ll be selecting them one by one and then authorizing IFTTT to post to them.

IFTTT

Now that your channels are activated, you need to locate your RSS feed. In most cases, your feed will be located in www.yourdomain.com/feed. This applies when you’re running a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, etc. Basically, your RSS feed is another way to present your content to the world.

This RSS feed gets updated every time you post something new on your blog. And we’re going to be using that feed to trigger the automation in IFTTT.

If you haven’t noticed yet, IFTTT stands for “If This Then That.” So the “If This” part of the recipe will be your RSS Feed, and the “If That” side of the equation will be your social profile.

This means that every time you post something new in your blog, your Feed will be updated automatically. And every time your feed gets updated, IFTTT will post the article in your social network profiles.

Use IFTTT to automate processes.

The best part of this amazing setup is that this is done on complete autopilot. Once you setup the recipes on IFTTT, you’re good to go. You just need to keep posting articles on your blog and let IFTTT do its thing.

Here are the recipes we use to setup this strategy. You can make a copy for your own record or download it to your PC. That way you don’t need to setup these recipes one by one. We’ve done the heavy lifting for you.

Discover New Opportunities With SEMrush

Now that you have a quick overview on how the strategy works, let me tell you how to overpower it and discover new opportunities with SEMrush Domain Analytics Overview. As you can see on the graphics below, we can input any social media profile inside SEMrush and see how they have been performing in terms of Google’s organic ranking.

So for example, let’s say I want to use IFTTT to post to Medium.com on autopilot. This will potentially give me the opportunity not only to get traffic from Medium.com, but also to get those articles ranked in Google and get some powerful backlinks on autopilot.

SEMrush dashboard

I can then choose to post to Pinterest using the same strategy. As you can see, at the time of writing this article, Pinterest have been gaining a lot of terrain and rankings in Google. That means that your pins will potentially rank in Google as well.

Domain overview in SEMrush

This will benefit you in terms of traffic, rankings and backlinks. And the best part is that you’re doing this on complete autopilot. This technique is also 100% ethical and white hat, because basically you’re promoting your content to your social profiles.

Best Practices to Make This Work For You

These are some of the best practices we recommend our students to have in mind when using this strategy. You might want to apply them to your promotion as well.

1. Brand Your Social Profiles to Sell

There’s no point on using IFTTT to post to Twitter, for instance, if your Twitter profile is an egghead, or you have no references to your brand, your products or your links. This is an opportunity to bring traffic and awareness to your content and products. And the best way to do that is by branding your social profiles consistently and using them to sell.

Hernan Vazquez

2. Important: Use Attribution Links

Most of the platforms I mentioned above will leave only a link or a bookmark to the posts in your blog. But some of them will copy the post “as it is,”  meaning it will be an exact duplicate of the post that’s on your blog. How do you cope with this?

There’s a handy dandy WordPress plugin called “Yoast SEO” (maybe you’re familiar with it). This plugin has an attribution link option embedded on it. If you activate it and correctly configure it, you’ll be using attribution links in every post you syndicate to your social profiles.

Yoast SEO

As you can see below, this is how the attribution link looks on your post. That’s the best way of telling Google that the original article is in your blog.

Attribution link in post.

3. Interlink Your Social Profiles

This is also another powerful technique we teach our students. Interlinking your profiles will allow you not only to send traffic from one profile to the rest of your social network, but also to create something called “semantic validation.”

Semantic validation

This is just a fancy way of saying that your company or brand is all over the place in terms of branding and profiles. So even if you don’t have a team in place to run your profiles, you’ll be posting on them nonetheless. This creates authority in Google’s eyes and will allow you to rank higher and receive more SEO benefits.

4. Link your Articles Internally

You have probably heard about the benefits of internal linking for On Page SEO. This is a great way of passing authority and traffic from one popular article or page in your blog onto the rest of your website.

From this point onwards, you need to remember that every article you post in your blog will be syndicated using the power of IFTTT. That means that the blogging platforms that copy your post “as it is” will also be linking to your other posts as well. Here’s is an example of a WordPress.com post inside our syndication network.

Internal linking

As you can see, that WordPress.com post is also linking back to other articles in our website, since we have added those internal links to our original article. Use this to your advantage.

5. Use Rich Media

One of the best ways to promote your social content in your blog is by adding sharing buttons, call to actions and embedding your Tweets, your Instagram posts and your YouTube videos into your posts.

As you might have guessed already, using this strategy will allow you to promote your social posts not only in your blog, but also in the rest of your syndication network. Every time you embed a YouTube video on your blog, you’ll also get it syndicated across many properties. This is an example of a Tumblr.com blog embedding a YouTube video because we did so in our original post:

Rich media

As you can see, this is a super powerful strategy. Not only in terms of promotion, awareness and traffic, but also in terms of SEO. Combining IFTTT to automate your posting with SEMrush to discover new targets to post to can literally propel your business to the next level.

Leave me a comment below if you have doubts or ways of making this better! I’d be thrilled to answer your questions.

Innovative SEO services

SEO is a patience game; no secret there. We`ll work with you to develop a Search strategy focused on producing increased traffic rankings in as early as 3-months.

A proven Allinclusive. SEO services for measuring, executing, and optimizing for Search Engine success. We say what we do and do what we say.

Our company as Semrush Agency Partner has designed a search engine optimization service that is both ethical and result-driven. We use the latest tools, strategies, and trends to help you move up in the search engines for the right keywords to get noticed by the right audience.

Today, you can schedule a Discovery call with us about your company needs.

Source: