Final stage: Using Zaps as part of your Ausome SOCIAL strategy

This is the second and last part of the project: Using Zaps creatively for automatically publishing / sharing articles you find
(»see Part 1 opens in a new window)


Here's the flow of the whole project, just to remind you.

This is what will be achieved by the project as a whole once you've completed parts 1 and 2

In the first part, we closed with you being able to share your interesting finds on Google+ with the share also going automatically to your collection blog.

Remember, as you write your text to go with the share, you'll be adding a hashtag or two to categorise the find. You'll see in a little while why this is important.

What we have to do in this second part is

• Draw items from your collection blog under the control of one of the Zaps tools, and share down appropriate other channels in your social media / blog portfolio.

 Here's the picture of how things will flow.

This is what we're covering in part 2, the final part

Step 1

Get to the configuration screen to set things up ready for your IFTTT recipe

• If you're a Zaps license holder, you'll want to use the Collection Blog Distributer, available on the Zapsters community
• If you're not, you can use the free Ausome Social Feed Digest to post to your social media channels / niche blogs.

Btw, if you're wondering what the difference is, the free Ausome has limited scheduling and only posts from the newest items it finds. The Collection Blog Distributer uses the Ferris Wheel approach to post from whatever it finds and has really nifty scheduling capabilities. If you do use the free Ausome, 1 in 10 of the digests will include a short message about it - this is a fairly common practice for free tools. This is what it looks like:

The AutoSocialiseMe tool (Ausome) automatically enriches your social media streams and blogs with interesting information and articles all about your niche. In fact, this article was selected and posted automatically by Ausome. Find out more here...

Step2

Configure things. In the screenshot below I've used my collection blog. Note that I'm looking only for items that include the hashtag #funandrandom (that's one I've been adding as I share posts on G+)

Configuration screen set up ready for IFTTT recipe

• When you're have things as you want, change the run hour to a couple of hours in the future.
  This is to give you chance to create the IFTTT recipe and give things chance to bake while there's nothing being emitted by the configuration.
• Click the "Run Pipe" button one last time
• Right-click the "Get as RSS" and choose "copy link location", or whatever your browser's equivalent is
  This is ready to paste into the "Feed url" when you're creating the IFTTT recipe

This is the video tutorial for setting up an IFTTT recipe. It's the same one you watched in the first part when you were setting up the recipe to post to your collection blog. We're re-using it here, and it works out just nicely.

• Watch starting at 2:18 (it should start from there automatically when you click the video)
• All you have to do is paste in what you just copied when you get to 2:40.
• What you do from 2:56 depends on where this recipe is to share to, so you can stop watching at that point.

Next steps

So now all you need to do is to make new recipes to spread the items you've hashtagged around your various niche blogs and social media channels.

The end result? Find interesting stuff anywhere as you do your normal bumbling around the internet, share it straight away on G+ and then, according to the schedules you've already got set up, they'll be distributed around the places you want them to go!

Neat:

• It does away with any form of delay between you finding something cool and getting your act together to share it the old way down each of your channels / niche blogs.
• And that means you won't forget to do it.
• And it won't cost you any more time, in fact it'll save you time!
• And that'll encourage you to do more of it because it's so easy.
• And that'll be great for helping you to socialize your blogs / channels.
• And that will lead to more followers, more popularity and more sales, in time...

You'd be mad not to!


Happy learning!
~~Mark (HightonRidley)