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Today’s guest post is by Douglas Lim, a social media marketing and search engine optimization evangelist and blogger. He publishes The Douglas Lim Daily which highlights the top news about his passions of social media marketing, SEO, business, entrepreneurship, technology, sport and “everything else in between”…

You have just spent a couple of hours or even days writing a great blog post and now it is time to promote it and share it with the world.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is by leveraging the power of social media. The more people tweeting about your post, sharing it on Facebook and Google+ or posting it on their LinkedIn status, the more eyeballs you have reading your content.

So today I’m going to share some ways to automatically syndicate your content to these various social media channels.

Let me begin by introducing a website called IFTTT which is short for If This Then That.

IFTTT allows you to connect multiple channels such as Twitter and Facebook together through the use of triggers and actions. Currently there are 50 different channels to choose from, ranging from bitly to YouTube. Each of these configured connections is called a ‘recipe’ which can also be shared with other users.

For example, a recipe may be “If my Facebook profile picture is updated, then update my Twitter profile picture” where the trigger is the Facebook profile picture being updated, and the resulting action is updating the Twitter profile picture.

Another recipe may be “If someone has tagged me in a Facebook photo, then send that photo to my Dropbox”. It is amazing to see the endless possibilities that are available with IFTTT but we are only going to focus on the social media channels.

Let’s begin:

Set up your IFTTT channels

Once you have created an account with IFTTT, the first step is to set up and activate your channels. This is the basis of all your recipes and forms the foundation for the automatic syndication of your content. The very first channel we will activate is, you guessed it, your blog!

Select the blogging platform that your blog is based upon – there are a few options available including Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr and WordPress. In my case, it will be WordPress. Note that you can activate either a WordPress self-hosted blog or a WordPress.com blog.

After selecting your blogging platform, follow the steps and add in the appropriate details to activate your blogging channel. You should see the following screen below.

Once you have set up your blogging channel, it is time to activate the various social media channels that you want your content to be syndicated to. In this instance, I am going to activate my Twitter account, my Facebook fan page account, my Foursquare account, my LinkedIn account and my YouTube account. Just like setting up your blog channel, follow the required steps.

Create your IFTTT recipes

Now the channels have been activated, it is time to connect these channels together using recipes. Click on ‘Create’ on the top menu. Then for the ‘this’ selection, add your WordPress channel activated previously. You will now see two trigger options that will initiate this recipe. In this case, we will select any new post.

Now it is time to set up an action as a result of this trigger. Go ahead and select ‘Post a tweet’ and complete the remaining steps.

Note that you can customize the way the tweet appears on your Twitter feed. For example, you can select different values from your blog post such as the title, URL, post date, content and even the URL of the first image appearing in the content. In addition, you can also add your own wording to the tweet.

Now once you have created this action, you should see a screen similar to the one below. As you can see, each of your personal recipes is checked once every 15 minutes in order to be run. This is perfect for us as our new blog post will be picked up and syndicated very quickly!

Now it is simply a matter of following the above process and creating a recipe for each of the other social media channels. Once this has been done, you now have multiple recipes that will syndicate any new blog post content automatically.

Another great feature of IFTTT that I highly recommend checking out is the ability to share your recipes with others. Here are a few of the different recipes that others have shared.

More syndication

Finally, I just wanted to finish by sharing some more great ways of syndicating your blog content. I highly recommend a website called Scribd which allows users to upload PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint files and many other file formats which can then be read by millions of users worldwide.

As you have probably already guessed, I am a big believer in leveraging your time and a great website to help with syndicating your content on Scribd is Zinepal. There is a free option with limited features and a paid option.

With the paid option, all you have to do is enter the URL of your blog post and Zinepal will take your content and automatically generate a PDF version from it and various other formats such as the Kindle ebook format.

Zinepal will also automatically publish this content straight to your Scribd account. For even more traction, you can then upload the generated Kindle ebook version to the Kindle Direct Publishing platform and self publish your ebook to the Kindle store where it can be picked up by millions of Kindle readers!

If you have any other suggestions or any other tips on syndicating your blog content, please share them via the comments section below.

Suggested reading

• 5 Ideas to Brand Yourself with Paper.li
• Inject Gameplay into Your Content
• A Social Media Health Check: Is Your Strategy on Life Support?

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