Free Stuff

There’s an awesome tool that you need to know about that increases your productivity in your online business. It connects many of the different social media websites allowing you to automate a large number of the tasks you usually perform.

For example, every time you create a status update on Facebook, you can automatically post a tweet to Twitter, or create a post in WordPress, send an email to someone, or receive a text message; the list is endless.

So what is it and how does it work?

The tool is called “If This Then That” and you can find it online at ifttt.com.

The concept might be slightly tricky to grasp but when you get the idea and see how easy it is to use, your head will spin with the possibilities.

Think of it as follows: You do something on a website that TRIGGERS an ACTION to be performed on another website.

So “If this then that” works as:

If TRIGGER (on one website) then ACTION (on another website)

The trigger can be something like uploading a photo to Facebook, creating a new post in WordPress, or creating a new tweet in Twitter. When you do one of those it creates a TRIGGER to perform an  ACTION on another website. The ACTION could be something like sending a text message to you, adding a file to Dropbox, in fact one of hundreds of different actions.

Let’s have a look at an example:

We get hundreds of emails in gmail every day, so sorting through them is a nightmare. There’s one or two emails we get that we do want to receive but finding them is very difficult. So we actually want to save the emails we select in one single place, automatically.

To do that, it’s easy to create a new task in ifttt.com. Then create a trigger that says, whenever we get an email from this person, we want an action that automatically copies it to Evernote. Evernote is another handy tool you can save all those ideas and notes into one easy location.

It’s extremely powerful what you can do with ifttt.com. To see it in action check out this slideshow. Once you’ve got your head around that, go to ifttt.com, open a free account and have a play!

PS. We just worked out that with a selection of only the more popular websites in ifttt.com like WordPress, gmail, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter there are over 450 possible ways of automating stuff for you! That’s just the tip of the Iceberg. So go ahead and get an account to make your life easier.

Why not share some of the tasks you’ve created in the comments section below!

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