Tools
According to its own data,WordPress is the most used website builder and we also recommend this tool to our customers who want to set up a new website in 99% of cases. The advantages are obvious: it is cheap, the market penetration is huge, there are countless plugins and the operation is intuitive and simple even for laymen. No programming knowledge is needed for small design and content revisions and the system is very stable for small to medium-sized websites. So everything it needs.
Nevertheless, WordPress can be partly overwhelming due to the plugins just mentioned, which offer almost endless possibilities. Email marketing, automatically distribute blogposts, manage blogposts and connect to social media marketing. It can quickly become a jungle of plugins and worst of all, some plugins are not compatible with all other plugins. This can sometimes lead to WordPress crashing. Highly unpleasant and of course to be avoided at all costs.
A solution that is certainly less common but no less powerful is the automation of WordPress with Zapier.
Zapier is a cloud automation tool that makes it possible to map recurring tasks in simple workflows, integrate various applications into it and thus run fully automatically.
We have already explained Zapier in more detail here .
Zapier is therefore an excellent way to make working with WordPress easier, minimise the effort and thus have more time for more important tasks.
Let's take this further and look at 10 things you can do to combine the power of Zapier with the website builder. Best of all, all the solutions presented are automatic. Once created, they run forever.
What we are presenting here is only a very small part of what Zapier is capable of. Zapier offers many more functions. For more information on the possibilities of Zapier and the diverse and individual solutions for cloud automation, go here:
You may have heard content marketing specialists say: "Blogging is 5% writing and 95% other stuff". Often that's true. But what if you could do less of that "other stuff" by delegating it to a machine?
Zapier can help you do just that by automatically publishing your new blogposts to all your social profiles, such as your Facebook page, Twitter account or Pinterest profile. That way, you'll never have to manually share a single blog post on each of these platforms again.
Speaking of saving time - on Facebook, you can even tell Zapier to share only certain types of posts and which Facebook pages to use. With Twitter, you can pre-set the format of the tweet, shorten the URL (or not) and specify which types of posts to tweet.
With the Instagram platform, you can ideally reverse the automated process by first publishing your photos on Instagram and then automatically posting them on your blog.
You can set up the Zap (that's what Zapier calls the automation workflow it creates) so that when you publish a photo on Instagram, Zapier automatically publishes it to your blog as a new post. You can even choose the post format and category.
This is especially useful if you are a photographer or use your Instagram profile heavily in your business.
Many companies also have YouTube channels to cross-promote and reach all potential customers. If this also applies to you, the "YouTube Zap" is certainly interesting for you.
Like the Instagram Zap, you can have Zapier automatically post your YouTube videos to WordPress by choosing how you want the video post to look on the blog and whether you want the post to go live immediately or be saved as a draft.
You might ask yourself why you want to publish an RSS feed on your WordPress blog?
A simple reason for this could be to create a feed of other blogs that you enjoy reading and find useful for your readers. You can also merge content from other platforms, such as your social media profiles or other blogs you run.
However you use the RSS zap, it will be one of the easiest zaps to set up (honestly, they are all easy to set up).
A "Delay Zap" is an app that allows you to schedule your social media content for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
And with the Delay Zap, you can also publish the same content on your WordPress blog. After connecting to Zapier, you simply create a title, select the author of the post and any categories or tags.
If you don't know SurveyMonkey: It's a free service that allows you to run custom surveys to get feedback from your customers or followers.
With the SurveyMonkey Zap, you can have people's responses or overall survey results automatically published on your WordPress site. This could be a great way to say to your readers, "Hey! This is what you all think as a collective group. Cool, right?"
Many authors and bloggers prefer to write in Google Docs. And with the Google Docs Zap, you can easily transfer this content to WordPress. Zapier automatically saves Google Docs as a draft post in your WordPress account. This makes creating the post much easier and eliminates the need for tedious copy-pasting.
If you create a lot of written content, it is important to have a content calendar. Zapier knows this. That's why you can create a Zap that adds every new WordPress post to your Google Calendar.
This way you can see at a glance which posts are published and when. No more accidental duplicate posts or too much time between posts.
You probably already back up the content of your blog, but it's better to be extra safe and use a secondary (and even tertiary) backup. With DropBoxZap you can save individual WordPress posts to your DropBox.
Don't worry - it's a pretty simple process.
After signing up for Zapier, the best practice is to create a new WordPress user that only Zapier can access.
And this is how you proceed:
That was easy, wasn't it?
After you have set up Zapier as a new user, you can connect Zapier to your WordPress.
Not doing things the hard way.
You have enough to do as it is. Instead of wasting your time doing tedious tasks manually, let Zapier do the heavy lifting. This way, you can focus on the things that really matter without constantly worrying that something will be forgotten and left undone.
In our fast-paced, ever-evolving workplace, time is your greatest asset. Thanks to Zapier, you can potentially reclaim hours of previously wasted time.
Have more questions about how to automate Wordpress with Zapier?
Cloud Integration, iPaaS, SaaS, BPA… Ough, hard to keep track of all these terms. They are currently used frequently (and increasingly) in the context of automation, and it is sometimes difficult to make a clear distinction and distinction. We have already written blog posts on the terms iPaaS, SaaS and BPA, but we’ll take them up again here to make the difference.
But let’s start with cloud integration, because that’s the central umbrella term in which we embed all the other technologies in this blog post.
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
To illustrate these advantages, an example is suitable that we know well from our everyday work as an automation agency:
The central data to be used here is the data of a major customer. This can be the simplest information, such as the address. This address is required in numerous but completely different processes in the company: on the one hand, for correct invoicing in accounting. On the other hand, in the CRM system, where all the data of the large customer is also stored. But the address is also important in sales, for example, when employees go to the sales meeting on site.
Now the customer announces that the address of the company has changed after a move. This information will reach you by e-mail. There are now two options:
01. The e-mail is forwarded to all affected departments, accounting, sales, customer service, marketing… All persons open their corresponding program, CRM, accounting software, marketing tools (such as newsletter marketing) and change the data already stored there of the customer. This means that in multiple applications, different people do exactly the same thing: change one address.
02. But there is also an alternative: By connecting your applications, thus by integrizing them, the customer’s e-mail, or rather the information it contains about the address change, is automatically passed on to all affected applications: CRM, accounting, marketing, ERP. This does not require any clicks, because the cloud integration detects a trigger, i.e. address change, and thus automatically starts the process.
What sounds unimpressive in a single process becomes more effective when such a process occurs several times a day or weekly. Because there is a lot of data that is available in different applications and should always be correct. If these applications are cloud applications they are suitable for cloud integration.
But cloud integration doesn’t just happen. There are now a variety of applications that enable and implement this. Such tools usually allow us to link the relevant cloud applications on a central platform and define clear rules on when, how, where, how much data should be passed on and what happens to them.
To realize cloud integration, there are various applications and technologies that are sometimes used interchangeably.
We have made a first distinction between iPaaS and BPA here.
We explain the term SaaS in more detail here.
Cloud integration is rather an umbrella term that includes numerous technologies, such as SaaS, iPaaS and BPA, and this is also absolutely necessary. Cloud integration is a concept that is made possible by appropriate technologies.
However, all terms share the commonality that they are cloud-based and thus offer enormous potential for growth and scaling. In addition, they are often cheaper to implement and maintain because changed requirements are easy to implement.
As an independent automation agency, we implement cloud integration according to your requirements. We use a variety of SaaS tools and iPaas (strictly speaking BPA) software. Together we find individual solutions that are flexible and scalable.
