MarkRMorrisJr.com

This is going to be a multi-part series on a free method for building nearly instant, growing and sustainable traffic to any web page you choose. Part 1

A few years back, I ran a social media marketing company. In my work I ran across a site called IF THIS THEN THAT that allows a user to set up repetitious actions between social media services, web apps, blogs, you name it. In effect, it allows you to use the web to automate many, many things in your life, for free!

What that means for a writer, like me, is that I can get dozens of backlinks, automatically generated, in deep links on sites like blogger, Wordpress, and Facebook, each and every time I post to my blog, or other site. FOR FREE! It will happen each time, every time, from now until I reset it, or tell it to stop. Right now, I have 4 accounts, each creating over a dozen links, for five posts a week, for more than 200 links a week, and that is just the beginning.

It’s not complicated! (just takes some time)

All that’s required to get an IFTTT account and begin making use of these features is an email address to confirm the account. Any email address. Enter Gmail, Google’s official communications arm, that allows users to create and operate multiple gmail accounts at one time. (there are differing answers as to how many), suffice it to say, more than you care to answer email for every day.

SO, to start your journey into traffic land, simply go to Google and set up a few Gmail accounts. (I am currently managing a half dozen) It’s pretty simple. You’ll want to be careful to use the “captcha” method of determining you are human or you’ll have to confirm your account with a phone number. 

Get ready, you’ll have a lot to keep track of!

Before you do this, you’ll want a spread sheet, or Word doc with a table in it to type all of your user names and passwords into. Be sure you remember to include the birth date of each “surrogate” you create. There’s no reason they can’t all be the same as yours, but just remember what they are, because the birth date can be used as a security question if you ever need to recover your account.

While you’re at it, you can also set up a single master account to receive all the mail from your surrogates. You won’t use it at first, but after everything has been set up it can be nice to just open one box to see if there is anything important to take care of. Just forward all mail from each address to your master box. DO NOT MAKE YOUR PERSONAL OR BUSINESS EMAIL the master account. All of this social interaction will bury your email box.

So, now that you have a few “pen names” to work under, you need to set up IFTTT accounts for each of them. Keep it simple. I use the same password for all of my surrogates. It makes login easy. Sign up for IFTTT and confirm the account by responding to the email they send you.

IFTTT has two basic features, Channels, and Recipes.

Channels explained

A channel in IFTTT is any website or app that allows you to connect it to other websites and apps through the IFTTT program. The channels page has all of them listed in various categories. I’ll share which ones to connect to next time. For now, you can click on each logo and get a brief description of what it is. There is everything here from Facebook to apps that will start your car, or turn on your lights at home.

Recipes explained

A recipe in IFTTT is two apps or websites linked together, If This, Then That. The “this” is the “trigger” when it occurs, IFTTT takes an action, which effects the “that” portion of your recipe. It’s easiest to explain with an example. If you have a recipe set up to link Wordpress and Facebook, for example, when you post to Wordpress, Facebook would automatically receive a message to make a post regarding your Wordpress post. On many of the channels (Wordpress being one of them) there are multiple options for what “that” will do. For instance, you can share only posts that contain a key word, or tag, or you can choose to share every single post on your Wordpress.

Setting up your channels

You can probably figure a lot of this out on your own, but I’ll talk more about it next time. It’s easiest, in most cases, to go directly to the channel’s site to initiate your accounts. Use the same email and password for all of your actions to keep it simple, or use a password keeper app to help you keep track. More on this in my next post!