How To Automatically Syndicate Your Old & New WordPress Content Everywhere [For Free]

This post will walk you through how you can automatically syndicate both new and OLD WordPress Posts for free across multiple social media & blogging channels.

There are a ton of guides online showing you how to publish NEW content across social media channels, but this guide is unique because I use a WordPress plugin to syndicate your OLD content, as well.

Benefits Of Syndication

1. Potential for incremental traffic from your social shares
2. Social signals can help with keyword rankings (Source)
3. Can help acquire backlinks passively from increased awareness
4. Old content doesn't die, forgotten

How To Set Up The Syndication

Summary

1. Install & Configure Revive Old Post
2. Use IFTTT to connect your Twitter account to different platforms
3. Supplement with Zapier to connect to Google+
4. Document exactly how your process works somewhere safe so you can fine-tune and correct it as needed
5. Save all of your social media account login information in a Google Sheet

Details

The WordPress plugin I use is called Revive Old Post.

Configuring Revive Old Post

1. First, make sure that you're logged into Twitter.

2. Once you've installed and activated Revive Old Post inside of WordPress, you'll see it in your WordPress side panel. 

3. Click into Revive Old Post and click the Add Account option for Twitter. Connecting the plugin with Twitter is pretty straightforward from there.  

4. Now you'll want to click on General Settings. Here you can configure how often you want to share by inputting an hour length in the Minimum Interval Between Shares area. I currently have mine set to "12" so that it shares twice a day.

You can also determine the Minimum Age Of Post To Be Eligible For Sharing. I set this to "0" so that it will share all of my content, no matter how old it is. The same with Maximum Age Of Post To Be Eligible For Sharing.

I also set Number Of Posts To Share to "1". I don't see any point in sharing more than 1 post at a time. 

I also enable Share Old Posts More Than Once. One note about this- if you don't have a lot of content to share, and you're aggressively sharing, it will look really spammy.

That's why I waited until I had enough content on NicheFacts before I decided to set up this social syndication process. If you only have 6 posts and you're sharing them twice a day, you're going to annoy the hell out of people. 

The Select Image Size Option is only available in the Pro version- but with Twitter I've found that it generates an attractive link preview thumbnail for my content, so I don't need to upgrade for image capabilities.

5. Next, navigate to Post Format.

This is where you'll configure how you want the Tweet to look. I use the Title Only for Post Content. I also adapted the Length to 280, reflecting Twitter's recent change in character length.

That ensures that long Post Titles don't get truncated.

There are some additional options that I don't really use here- like the Custom Field, Additional Text, Fetch URL From Custom Field. 

You can use a URL shortener- my URLs happen to be very short, so currently I'm not using this option. But if your URLs are long, you'll want to shorten them so you don't exceed the Tweet character limit. 

I am using Common Hashtags For All Shares- this works for NicheFacts because all of the content is relevant to the hashtags I chose to use. You can also choose to automatically create hashtags from the Categories or Tags your post has.

That's a handy feature- but depending on the names you gave your Categories and Tags might not be the best option for discovery on Twitter.

6. Then click on See Sample Post and you'll get a preview of what your share will look like. If it looks good, try clicking the Share Now button from Preview and see if it posts to Twitter. 

Configuring If This Then That

7. Assuming that your Revive Old Post plugin is now connected and communicating with Twitter, it's time to dive into If This Then That. 

Create an account on IFTTT and navigate to New Applet.  

Now you can start creating some connections- click the "+this" text, choose Twitter and then choose New Tweet By You as the Trigger:

You'll then be able to select what happens once a Tweet of yours is posted:

You'll see a ton of services that you can automatically post to from Twitter. Make sure you create an account with the service (Blogger, for example) prior to connecting to it in IFTTT.

Try searching for some of the following services: 

1. Blogger
2. Tumblr
3. Facebook
4. Facebook Pages
5. LinkedIn
6. Delicious
7. Pinboard
8. WordPress
9. Pinterest

You can set Twitter up to automatically post from WordPress to all of these (and more) platforms. I suggest you be judicious in how you implement this. 

Embarrassingly, I once set up an affiliate site to auto-post to my LinkedIn and I was sharing irrelevant affiliate content to all of my LinkedIn connections for a LONG time. 

Not good. 

Set this up carefully- document all of your login passwords as well as the connections you've set up. You WILL forget how the whole things works unless you document it. 

And occasionally these connections need to be refreshed, so you'll want to have the automation process captured in detail to reconstruct it.

Configuring Zapier For Google+

7. If you want to add auto post to Google+ using Revive Old Post Tweets, follow the following steps: 

1. Create a free Zapier account  
2. Create a free Buffer account
3. Connect Buffer and Google+
4. Use Zapier to connect Twitter to Buffer and the Google+ Page

The way it works, Zapier connects Twitter and Buffer which posts to Google+.

The first step once you have free Zapier and Buffer accounts is to connect Buffer to Google+. Setting that up is easy- just make sure you're logged into your Google+ page and then click Add A Social Account within Buffer.

Next, when you create a Zapier account, make sure you're logged in to Twitter and your free Buffer account, then click Make A Zap!

From there, type in Twitter, choose Twitter, select My Tweet, then Save + Continue, and then go through the process until you're able to choose an Action App. 

Then choose Buffer and the Buffer Action should be Add To Buffer. Eventually you'll click through to the following setup page where you can choose your Buffer account's Google+ page. 

And that's the secret way you can auto-post your old content to Buffer.

When using Buffer and Google, don't go overboard posting recycled content. I actually received a spam warning from Google+ because I was posting 7x a day. 

I reduced it to once a day and I've been fine ever since. Within Buffer you can choose a custom Schedule for each social account:

It's a very cool, free feature. If you want to take this process up a notch, check out Bulkly,  which enables you to keep your Buffer Queue automatically filled with content.

Final Thoughts

For the most part, this is a one time setup. I occasionally get error messages from Zapier, Buffer or IFTTT and I have to reauthorize a login. But other than that, it's pretty seamless.

If you have active social profiles- meaning that you actually have Followers that engage with your content, this can be a pretty effective strategy for acquiring incremental traffic from old content they might not have seen before.

Personally, on NicheFacts, I'm hoping that I get a stream of traffic from Twitter on auto-pilot considering that I have spent a good deal of time authentically engaging with other online marketers. 

Let me know in the comments section what you think!