You know it. In our super connected world, people are highly distracted. Getting people to return to you, and stay engaged is a challenging.

Good thing there ways to improve that. Even better, they can be automated. In this post we’ll explore some options. What I love about these – you only need ONE plugin – sometimes not at all. The plugin is HookPress and the tool is fabulous Zapier (which you can get started free). Using this combo, here’s what you can do:

Add People To Your List When They Register For An Account

If you open your blog up for registration, it is tremendously valuable to also have them in your mailing list. Of course, you’d want to make sure they know they’ll be hearing from you regularly when they register.

For this zap, you’d set HookPress to user_register, with display_name and user_email fields at a minimum. In Zapier, you’d choose WordPress Any Webhook as the trigger and your email service provider as the action (e.g. Aweber, Active Campaign etc)

Publicly Welcome New Users

Want to give a shoutout when people registers on your site? You can do that. This is a fantastic way to give social proof people are registering, using or signing up for what your site/blog offers.

In HookPress, create a web hook for user_register with display_name field. On the Zapier end, choose WordPress Any Webhook for the trigger and the social network of your choice as the action.

When Members Submit A Post For Your Review

This is particularly helpful when you have a site where your content is user generated. By default, WordPress allows anyone with a contributor or author role to submit a post, but not be published. The post will only be published by a user with editor or administrator role. However, you don’t get notified when there are posts pending review. Until now.

To do this, you’d set up a web hook in HookPress for save_post. Include the post_status field (very important). Additionally, for your info, you can also include post_name, post_title, post_type and post_url.

In Zapier, create a zap with trigger being WordPress any web hook and action to email. Be sure to filter your WordPress trigger by selecting Post Status to exactly match “pending” without the quotes. If you don’t do this, you’ll receive an email each time a post is auto-saved which can be a lot.

New Post Alert Via Text Message

Maybe your audience is on the go and they prefer to be notified via text message. For this, you don’t even need HookPress. You can simply set it up directly in Zapier by choosing WordPress New Post for your trigger. For the action, you’d need a third party service like Clickatell.

You can also make this more specific. Obviously it could get annoying when you publish a lot of posts. So maybe you could only offer text updates for specific types of posts, or when a post is published in a specific category. Very useful for news related or time sensitive content.

Encourage Users To Complete Their Profile

Getting people to enter more information about themselves is always tough. A good way is to cheer them on and encourage them to complete their profile.

Let’s say you are already adding people to a list after they register. In your welcome email, you encourage people to go update their profile now.

When they update their profile, you can use HookPress and Zapier to automatically email them, thanking them for updating. You can also take this a little further by checking if certain fields (e.g. user_url) are empty. Doing this, you can opt-to mention it in the email. Or, you could create yet another zap for when users update their profile. This time, if the URL is completed, they will receive a bonus freebie.

Create A New Post When Youtube Video Is Published

Fresh content is always welcomed by readers. Good thing content can be in many formats and automation doesn’t have to be a one way process. It can be incoming as well. For example, if you publish YouTube videos regularly, you might want to have a blog post created on your own blog.

Zapier handles this one very easily. All you need is Youtube as your trigger and your blog as the action. You can make the post as draft if you need to review it or you can set it to publish immediately.

What do you think? Could you use any of these? Maybe they can trigger additional ideas for other uses.