What even is automation for authors?

For this course an automation is another word for a workflow. It’s a set of instructions for something that you want to do over and over.

At the most basic level an automation for authors is when we say when this happens, do this thing. For example, when we have someone fill out a contact form on our website, add them to the our mailing list.

When someone fills out the form, it’s a trigger. It triggered the automation to run. 

Adding them to the mailing list is an action. 

But you can extend an automation to do multiple actions. Maybe we want to add them to our mailing list AND add them to a custom audience for our Meta Ads? We’d have to have the ‘Add to Mailing List’ action then ‘add to Meta Custom Audience’ action.

What if we want keep our mailing list as clean as possible and check the email address address a list of known scammers and hackers before allowing them to join?

We can add an intermediate step that checks the address against an email validation service. If they pass the checks they go to the next step. If they don’t the automation stops there.

Next Lesson

In the next lesson we’ll go ahead and create that first automation to see it in action.