We’ve compiled 7 things you can work towards automating in your business to save you time, so you can focus more on the tasks that drive your revenue.
Time is money, right? Often, working as a creator is a solo job with minimal assistance. Sure, you can hire an assistant, but with the amount of tech out there, you may be able to save yourself a decent amount of time without the investment of a second-team member. We’ve compiled 7 things you can work towards automating in your business to save you time, so you can focus more on the tasks that drive your revenue.
Anything that is a task you routinely do that involves technology can likely be sped up (Or sometimes eliminated altogether) through automation. While we don’t recommend automating things like engagement on your social media pages, a litany of other tasks can be automated with ease.
Why is social media engagement a bad candidate? It involves a heavy degree of human touch and your response is likely formed based upon the post you are seeing. While automation is great, the tools available to automate engagement simply lack that processing capacity.
Do you often find yourself using the same email responses on a day-to-day basis? Perhaps responses to gifting opportunities, pitching yourself, or even sharing your calendar. Set up email templates with software like Apollo.io to easily respond to these emails and save yourself time by having them ready to go in your inbox!
Sending out lots of cold emails? Automate your follow-up emails using Apollo.io as well. You can set up sequences within the platform itself or you can simply schedule a reminder to send a follow-up email while drafting the original. Don’t worry, if your contact responds, they’ll automatically be removed from the sequence.
Are you still manually publishing each post and story? Save time (and energy throughout the day) by scheduling your content to go live and then pencil in time to your calendar to be online to respond to DMs and comments. There are content schedulers for nearly every platform and most platforms even offer native scheduling. Not sure what content scheduler is right for you? Check out this post here.
Did you know you can set up quick replies in Instagram? You can use these for a variety of items such as common questions (like where to buy something in your recent stories/posts). Another option is to use them to set up a simple outreach option if you prefer DM pitching (although we always suggest email!). If you provide services or calls, you can also set up FAQ’s for automated responses via Instagram and Facebook.
Tired of long email chains trying to find a time that works for everyone's schedule? Skip that and set up your schedule with Calendly to make scheduling a time to chat about new opportunities easily. Or, engage with your community more by setting aside time to chat one on one!
Looking to make tracking growth on your platforms easier? Automate weekly reports on your Instagram growth and hashtag tracking with Flick.tech. If you’re looking for something to track across platforms you can also use software like Cyfe to build out your own custom analytics dashboard to review. As an added bonus, you can link to your Cyfe dashboards directly for brand partners.
You can even create an automatically updating media kit with software like Kitly, which will also allow you to track your campaigns. Read more about Kitly in our post on managing brand partnerships!
If you are wanting to get better at managing your content so you can reuse it later, check out IFTTT. You can set up automated sequences, such as saving your Instagram posts to a dropbox folder. Set up a similar sequence for each of your platforms to make sure your content is safely stored for repurposing later! We recommend still setting aside an hour or two once a month to tag the content you have created for ease of use later.
Brands
Taking this step can go the extra mile to impress brands, AND it helps you assess and improve your performance.
Hashtags are a promising way to help your Instagram account grow organically and beat back against the decline in organic reach. However, with countless “experts” out there, hundreds of different tools, and regular changes from Instagram themselves, where do you even start?
Interview
In this week’s Creator Spotlight, Anthony of @saint_travels shares the details of how he got his start in the business, his best advice for creators just starting out, and how to get comfortable charging what you’re worth. Thanks for chatting with Willa, Anthony!
Planning
Using a content calendar allows you to more easily plan out social media content and remain consistent with your messaging across multiple platforms.
