Let me ask you a query: How does the beginning of your typical workday look?
Is it crammed with electronic mail responses, follow-up emails, schedule sorting, social media posting, and extra tedious and repetitive duties like these?
In the event you’re like most girls working from residence, half of your day finally ends up being consumed by all the little issues. Whereas these little issues are important to maintain your online business rising, you possibly can most likely do them along with your eyes closed by now.
Think about how a lot time you’d save in case you weren’t manually conserving the entire present operating behind the scenes. I imply, consider all of the tasks you possibly can lastly end or the leads you possibly can land in case you bought again only a few additional hours every day.
It’d be big, proper?
By automating your online business, you are able to do exactly that. You’ll be able to take all the tedious little duties that take a lot additional time, and set them on autopilot. Consider it like bringing on a full-time assistant, however with out all of the hiring, paperwork, and administration.
Right here’s Easy methods to Automate Your Enterprise and Get Hours of Time Again Every Day:
1. Streamline Funds
Whether or not you’re promoting bodily merchandise, digital merchandise, or providers, one of many very best methods to get again hours of time every week is by automating your funds.
When beginning out, companies and freelancers have a tendency to decide on the simplest and most cost-effective choices for normal practices like amassing funds. Naturally, that sends a number of them to platforms like PayPal. And whereas that’s fully superb, lots of those self same individuals maintain utilizing their private PayPal accounts as soon as they’ve severely outgrown them.
Selecting a great fee processor that not solely accepts funds but additionally automates refunds, chargebacks, and failed funds saves each time and stress. As an alternative of sending shoppers a hyperlink to pay with or creating a person bill for each buy made, you possibly can merely arrange a fee web page and let clients take it from there.
Shopify is an ideal platform for promoting completely something on-line (you should utilize them to promote providers, too), though processors like PayPal Enterprise and Stripe are nice, as nicely.
Associated Content material: Why You Ought to Use On-line Accounting Software program Over a Spreadsheet
2. Set Up a Dwelling Base
It doesn’t matter what type of enterprise you’re operating, you want an operations base — your on-line headquarters for the whole lot business-related, together with calendars, information, communication, and extra.
A superb venture administration app can work wonders for serving to you automate. My app of selection is Asana, which helps you to do issues like:
- Create tasks, with duties and subtasks inside every venture
- Assign duties to particular person customers or workers with distinctive deadlines
- Handle your calendar, whether or not you employ it for publishing content material, consumer work, or something in between
- Chat along with your staff or companions and share information inside duties and tasks
One of the best half is, as an alternative of continually scheduling your duties as they arrive, a venture administration app lets you possibly can create repeating duties and deadlines. Which means you’ll by no means have to recollect when to put in writing your subsequent weblog publish, who’s presupposed to ship that consumer electronic mail, or what day you supposed to observe up with a buyer. A venture administration app will deal with all that for you. Speak about a weight lifted.
There are numerous electronic mail advertising instruments on the market, irrespective of your price range. Which means there’s completely no cause to not make use of 1 — even in case you’re not doing electronic mail advertising but.
On a small scale, consider an electronic mail advertising instrument as an autoresponder. Let’s use MailChimp for example due to its free choice for small companies.
With MailChimp, anytime somebody sends you an electronic mail, you possibly can robotically reply. For instance, possibly a buyer is reaching out by way of a contact kind in your copywriting providers web site. As an alternative of constructing them wait till you will have time to answer, MailChimp can ship them a personalised response with quite a few choices for that potential buyer to decide on.
On a barely bigger scale, you possibly can program MailChimp to ship follow-up emails, too — comparable to a collection of emails providing useful suggestions that may shock and delight anybody who reaches out.
Taking it a step additional, since constructing an electronic mail checklist is among the greatest issues you are able to do for your online business, why not go all-in? With an electronic mail advertising service, you possibly can add an opt-in field to your web site that enables guests to enroll after which robotically sends them emails for weeks to observe.
With out a good electronic mail advertising instrument, you’ll be slaving away responding to shoppers (and dropping helpful leads within the course of), letting buyer questions fall by way of the cracks, or dropping hours of time manually reaching out to your viewers.
Social media will be incredible for enterprise or detrimental to your productiveness.
It’s fantastic if you’re in a position to construct a big, but close-knit following — one which helps and engages with you.
It’s not so fantastic when half your time is spent creating and scheduling posts every day, inflicting you to cram to get in your entire different work.
In the event you ever really feel like your social media efforts are going nowhere or that it’s merely taking an excessive amount of time, it is advisable automate it.
Instruments like SocialBee or SmarterQueue have been created to not solely relieve you out of your each day social media administration but additionally to scale back the period of time it is advisable spend creating contemporary content material.
With a instrument like SmarterQueue, for instance, you possibly can schedule your entire posts for all of your social media profiles on one calendar, then have them automated to repeat at sure instances. You too can schedule outdoors content material from throughout the app, conserving your entire social media duties in a single place.
In the event you take a second to think about solely spending a number of hours every month (and even each few months) doing social media, you’ll understand precisely why you want a instrument to automate the method. There’s little question this activity performs a big half in your day-to-day schedule, however it doesn’t need to.
5. Use IFTTT
IFTTT stands for “if this, then that.”
IFTTT.com is an app that connects your units and different apps to arrange “if this, then that” eventualities between them. In different phrases, if one factor occurs in a single app, one thing else can occur in one other.
Listed below are a number of examples of how one can put it to work:
- “In the event you create a brand new Instagram video, it robotically will get shared to Twitter.”
- “In the event you get an electronic mail with a brand new attachment, it robotically saves to your Google Drive.”
- “In the event you “star” an electronic mail, it robotically will get added to Evernote.”
The checklist may go on, however you get the thought. With the app, you possibly can automate all the little duties that eat away at your time. It really works along with your electronic mail, calendar, contacts, sensible units, social media accounts, and a lot extra. If you end up frequently repeating little duties all through the day, create a free IFTTT account and get arrange immediately
What Can Enterprise Automation Do for Me?
In the event you’re like me, you will have a mountain of duties standing earlier than you every day, from little “to-dos,” to large-scale tasks. It’s arduous to maintain all of it operating alongside easily, particularly if you’re making an attempt to steadiness all of your “life stuff” on the similar time.
By automating as many enterprise duties as potential, you possibly can probably save your self hours of labor every day. Hours! And in case you’re operating your online business as a small operation — with out bringing on an entire staff of workers — automation might be the one technique to proceed to scale and develop.
Begin by giving your online business a each day evaluation. As you go all through your workday this week, make a remark every time you do a particular activity greater than as soon as. My guess is after a full seven days you’ll most likely have a few pages value. From there, undergo the steps above to automate as lots of these duties as you possibly can, whether or not it’s with electronic mail, an app, or a great fee processor.
Upon getting your first set of duties automated, undergo the following week making notes every time you repeat a activity and discover methods to automate them. After a number of weeks of rinsing and repeating, you would possibly simply discover you’re working far more than it is advisable.
How do you automate your online business? Drop us a word; we’d love to listen to from you!
Kristen Youngs co-operates two on-line companies whereas touring the world full-time. Go to her web site, One Bag Nomad, to discover ways to journey so long as you need and construct a profitable on-line enterprise, fully location-free. You too can go to her on Pinterest.
