Let me ask you: What does your typical work day look like?
Filled with email responses, follow-up emails, schedule sorting, social media posts, and such boring and repetitive tasks?
Like most women who work at home, half of your day is consumed by all the little things. Those little things are essential to keep your business growing, but perhaps you can close your eyes and do them by now.
Imagine how much time you could save if you didn’t manually run the entire show behind the scenes. So think about all the projects you can end up finishing, or leads you can land if you get back a few extra hours each day.
That’s huge, isn’t it?
By automating your business, you can do it accurately. You can take all the boring little tasks that take extra time and set them up for autopilot. Think of it as something like bringing a full-time assistant.
Here’s how you can automate your business and go back hours every day:
1. Streamline your payments
Whether you sell a physical, digital product or service, one of the absolute best ways to get your time back each week is to automate your payments.
When you start, businesses and freelancers tend to choose the easiest and cheapest options of standard practices, such as collecting payments. Naturally, it sends many of them to platforms like PayPal. And while that’s completely fine, many of those same people continue to use their personal PayPal accounts after they’ve grown badly.
Choosing a great payment processor that not only accepts payments, but also automates refunds, chargebacks, and failed payments will save you both time and stress. Instead of sending a link to pay a client, instead of creating a separate invoice for each purchase, you can set up a payment page so that customers can retrieve from it.
Shopify is also great processors like PayPal Business and Stripe, but it’s the perfect platform for selling absolutely anything online (you can also use them).
Related Content: Why should you use online accounting software in your spreadsheet?
2. Set the home base
Regardless of the type of business you run, you need an operational base, that is, all business-related online headquarters, including calendars, files, communications.
A great project management app can work incredible ways to aid in automation. The app I chose is Asana. This allows you to:
- Create a project with tasks and subtasks within each project
- Assign tasks to individual users or employees with unique deadlines
- Manage your calendar whether you use it to publish content, client work, or anything in between
- Chat with teams and partners and share files within tasks and projects
The best part is that instead of always scheduling tasks, you can use the Project Management app to create recurring tasks and deadlines. This means you don’t have to remember when you’re going to write your next blog post, whether you’re supposed to send a client email, or the days you intended to follow up with your clients. The Project Management app handles everything for you. Talk about lifting weights.
There are countless email marketing tools no matter what your budget. So, even if you haven’t done email marketing yet, there’s absolutely no reason not to use it.
On a small scale, think of email marketing tools as autoresponders. Let’s use MailChimp as an example because it’s a free option for small businesses.
MailChimp allows you to automatically reply whenever someone sends an email to you. For example, a customer may be reaching out through a contact form on a copywriting service website. Instead of making them wait until they have time to reply, MailChimp can send personalized responses with many options for potential customers to choose from.
You can also program MailChimp to send follow-up emails on a slightly larger scale. For example, a series of emails that offer useful tips that will surprise and please those who reach out.
Go a step further as creating a mailing list is one of the best things you can do for your business. Would you like to try all in? Email marketing services allow you to add an opt-in box to your website that allows visitors to sign up, then automatically send emails over weeks.
Without a good email marketing tool, you can respond to your clients (and lose valuable leads in the process) and your customer questions can fall through the cracks or lose time manually to your audience.
Social media is great for your business or harmful to your productivity.
It’s great to be able to build a large but close follow-up.
When half of your time is spent every day writing and scheduling posts, that’s not that great.
If you feel that your social media efforts aren’t going anywhere or simply taking too long, then you need to automate them.
Tools like SocialBee and SmarterQueue were created to not only ease you from daily social media management, but also to reduce the time required to create fresh content.
For example, a tool like SmarterQueue allows you to schedule all posts from all social media profiles in one calendar and automate them to repeat at a specific time. You can also schedule external content from within the app to keep all your social media tasks in one place.
Just do social media for a few hours (or every few months) each month and you’ll know exactly why you need tools to automate your processes. There is no doubt that this task plays an important role in your daily schedule, but you don’t need to.
5. I use IFTTT
IFTTT stands for “If that’s the case.”
IFTTT.com is an app that connects your device and other apps to set up scenarios between “if it is, and then it.” In other words, when something happens to one app, something can happen with another app.
Here are some examples of how you can make it work:
- “When you create a new Instagram video, it will be automatically shared to Twitter.”
- “If you receive an email with a new attachment, it will be automatically saved to Google Drive.”
- “When you “start” an email, it will automatically be added to Evernote. ”
The list may continue, but you will get ideas. The app allows you to automate all the small tasks that eat up your time. Works with emails, calendars, contacts, smart devices, social media accounts, and more. If you find yourself constantly repeating small tasks throughout the day, create a free IFTTT account and set it up immediately
What can business automation do for me?
If you’re like me, you have a mountain mountain standing in front of you every day, from small “to-dos” to large projects. It’s difficult to keep everything running smoothly, especially when you’re balanced with everything “life.”
By automating as many business tasks as possible, you may be able to save time on your work every day. time! And if you run your business as a small operation without introducing an entire team of employees, automation may be the only way to continue expanding and growing.
Start by giving your business a daily rating. When you go throughout this week’s work day, I make notes every time I do a specific task multiple times. My guess is that after a whole seven days, it’s probably worth a few pages. From there, proceed with the steps above to automate as many tasks as possible, including email, apps, and great payment processors.
Once the first set of tasks is automated, I’ll pass next week and make notes every time I find a way to repeat and automate the tasks. After a few weeks of rinsing and repetition, you may find that you are working more than you need to.
How do you automate your business? Please drop a note. We look forward to hearing from you!
Kristen Youngs collaborates between two online businesses while traveling the world full time. Visit her website, 1 bag of nomads, learn how to travel as much as you want, and build a successful online business that is completely location-free. You can also visit her on Pinterest.