What could be better than automating your online business so that sales come in while you sleep? The ultimate! But automation actually starts on a small scale, with tasks that take a lot of time, such as: making appointments, social media, email marketing, accounting, sending digital products, team processes or customer support. Online business coach Johanna Fritz presents various software solutions that can make our lives easier and save a lot of time:
In this article I would like to recommend some tools that will make your (business) life easier so that you can focus more on your customers and optimizing your company.
**How much does automation cost? **
This is the most popular question after the statement: I haven’t implemented it yet because it takes far too much time. But the fact is, as long as you do everything yourself, you are trading your time for money.
This means: Yes, money has to be invested to use the tools and (one-off) time has to be invested to set them up. However, in the long run they not only help you save time, but also make you less prone to errors. How often does it happen to us as stressed people that we mix up numbers when transferring an appointment?
Automate appointment scheduling
You can automate appointments. The following probably sounds familiar to you: you write ten emails back and forth with a customer just to find a time for a Zoom call. That costs time and nerves! The tool calendly helps here. With calendly you can automate appointment scheduling. All you have to do here is simply send out a link and they will choose an appointment approved by you.
I’ll explain to you in more detail how this works: Let’s say you create a calendar for customer appointments. You define in the calendly calendar on which date and time you can have conversations and then send the calendly link to your customers. They can then choose a suitable date.
In addition, calendly has three automatisms that are worth their weight in gold. A direct integration with Zoom is available. This means that when you book an appointment, a Zoom meeting is automatically created and sent to the customer via email. The appointment booking also ends up (if linked) directly in your Google Calendar, in which the Zoom link is stored for you. In addition, your customer can receive an appointment reminder from calendly by email before the conversation. You can customize these yourself and send them automatically.
Schedule and recycle posts with Smarterqueue
You probably already know one or two tools that can be used to schedule social media posts. They can all do pretty much the same thing. You schedule your most recent blog post to be published on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
But Smarterqueue has another special feature: it “requeued” old posts. This means that it will put them back in the queue after they have been published once. This will set a scheduling cadence to repost your old posts. To avoid boring your followers, you should rephrase the posts. Recycling deluxe!
Here you can specify your own categories and create different posting plans for, for example, your blog posts, tips or YouTube videos. This way, you’ll keep getting traffic to your blog posts, YouTube videos, or podcast episodes without having to actively plan for them again.
Repurpose
If you offer a podcast, I have another secret tip. Because there are people who like to listen to audio podcasts on YouTube. How do you do that? And how do you prepare that graphically?
That’s what Repurpose is for. The tool creates an audio track via iTunes. You can store your own graphic here to serve as a background for the audio waves. One click and the tool takes the title and description and automatically uploads them to YouTube. You will receive a YouTube video with Audio Waves and your listeners will be able to listen to the podcast on the most popular video platform in the future. In addition to YouTube, there are other linking options such as LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.
Last, but not least, every entrepreneur’s favorite topic: accounting.
Automate accounting with GetMyInvoices
This solution is a game changer. You probably also use countless programs, systems and software that send invoices. But who still keeps track?
Some invoices come via email, others have to be laboriously downloaded. In other words, you would normally collect all invoices by hand, import them into your accounting program and assign them to the accounts. GetMyInvoices completely relieves me of this work and once again saves me an incredible amount of valuable time (and nerves).
The program automatically pulls all invoices from various stored accesses and even from the e-mail inbox. Also very practical: When creating the receipts, you can define whether the invoice should always be forwarded as paid (which is particularly advantageous for subscriptions) and which item the invoice refers to: software, employees, etc.
And then, here it comes: the invoice lands directly in your accounting system via a link and assigns it to the outgoing cash. It couldn’t be easier, right? So when I log in to my accounting, the majority of outgoing payments are already green and linked to the appropriate receipt.
You see, automation definitely starts small if you’re willing to invest some money and time. I’ve been using all the tools presented here for years and I’m so, so grateful for how much they’ve helped me.
