More you: This is how you can automate your business

What’s better than automating your online business, so you acquire more customers while you sleep? The absolute best! Actually, automation already starts with small things, with tasks that require a lot of time, such as: making appointments, Social Media, E-Mail-Marketing, bookkeeping, sending out digital products, processes in the team or Customer Support. Online Business Coach Johanna Fritz presents different Software-Solutions, that makes our life easier and save us a lot of time:

In this post, I want to suggest a few tools that will make your (business-) life easier. In this way, you can focus more on your customers and optimizing your business.

What are the costs of automation?

This is the most popular question after saying: ‘I haven’t implemented this because it takes too much time.’ However, as long as you do everything by yourself, you are exchanging your time for money.

That means: Yes, money needs to be invested to use the tools and time needs to be invested to implement the tools (once). In the long-term though, the tools help you save a lot of time and also be less prone to mistakes. How many times does it happen to us when we’re being stressed, that we mix up some dates in the transmission of appointments?

Automate Appointments

You can automate arranging appointments. For sure, this will sound familiar to you: You write ten emails back and forth with a customer just to find a common appointment for a zoom call. That costs time and nerves! This is where the tool calendly helps. With calendly you can automate the appointment setting process. All you have to do is to send out a link and the person will choose an appointment that you have approved.

I will explain how this works in more detail: Let’s say you create an appointment calendar for customer appointments. You define in the calendar at calendly on which date and at which time you can hold calls and then send the calendly link to your customers. They can then select a suitable appointment.

In addition to that, calendly offers three automatisms that are worth their weight in gold. For example, a direct integration to Zoom is available. This means that when an appointment is booked, a Zoom meeting is automatically created and sent to the customer by e-mail. The appointment booking also lands (if linked) directly in your Google Calendar, where the Zoom link is stored for you. In addition, your customer can receive an appointment reminder from calendly via email before the meeting. You can customize this yourself and send it automatically.

Planning posts and recycle with Smarterqueue

If you’re offering a podcast I have another secret tip for you, because there are people that like to listen to audio-podcasts on YouTube. And how do you prepare that graphically?

That’s what Repurpose is for. The tool pulls an audio track over iTunes. You can store your own graphic here, which should serve as a background for the audio waves. One-click and the tool takes the title as well as the description and uploads them automatically to YouTube. You get a YouTube video with Audio Waves and your listeners can listen to the podcast on the most popular video platform in the future. Besides YouTube, there are other linking options like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.

Last, but not least, the favorite topic of all entrepreneurs: bookkeeping.

Automate bookkeeping with GetMyInvoices

This solution is a game-changer. Surely you’re using several programs, systems, and softwares, that send out invoices. But who keeps the overview of that?

Some invoices are sent by mail, others have to be downloaded. That means, usually, you would have to collect all invoices by hand, import them in your bookkeeping software and allocate them to the accounts. GetMyInvoices does all of this work and again, saves loads of valuable time (and nerves).

The program automatically finds all invoices from the various stored accounts and the e-mail inbox. Also very useful: When creating the accounts, you can define whether the invoice should always be forwarded as paid (which is of advantage for subscriptions) and to which item the invoice refers: Software, Employees, etc.

And then, here it comes: the invoice goes directly to your bookkeeping system via a link and assigns it to the outgoing money. It doesn’t get any simpler than that, does it? So, when I log into my bookeeping system, most of the outgoing payments are already green-lit and linked to the appropriate document.

As you can see, an automation starts small if you’re willing to invest some money and time. I’ve been using all of the tools featured here for years now and I am very grateful for how much it takes off my plate.