Simple Automation Tips to Help You Regain Your Work-Life Balance
Maybe you’ve bought into the dream of marketing automation, you know, the one where you set it up once and forget it, hit the easy button, and retire to the beach sipping margaritas. Or perhaps your experience is the opposite, where you are simply overwhelmed with all the tasks that need to be addressed with an online business, and can barely breathe.
The reality lies somewhere between these extremes. Unless you truly have gotten it together and are drowning in your own business, you likely need some help with regaining a sensible and profitable work-life balance. Let’s look at ways we can do this.
Some cool tools that can help with marketing automation
Hootsuite – Like it or not, social media is a vital part of your business going forward. Hootsuite helps you manage your social media marketing by aggregating all your important social accounts in one place, enabling you to respond with more agility, and saving hours of time.
Email autoresponders – One of the most lethal and useful tools in an online business arsenal is your email autoresponder. This keeps your brand in front of prospects on a regular basis, with practically no effort on your part, save setting it up once. A must-have!
IFTTT – If this, then that, is an ingenious tool (free) that works on formulas, or “recipes,” you create, such as “If I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook, then send me a text message.” IFTTT is tied into the web-based accounts that you chose to authorize, and will check for new data every 15 minutes unless you’ve chosen to make this instant.
Zapier – A paid service much like IFTTT, but with a few more premium features.
Google Alerts, Hangouts, Drive, Communities – The Google suite of tools is free and can be extremely useful for saving time and organizing teamwork. You can collaborate on work within Drive, Hangouts and Communities are terrific ways to synch up with team members and connect with prospects.
Best practices for automating parts of your online business
Autoposting – Can be useful for scheduling blog posts or other content.
Outsourcing – You can’t do it all. Delegate to staff, or hire outside outsourcers to handle tasks that you absolutely don’t have to do. Some good places to locate affordable outsourcing help are Odesk, Elance, and Fiverr.
Hire a virtual assistant – This can free you up in many ways, and allow you to focus on parts of your business you really need to attend to.
Worst practices (avoid these!)
Autoposting – Can be abused! Don’t schedule a load of mediocre or worse, poor content to be posted to your sites. This will hurt more than help.
Social Oomph – Though quite popular, this is one of the worst aspects of social media. No one wants to read a litany of quotes from dead men. This is the antithesis of “social” media.
Not paying attention – While it’s nice to have automated systems in place, that’s no excuse to not pay attention. Unanswered comments, questions and replies can lead to a reputation management problem, so keep an eye on it with the tools we’ve presented here!
