This month our theme is the How. The how of 5 five questions every small business owner has to be able to answer to have a truly successful business.
Now when we are talking about how, it’s the how we do things. And you want to be more effective. Now I’ve recently talked about that, about becoming more effective rather than just busy. And yesterday talked about finding your sort of unique ability. Finding the thing that you, just you can do.
And how to offload the things that you don’t like doing and the things you shouldn’t be doing. And that’s generally what we all struggle with is offloading the things that we shouldn’t be doing to people that should be doing them.
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So today we are going to talk about some automation.
This generally will happen in things like social media. There are a lots of parts of marketing strategy that need to be done.
And they need to be done over and over and over again. And they can be a huge huge time suck, so they will need some automation.
It’s very important, a lot of people will be looking, you know listening to this and going, ‘Ohh no Jon. We can’t automate. That’s awful, especially on Social Media. We are sick and tired of all the automation.’
But let me make this clear. No, you cannot automate actual talking to people. And business, when it comes down to it, even on social media you have to talk to people. That means you have to communicate and it may be by a tweet, it may be by a Facebook messenger. It could be via an email, it could be on the phone. You can’t automate that. There are parts that you can’t get out of. Sorry for all you people that think working online means that you don’t have to speak to customers anymore.
In my fire safety business, we take over a 100 paid orders every single day. And I have staff and they spend all day talking to customers. We are an ecommerce business like amazon, and it doesn’t matter. We gladly talk to customers. They phone us, they want information. We gladly speak to them. It’s going to be the same for you.
So take something like twitter. With twitter, if you are using it, and I do advise you use it because it is the only social media tool with a search facility where you can find new potential customers. But there are methods, there is a strategy.
What I suggest is that you look into tools such as Hootsuite, or Sprout Social or TweetDeck or things like that to help you ease your day.
You only need to spend 15, 20, maybe 30 minutes because you’re learning, a day on social media. And that can be spread throughout it. And the way you do that is through using tools like automating tools.
And what I mean by all the automation is if you’ve written a post, you want it to be, it’s going to publish on a certain time on a certain day.
You want it to be sent off to twitter for people there to find it too. You don’t want to have to physically go and do that. So you can set this up with a tool. You can schedule it.
If you want to put something on Facebook, perhaps you’ve made a video like this, for example. This, this is starting off as a video. Then gets changed into an mp3 file for the podcast. That will go to iTunes. It will go to Stitcher, and it will go to SoundCloud.
But these are recorded in advance and are ready to go there at a certain time. So what we do is this will go, the video will go onto YouTube. The YouTube will be embedded, and the post will be created and it will be scheduled and it’s scheduled for a time using WordPress in built scheduler.
And then it has some rules to send it to twitter and so on. But it will only send it once the post has gone live. It will also only go live on ITunes when it’s published on WordPress, on the blog, at www.MarketingforOwners.com.
And then it also goes to Stitcher, it also goes to SoundCloud, it also goes to Google Play. All at the same time. There are other places. It, things will go to LinkedIn.
It will go to Facebook, and we will also quite often publish video on Facebook. But it has to be uploaded there, and scheduled. This is automation. And these are things you don’t need to be doing. Because there are tools that do it for you.
In fact, even better, in my opinion than Hootsuite and so on, are Buffer and Meet Edgar. We actually use both of them. Been user of Meet Edgar since the start. Edgar is, I think it might have gone up now but it started off at $49. It’s not necessary.
Buffer is, well first of all it’s free. There’s a free level. But the paid one is only something like $10 a month. So that’s a good starting point.
But there are other things you need to automate. You need to know when people are mentioning you. When people are talking to you. And all this has systems.
Now I mentioned at the start that we have the Owners Club Gold. Within that you get free access. Not only to website101, that shows you how to set up step by step. In fact not step by step, sorry. Click by click. Everything, everything you need to do to set up a website to properly get leads and convert them into clients.
But it also has Facebook101, Twitter101, and LinkedIn101, which get you to set these up correctly for a business. Remember most people are setting them up on the personal profiles so this is not right. So shows you how to set that up.
That is also included, or you can join the owners club for 29 pounds for one month do it all and then cancel. And you’ve got it. You know you can even download and get all the copies of everything. Anyway that’s another thing.
Tuesday Toolbox Tip
But these are things you need to set up and automate. And because this is a Tuesday, it’s time for a Toolbox Tip.
And our Toolbox tip is Upwork this week. www.Upwork.com.
Now this is a paid thing. It is one of the largest freelancing sites on the planet.
So Upwork, there’s freelancer, and there’s Fiverr. There are our favourites. But on Upwork, you can find people who can set up these automations for you.
Just go into Upwork and search for jobs, put in something like twitter automation, or twitter management.
People there can set them up and you will find people in parts of the world where the cost of living is lower and there cost will be something like $7 an hour.
Some of this is very simple. And if people will do things like that, at $7 an hour, you shouldn’t be doing it. If you value your time at $7 an hour, there is no hope.
You should be out there getting more clients or building the business. And therefore you can afford to pay someone $7 an hour. Remember you don’t need to pay them 40 hours a week. Its only when they do it. So Upwork works perfectly with this.
You can also find someone to manage the automation of your website. You can give them the work and give them a process and give them a system to do it.
So if you have, if you have a way of doing things, just record it with screenshots, and with instructions, the next time you do it. Or with a screen video using something, a free tool like Jing, or Screen-O-Matic or any of the others, or CamStudio.
That is different to Camtasia because it’s free. Although I think that’s only for windows. Macs have inbuilt QuickTime which does it as well. Did you even know that?
And you can then get someone to do that process for you. That is automating by giving it to someone. It’s just the same as why do you use Microsoft Office? It helps make things easier.
So this is why you want to automate effectively. So get a system. Stick to it. Get people to do that for you, and set it up for you if you’re not sure. Upwork is the fella. It’s brilliant. Honestly. It saves you a fortune, makes your life easier.