Now these super powers can change your entire business, this doesn’t just apply to marketing, this can apply to anything.
Very very simply, if your business is organized and with systems and processes, then you will be able to do other things, you will have predictability, you will be able to do what you want, when you want and you’ll be able to do more of it. You will also find ways to have other people do things for you.
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“Okay Jon, lovely, sounds great, great theory.” I hear you say. “Explain what on earth you are talking about and how it works and how it works for us.” Well, I was going to do that anyway but thankfully, you asked.
So this is the modern world, okay. We have social media, we have the Internet, etcetera, etcetera. Now these add to everything we already had before that and I think a lot of us forget.
I have got gray hair; in my day, so when I started, if one was phoning the office, when I was a door to door salesman, I used to go in a phone box.
This is a red thing, a big red thing and it used to have a phone in there and you put money in. And I would phone the office, give them the phone number of the phone box and get them to ring me back and then I would explain to them what had happened in the day.
There was no quick communication and I filled in orders with paperwork and so I had to wait and post those invoices into the office and they would get them when they got them.
Everything worked the same as it did now but just a little bit slower, but it still worked. Everyone got their orders and everything happened. And we used old fashioned marketing and so on.
So all that still exists, obviously now I don’t have to post invoices in, but some people still do; I don’t have to use phone box. But everything happens the same; just all these new things are added to it.
So all these extra things we have to deal with, the email and the Google AdWords advertising and social media and creating YouTube videos like this and podcast, this is an addition, so there is more work. So many think, “Well it is easier now because of all this.”
But not really, it just is more for us to do. And we really need to add automation, because it is not as bad as it may sound because there are ways of making it easier and there are many many free tools. But if you have never heard of these tools, you won’t know. So let’s start with social media.
Now a lot of people of my age would say, “Oh, we did fine without social media. I don’t like it, I don’t want to use Twitter, I don’t want to use a Facebook”, so they avoid doing it.
What I would challenge you to think, is if that is you, because it is important, now it is not going to get you bucket loads of sales like some people will tell you, but it is important to be there because you’re going to join in conversations and people will talk about you and talk to you. And if you are not there they will think you are out of the game.
The young people coming through today, they are your customers in five years time. I know you don’t want to think ahead five years time, but if they are twenty today and they are at University, they are using some form of a social media.
When they are twenty five they are going to be graduates and having good jobs and they’re going to be buying your stuff or they are going to be starting companies and you are irrelevant to them if you’re not on.
So look in your staff, look at other people, look at outsourcing, look at finding contractors who can do things for you. But if you do want to embrace and take it on yourself and join the modern era, because if you are like me, I am fifty one at the time of recording, I have probably got a good, another thirty years working. That’s a long time, so get with it granddad, get with it grandma.
Now let me explain how you can make these things easy, because you’re thinking, “Well, if I add Twitter and if I get on LinkedIn and if I get on Facebook, I have heard I have got to be on them every day.”
So, look into services such as Buffer; Buffer enables you to schedule posts and things to keep your feeds and your timelines, keep your outgoing activity of relevant posts and things where you share and re tweet and put out posts, to keep it busy so that when people come along and look there is always something just being added.
You only have to spend a little time once a week at the beginning of the week, to schedule everything for your whole week ahead. And when I say schedule, it is just click click click, very very simple.
If you use a tool like Edgar, that’s Meet Edgar and these things are like buffer.com, meetedgar.com. Don’t say, “Oh, I don’t know how to find them.” Just go to Google and put the word in, Google will find it for you.
So something like Edgar, you can put these things into a library and they will come up again and again. So if you have got Christmas offers or tweets that are good for Christmas, you can set them to come up the following December or November or whenever you post them.
If you have got things that are relevant to Valentine’s Day, next time around people will have forgotten what you tweeted last year, they can be set to reoccur, saving you loads of time with a bit of planning.
And of course there other tools such as Hootsuite that will also do similar things. Now if you want to find things to tweet about or to put on there, and by the way for something like Pinterest, there is Tailwind.
Buffer will post to Pinterest and Facebook and to LinkedIn, but Tailwind is specialist for Pinterest and there will be specialist tools for other things. Instagram does not allow automated tools to post to them, but there are ways around it, look into that. If you look at Buffer again, they have a way around that.
So you may say, “Okay, what can I tweet about? I wouldn’t have all that information at the beginning of the week.” Then get something like Feedly.
So again, feeedly.com, just go and look at it. You can save all your favorite posts, top people will be blogging about and writing all over the world about the subject you wish to talk about. You can recommend these posts and this information to your audience, point them to it, it makes you look good. I won’t go into why you would be doing this, but you should.
And if you want other people to know how…so for instance if you develop a little system of looking in Feedly and then going to Buffer or to Hootsuite and posting it, if you want someone else to learn how to do that, to take that over once you have started doing it, you can use a free tool such as jing.com and it’s got screen cast, or Screencast-O-Matic, or if you use a Mac you have got Quick Time which allows you to do screen cast.
And you can then video yourself on your screen, actually it will video your screen as you do it and you talk over what you are doing and that records a free video and then you can give a link to that video to somebody to show them how to do it.
You can park that video on Dropbox, a free account in Dropbox that’s for storage, or in your Google Drive if you get a Gmail account, a Google account which is free.
You can also then create your systems if you have a Gmail account or any form of Google account like You Tube or something, then you have access to all their things which includes Google Docs, so it gives you access to spreadsheets or Google sheets they call it and to Google Docs which is like Microsoft Word.
You can even put Power Points in there and you get drive storage; you can do all this and you can give links to it that sheet, you can just share it with someone via their email address on the other side of the world and they can see your system and so on.
There are so many ways you can do this and if you really get into it you can also go to a free tool such as Process Street which is process.st and that is one of the things that I use.
Or you can go to Trello, trello.com and again you can set up your projects there, these are all free, you can automate everything and this turns you into Superwoman or into Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman, whoever you wish to be.
But it accelerates everything you could do and then you can get on with your life and the stuff you used to do before. And all these new things are being done and they took you twenty minutes, half an hour at the start of the week, once a week and you are bang up to date. How cool is that?
Okay, so that is how you use automation to create super powers.
Monday Book Recommendation
It is a Monday it is time for book for the week and I think you’re going to love this one, it is by Mike Michalowicz and yeah, you can go look that up. But the book is called Profit First.
Just go to Google and Google “Profit first”, or go to Amazon and put in “Profit first book”, if you add “Profit first book” you will find it.
Mike Michalowicz has written some fantastic books, I recommended you read his others too. That is my recommendation for today. I will be back with another tip tomorrow.
