Now that it has been almost one year of many companies drastically shifting to a work from home setting since Covid hit, some of my favorite automation tools such and Zapier and IFTTT have really upped the ante! These tools were already awesome in their ability to create automated tasks with ease, but now that more companies are on board, there is soooo much more you can automate for your business and blog. I wrote an earlier post on the top things you should automate for your blog, so here are 5 more things that you should automate for your business/blog now that itโs 2021.
1 | Accounting
Accounting for a small business owner can be daunting especially if you donโt have an accountant. The great thing is that there are various types of accounting software out there that make bookkeeping easier on you. Many of these tools have the ability to track income from PayPal, Stripe and other payment processors automatically. They can also track the ins and outs of your bank account meaning less for you to have to keep up with throughout the year.
For those business expenses that do not hit your linked account or if you donโt feel comfortable linking your bank account, you can use automation to add certain transactions to a Google Sheet when a receipt comes to your email (this can be set up using Zapier). For example, I subscribe to various monthly services for my business, so when the email receipt comes to my inbox, an automated task combs through the email and pulls the values that I want to add to my accounting spreadsheet (date, company name, amount paid, accounting category, etc.). This is something I implemented last year and tax season was much more streamlined as a result. And, since I created the spreadsheet to be compatible with my bookkeeping software, importing the data for the year is a breeze!
2 | Hashtag Groups
Using hashtags is still an effective way to increase viewership on social posts. Because of this, many Instagram feed planning apps incorporate the option to save your commonly used hashtags in a group inside the app. You then copy and paste them into Instagram when itโs time to post. With the ability to use 30 hashtags per post, it would be difficult to remember them all! The only catch is that sometimes these apps only allow you to save a certain number of hashtag groups depending on the type of plan you have. While this is a great app feature, I recently ditched the feature and created my own hashtag groups inside of my phone by using the text replacement iPhone shortcut feature. I created an Instagram Reel showing how to do this step by step, so check it out here. I love this hack because itโs so much faster and streamlines the posting process!
3 | Sales & Invoicing
Gone should be the days of selling products/services by telling customers to DM you for an invoice or leave a comment to get an invoice. Your sales process should be automated. If you have a business, you should have a web presence. Not only is a website professional, it is a place where you showcase your business and products and it makes it easier for customers to make purchases. This can be in the simplest form of a basic landing page which contains buttons to purchase your products/services. You can create something simple such as a Google Site (sites.google.com) and embed PayPal or Stripe payment buttons where customers can purchase your items directly. Doing business in DMs and comments can become disorganized and is incredibly manual. You could be spending your time creating more products, services and content. Google Sites is a standard part of a Google account and is free to use, however, itโs a good idea to have your own domain name/URL.
While youโre at it, you should also create a business email account with an email address that uses your custom domain name (this screams professional!). Currently, Google Workspace comes standard with a business email account and starts at only $6 a month. And yโall, the $6 is sooooo worth it. Check it out to see all the benefits of Google Workspace then get your site set up today!
4 | Inbox
Signing up for all those free and paid courses, newsletters, memberships and sites to receive free shipping on your first order all contribute to a clogged inbox. Make it a point to get your inbox in check and set up filters and rules! Filtering messages and creating rules for certain messages will help to organize your mailbox automatically! Check out this blog post for the steps to clean up, organize and automate your inbox.
5 | Video Transcription
Since we all know that video content is King these days, remember that itโs important to include text on your videos (Reels, Stories, IGTV, etc.). This is because one, you want your content to be accessible to everyone, even the hearing impaired. Also, two, everyone doesnโt have their audio on when scrolling through IG. You want to catch your viewers attention with words on your video, that way they will know what youโre talking about and they may unmute to hear the entire message. Transcription is a great solution to these two problems, and you can easily add transcription to your Instagram videos automatically. One app that has this feature built in is Threads. You record your video content as you normally would inside the app, then after a short period of time the words you spoke are transcribed and added to your video. The awesome part about automating this is that you donโt have to worry about typing it up, and you only need to make edits to the existing text if needed. You can also activate the โauto-generated captionsโ feature in Instagram to have captions added to your IGTV videos before they are posted (Settings->Account->Captions-> Toggle โAuto-Generated Captionsโ to On).
Automation is important now more than ever especially if you are a solopreneur. What are some thing that you wish you could automate for your business? Let me know in the comments!