“We need to use this technology as much as we possibly can to build our business. We don’t have to be rocket scientists to utilize this technology and ensure that we’re leveraging our time as much as we possibly can.”
You know when I think about it, it’s hard to believe we are in the year 2022. Someone recently told me that we are now past the time that the Jetsons would have had their flying cars. So, what I want to know is… WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR? That’s all I want to know. Where is my flying car? Because honestly, I would pay anything for that flying car. It would be awesome.
But you know what else is awesome? The state of the internet. We are where we are today because there’s so much technology. There’s so much out there, and you know what? We need to use this technology as much as we possibly can to build our business. We don’t have to be rocket scientists to utilize this technology and ensure that we’re leveraging our time as much as we possibly can.
One of the tools that I’ve seriously been getting knee-deep into lately is a tool called Zapier. Zapier is an automation tool that allows you to connect one application to another and perform actions automatically saving you valuable time.
An easy example of using Zapier is with Gmail. Let’s say I receive an email into my Gmail account. I can then set up Zapier so that when I get an email that says, “blah blah blah” in the subject line, it will take that email and automatically forward it to a specific person. Or if I am using Slack and a message comes
to me with a particular subject, I can set up Zapier to automatically notify someone else or post something to my blog or post something to one of my social media accounts.
One of the ways I use Zapier the most is with GoToWebinar. I don’t particularly care for the registration form that GoToWebinar has. So, I created my own inside my Sender autoresponder that has my look and feel and branding. I go to Zapier and create a “ZAP”—that’s what they call this automation. I then take that zap and connect it to my Sender. Now, when a person registers for my webinar or event via the custom form on my website, it automatically takes that information and registers them inside GoToWebinar. This way, I have my branding, my look and feel, I have a controlled process that I like and am comfortable with, but I am also getting them added into GoToWebinar.
Now, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different applications that you can use Zapier for, but right now I want to concentrate on one specific use that will help you leverage your time with something like a podcast or any recording. I call it chaining. That is where you chain together a bunch of the processes you have. When you post a new podcast to your blog, you then need to announce it. You need to let everyone know it’s there, right? So, you have to post on Facebook; you have to post on Twitter; you have to post on LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. You should also have it transcribed.
What if you could do all that automatically when you post the recording. Let’s say I have this recording—a podcast. And I want all that to happen instantly when I upload it to my blog. What I can do is go to Zapier and say, “Okay, when I post a new podcast, or when I have a new post in this category, that’s an audio file, I want you to take that podcast download it, and send it over to my Rev.com account for transcription.” That is the first link in the chain.
The next chain link would be to tell it to post a message to message to all of our social media accounts telling people that I have a new podcast episode posted. I can cover all social media with this link.
So far, setting up this initial chain, when I post a new podcast to my blog it is automatically set for transcription and a message is posted to all my social media. All I did was one post, but all that happened without my having to do anything more than that after initially setting up the Zap.
You can set the start point of the chain anywhere; it doesn’t have to be posting to your blog. You could set it so that all of that happens when you upload a new episode to iTunes or your YouTube channel. You just tell Zapier to grab that video and then go ahead and post it to my blog and/or have it share that video over on Facebook and post the message on social media.
Just this first part will save you 20 to 30 minutes when you have a new podcast to announce. It’s all automated. It’s basically a robot doing all the work for you, and you reap the benefits.
When you get a chance, go to their site and check it out. You don’t have to buy anything. They have a free account you can set up so you can play around with it. And then you can up- grade depending on how much you want to use it. Notice, I’m not giving you an affiliate link. I’m not trying to make money by telling you to check it out and buy it if you like it. I recommend it because I use it myself. I never recommend anything that I don’t use myself.
Right now, it currently showing over 4,000 apps that you can integrate with on Zapier. That’s ridiculous. It’s a crazy number of different things that you can do in there. To highlight some… you can integrate with Google sheets, you can connect it to your Facebook account and download your Facebook lead ads, you can connect to MailChimp, Active Campaign (Sender), Click Funnels, HubSpot, Slack, Trello, Stripe. I mean, there are just so many different things that it will integrate with.
I can’t tell you that it’s going to do everything that you want might want it to, but it’s going to be able to cover most things that can and should be automated.
Let me give you another example…one of the things that I was looking at is if I can automate an event in Eventbrite. Let’s say I want to promote my webinars by creating events in Eventbrite.
Can I create a Google Sheet with a list of a bunch of different events in different locations and connect that via Zapier and have it create all those events in Eventbrite automatically for me? And it looks like I can. There will be a little bit of work involved, but a lot less work than if I did it manually. The setup will be totally worth it. So, I can tell you we will be implementing that very soon.
I think that people are working against themselves by not investigating and implementing Zapier to the fullest extent of what it could do. Because by automating one or two tasks, that could be 20, 30, or 40 minutes out of your day that you’re gaining back. It could be one less person you have to hire. Automation is how we level the playing field against companies that five times or ten times bigger than you.
You have to think smart and work smart on the internet to keep your sanity. And Zapier is just one of the tools that can make this happen.
There are other tools like this out there. While I like Zapier, it doesn’t matter if that’s the one you use. I just want you to get into the concept of automating and putting all these things into a sequence that happens automatically, working from a mindset of leveraging these productivity tools to your advantage.
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Like I said early, you are just setting it up so when you initiate the first in a chain of events, you can let everything else just happen automatically. I think this is one of the smartest things that you could do for your business. When you start thinking in this direction, suddenly, you start thinking of more ways that you could use this.
Start by looking on Google for Zap examples for productivity. You will find all kinds of ways to use it to save time and increase your productivity in so many more ways than just the examples of podcast posting or event planning.
And like I said, there are 4,000 apps you can integrate with, so there are things that this can do that even I have no clue of yet. I’m telling you; it is an absolute game-changer. Check it out and tell me how you wind up using it!
