With a new year on the horizon, it's important to start thinking about areas where you can improve your business and increase productivity. One of the best ways to accomplish this is through automation.
When you start to implement automation into your business, not only are you potentially decreasing your costs and time spent on tedious tasks, you also are opening up yourself to finding success in new areas.
To help with this process, I wanted to highlight three different methods you can start using in 2017 to bring your business to the next level, while also hopefully relieving some stress in the process.
Hire a virtual assistant
Running a business on the internet is unlike anything else. For many entrepreneurs and site owners, this can successfully be accomplished with just a single-person company. However, there are many times you may find your focus or dedication lacking in one area. After all, no one wants to be a "jack of all trades, master to none;" instead you want to be the "master of one."
A great way to scale your personal productivity and focus, while also expanding your business in size, is through the use of a virtual assistant. The great thing about hiring a VA, is that you can likely find one for any job you are specifically looking for, e.g., content writing, scheduling, email management, SEO, or anything in between. At the same time VAs can cost a mere fraction of what it might cost to hire someone within the United States and bringing them in-house.
To learn more about virtual assistants and how they might be a great fit for your business, be sure to check out these two articles: questions to ask before hiring a VA, and how to hire a VA for your startup.
Use a marketing automation tool
Virtual assistants are great for many things, but there are some areas of your business you will likely want to keep to yourself: customer management and marketing. The good news is that there are many tools and solutions to help grow and manage your business in these areas as well.
One such marketing automation solution is GetResponse, which offers an all-in-one solution for building out web sites and landing pages, hosting webinars, and for email management. The benefit to finding a marketing automation platform that fits the needs of your business, is that everything can seamlessly be done within one platform.
Another great example of where you can use marketing automation within your business is through social media. Tools like MeetEdgar and Sprout Social make it easy to connect social media accounts, schedule in content, then measure engagement and ROI in the process. Again, the benefit here is having the ability to set up and manage campaigns in a way that simply isn't possible through manual updates to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
No matter where you currently advertise or generate leads online, a marketing automation solution is out there for you. It's just a matter of finding the one that's right for you, then setting it up to run the way you like.
Find little short cuts here and there
In addition to the "big" methods of automation to help increase productivity and further run your business, there are also plenty of little things that can be done, many of which won't cost you a dime.
One very simple yet extremely effective automation tool that saves endless hours for people all over the world on a daily basis are "canned email responses" within Gmail. The way they work is simple. Think about how many emails you get on a daily/weekly basis that ask the same question. With canned email responses, you can write the answer to this email once, then simply click a button to place that answer inside your response. This is a dream come true for any entrepreneurs or site owners who continually get the same questions and emails on a daily basis.
This is just one example of a simple tool that makes a huge difference in the long run. For more examples like this, be sure to check out this list of 9 other time-saving tools.
Focus on the best, automate the rest
You know your own business better than anyone else. Keeping this in mind, make a list of where you spend the most time and effort during each day. Then look at this list and see what areas can be outsourced and automated. Once you start getting rid of tedious work, you can then start focusing more on the real driving factors of your business.
