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Project Management Tools to Try

When it comes to project management, the worst thing you can do is either use nothing to organize yourself or use a tool that you don’t understand enough to utilize fully. Try out a few different options to find out what works smoothly for you within your budget.

 

  • Smartsheet.com – If you’re accustomed to using spreadsheets to organize your work, this might be the system to work for your needs. It’s easily customizable, supports automation, but you do have to use other software if you want time tracking and built-in project management features.

 

  • Wrike.com – This is the PM system used by big businesses like Paypal.com and Hootsuite.com, but it’s not overpriced, so you can afford to use it too. This is a true all in one project management system that allows you to collaborate not only with contractors and employees but your customers too.

 

  • Monday.com – This platform is very helpful in managing tasks and creating impressive and effective workflows. It’s really billed as an online collaboration application, but you can use it to manage projects too. It’s very customizable and easy to understand.

 

  • Easy Projects – This cloud-based project management software works for small and big businesses. It allows you to work with anyone interested in the following projects. You can give permissions that keep people notified of the action being taken.

 

  • Zoho Projects – Competitively priced, cloud-based, fully-featured, and intuitive. This is really a standard in project management. It’s especially good with individuals and small teams. It’s responsive and not really hard to understand and set up. Try the free trial.

 

  • Basecamp.com – This option has been around for a long time. It is a popular choice among virtual assistants, graphic designers, and others who want to be able to let their customers sign-on and assign work to them in a project management system. It’s easy to understand and has tons of features you’re used to in a dedicated project management system.

 

  • Trello.com – If you think visually, you’re going to love using Trello. You can organize your workflows and teams, or you can just use it for your own organization. There are many public free and premium templates you can get too. What’s more, is you can use it free.

 

  • Honeybook.com – A super popular choice for virtual assistants and service providers, this easy-to-use platform helps small business owners get control of their processes and manage clients from start to complete projects, including proposals, contracts, project tracking, and payments.

 

  • LiquidPlanner.com – Manage projects, tasks, and human resources, and more with this fully featured project management system. Track tasks but also track resources, including HR, to best keep your company lean and mean. While this one is a little more expensive than some of the other choices, it’s well worth every penny because of what it can help you do for your business.

 

  • Asana.com – People who use Asana are fans of it and love to brag about using it. It’s a unique online collaboration tool that helps improve your workflow management. It’s not really a full project management since there is no time tracking, but many service providers love it and use it regularly.

 

  • Quire.io – This project management and collaboration tool can help you launch your projects fast. Users love the fact that it’s super intuitive and easy to understand how to use it. They use Kanban boards, which many people love, to help get organized.

 

Almost any of these choices will work for most small businesses to manage their projects and keep their work organized and on task. Being productive is about using your time wisely. Don’t use a system you don’t grasp almost immediately. Test it out, and if it’s too hard to get, move on to another one so that you are using what works with your way of thinking.

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Don’t Forget That You Can Automate and Outsource Your Home Management Too

While we are so busy talking about business automation, remember that you can boost your efficiency by also automating and outsourcing your home management too. The time saved will allow you to get more done that you really want to do for yourself, your family, and your business.

 

  • Lights – With a smart house set up, you can fix your lighting so that it stays at a specific level of natural light. For example, if you close the shade and the light has reduced, the lighting in the room automatically compensates. You can also turn on lights via a motion sensor at night when people are using the toilet and so forth.

 

  • Door Locks –Using automated door locking is a great feature and helps you get in your home with packages. You can also lock your front and back doors or garage using your smartphone instead of checking physically.

 

  • Security Cameras – Setting up security in your home with cameras can also be automated once it’s set up. You can film the parts of the house you want based on motion, lighting, sound, and other criteria.

 

  • Blinds – Close your blinds based on how dark or light it is outside. Even if you’re not home, the blinds will close, which can make your home less likely to be broken into but also reduces the time you must take to raise and lower the blinds on your own.

 

  • Heating and Cooling –Setting up your heating and cooling to be based on the ideal temperature for you based on the room and time of year will not just save time but money too.

 

  • Filling Your Tub – Newer smart homes come featured with a smart bathtub that can be programmed to fill up at the right time without you ever going in there using your smartphone or the control dial. Set up a hot bath when you’re outside sledding with the kids to save time and get warm faster.

 

  • Starting Your Coffee – If you like to drink coffee in the morning or at any time, set up your coffee maker to automatically brew your coffee for you. When you get out of bed, you will eliminate a few steps from your day.

 

  • Paying Your Bills – Just like you can set up your business bills to be paid automatically, you can do the same with your household bills. Setting up automation for saving, bill paying, and so forth not only saves time but will help you stick to your budget better.

 

  • Sending Birthday or Holiday Cards – Do you like to send your friends, family, and perhaps business partners cards in the mail? You can use a service like Send Out Cards or Postable.com to automate this process by setting up an account and the criteria.

 

  • Yard and Housekeeping – It’s not hard to hire people to help you keep your home clean and organized, from landscaping to basic lawn care to keeping your home clean and shiny without lifting a finger. You can find what you need through sites like Thumbtack.com and Care.com.

yard and housekeeping

  • Childcare – Even a work at home mom needs time away from the kids. You can find a mommy’s helper, or you can hire a childcare worker or teenager to help you with your kids using Care.com or other online sites.

 

  • Grocery Shopping – Using a service like Instacart.com to get your groceries delivered can save hours of your time and help you avoid last-minute purchases, thus actually saving money over shopping yourself.

 

If you have a voice assistant like Google or Alexa, you may already have the ability to automate some of your home life. Take a look at what’s available with your particular assistant and the tools you have. When you eliminate personal steps in a process and turn it over to a bot, you save time and generate an opportunity to do more with that time.

 

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Tools to Help You Automate Competitor Research

As you start and run your business, one of the most important ways you can improve your offers is to study your competition. But competitor research can be time-consuming. That might not be as big a deal for a giant corporation, but for a mom-and-pop business or a sole proprietor, it’s a lot. You still need to do it because learning about your competition will help you differentiate yourself.

 

  • Google Alerts – This is a free and simple way to start your competitor research. Simply set up your Google Alerts to search for product names, content type, search terms, and type of update. Set up separate alerts for each. You can also use Zapier.com to automatically pull the information from email and put your results in a document for you to review when you’re ready.

 

  • IFTTT.com – This stands for “if this, then that,” which defines the parameters of a task process. First, you do this. Then you do that, and so forth. You can make these as straightforward or as complicated as you desire.

 

  • Zapier.com – This is really just another “if this, then that” option that creates little programs they call zaps to automate a process. For example, you can set up an appellate or a Zap to automatically create documents for you to review later.

 

  • Ubotstudio.com – You can set up UBot Studio to do a lot of tasks for you that will amaze you. For example, you can use Ubot to create and manage blogs, open accounts on social networks, post status updates and blog posts, and more. You can even make it upload videos to every single video site on the web with a touch of a button.

 

  • Rivaliq.com – Use this platform to audit competitive communications, identify trending topics and content, and even study your competition’s data. Compare your competition’s top content against yours so you can find a way to stand out. You can set up automation that causes your account to follow specific hashtags and even create a report about it.

 

  • Sproutsocial.com – Use this platform to perform a social media competitive analysis. They even provide a free template for your use. Truly understanding your numbers is an important part, and Sprout Social helps you do that.

 

  • Semrush.com – This is a fully-featured marketing system more than a platform. You’ll get training and tools to use in all aspects of your marketing, including competition research. Determine what your competition is doing so that you can find gaps in their coverage, which will give you a door to stand out from the competition.

 

  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider – This platform can allow you to observe what competitors are doing, who their customers are, and what resources they are investing in. You can find out a lot of information from this bot crawling a competitor’s site, but you can also use it to crawl yours and get advice.

 

  • Similarweb.com – This is a great platform to use to search your competitor’s website so that you can learn about trends, gain insight into their traffic so you can learn where to distribute content and information. It gives you a 360-degree view of any company you want to study.

 

  • Kompyte.com – This competitor analysis software will capture the changes your competition makes to their website so that you can find out what they’re doing in real-time to attract and please customers. Knowing this gives you insight into what you need to be doing too.

 

  • RPA (Robotic Process Automation) – Much of what we’ve mentioned really is already RPA. All RPA involves is training bots to perform the tasks that you used to do manually, such as saving files, wait for and alert you when a specific email comes in, processes orders within a certain monetary perimeter. If you do it on a computer, the bot can do it when programmed.

 

To choose the right tools to help you research your competitors, figure out what you want to know, and the process involved in determining it. Then you can find the right software to help you make light of the job.

 

 

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How to Use Automation for Boosting Efficiency

One of the main reasons people like to use automation in their business is because it boosts efficiency. If you can automate any task that is repeatable such as invoicing, creating files, saving files, and so forth, you can save many hours of time in your workday and work year. Those are hours you can use to create even more awesome products and solutions for your ideal audience.

 

  • Sort and Respond to Emails – Your email software has many features that you may not be implementing fully. Apps like Boomerang for Gmail or Sales Handy for Outlook will help you sort and respond to emails using automation features.

 

  • Manage Projects – This is especially important if you are working with a team. Set up a project management software that allows you to know when each part of your team is done because they check it off, make a note, or otherwise use the system to ensure smoother collaboration and avoid bottlenecks.

 

  • Improve Your Sales Funnel – Using software to automate your sales funnels is a no-brainer today. There are numerous options for you to implement, such as Leadpages.net and Instapage.com, but also many email marketing solutions come with sales funnel automation options.

 

  • Enhance Your Workflows – Software like Monday.com, Kissflow.com, and others can help you automate your workflows whether you work alone or with a team. Improving and enhancing your workflows will ensure that when you do automate something, it’s done most efficiently.

 

  • Optimize Your Online Presence – Use an all-in-one platform that enables you to use all your social media in one spot, such as Hootsuite.com or sproutsocial.com. When you use one of these social tools to automate sharing, engagement, and relationship building, you’ll really realize the power of social media marketing.

 

  • Drop the Dead Weight – You don’t need to keep doing tasks that are not working. For that reason, you want to always check your metrics to ensure that when you act, the result is what you’re looking for. If it’s not, stop doing it and move on to something else.

 

  • Automate Every Possible Task – Make a list of any tasks you do each day that are repeated. For example, perhaps each morning, you walk into your office, turn on your computer, and check email. What can you automate? You can automate turning on the light in your office as well as turning on the computer. You can even automate organizing emails using tags and other features so that it’s faster to get to the emails you need to respond to.

 

The best way to determine what you want to automate is to track what you do each day, week, month, and year. Anything that repeats, do a little research about how other people automate that task. You may be shocked to learn how simple automating your business really is. Automation is not nearly as expensive or complicated as you may think before actually finding the right solutions.

 

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Tools and Tips for Automating Your Sales and Inventory Process

Whether you sell physical products or hours and services, automating as much as you can of your entire sales process and inventory, if needed, will save you tons of time. When you save time, you’re saving your most valuable and irreplaceable resource, but more than likely, automation will also save money.

 

  • Understand Your Buyer’s Journey – Every business type who has a buyer can learn what they do to make a business decision. Most buyers go through a process from awareness to delight, and it’s your job to know what the buyer’s intent is so that you can deliver just the right information at the right time to advance sales.

 

  • Stop Doing Repetitive Work Manually – If it can be automated, stop doing it yourself. There are too many ways you can automate things today that fit any budget for you to keep doing everything like file creation, backups, and inventory tracking. If you continually need to transfer customer information to another system, find a way to automate using Zapier.com or another option.

 

  • Provide the Right Information to Your Stakeholders – Ensure that anyone who is interested receives information that they need to make decisions in a self-serve manner. This can be via internal documentation that you provide access to based on their place, such as Trello.com or Basecamp.com. You can assign access based on who they are. For example, the customer of product A gets access to information, groups, and help about product A.

 

  • Empower Customer Care – If you hire customer service personnel or use a chatbot, empower your customer care to make sales when it seems like the right thing to do, depending on the conversation. You can even set up your chatbots to do it.

 

  • Empower Your Customers – Let your customers care for themselves with self-serve information and AI chatbots so that you don’t have to answer repetitive questions, and they can help themselves.

 

  • Create the Right Email Messages – Every product that you create needs certain email messages set up right away. You’ll need a series for all stages of the buying journey, from awareness to delight.

 

  • Get the Right Software – It depends on the types of products you sell, but many shopping carts have inventory management included in the system. The most crucial factor is to get the right software for your needs and not try to make bad software work for you.

 

Automating your sales process may only involve setting up a landing page, a freebie, and moving them to your email list so that you can teach them information, make offers, and move them through their buying journey faster. But if you sell physical products, you probably want to keep track of how many you have available to buy—the same thing with the hours you sell for your VA business. If you’re a service provider, keeping track of what you’ve sold will ensure you don’t oversell but also ensure that you meet your goals.

 

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Tools and Tips for Automating Discovery Calls

Many small business owners like virtual assistants, business and life coaches, and others who work one-on-one with customers and clients use discovery calls to help pitch their offers and close sales. Discovery calls are a powerful way to get more customers, but it can be time-consuming if you don’t develop a process that can be automated and replicated.

HBA Funnel Builder…

  • Build a Landing Page with Your Offer – Your first step is to build a page that tells your audience about your discovery calls and what’s included, and why they should set up a call with you. You can do this with your basic website pages, or you can use landing page software like net or Instapage.com.

 

  • Set Up a Questionnaire Via Your Scheduling Software – Using scheduling software like com offers you the ability to force your lead to fill out a questionnaire in order to set up their appointment, all without you helping in person at that moment. Most people will happily fill out a short questionnaire but remember that you are trying to qualify your leads, so don’t be afraid to ask questions that make them leave the form.

 

  • Develop Transactional Emails for Your Autoresponder – Now, set up some information in your autoresponder so that once they submit the questionnaire as well as choose their time for a call, they receive automated emails giving them more information and instructions. You can use your email autoresponder for this, and it doesn’t matter which platform as long as you check to see if the other software you’re using integrates. Aweber.com works with most.

 

  • Let Your Potential Customer Choose Their Time to Call – The scheduling software allows you to put the times you’re free. In fact, you can choose different free times for different types of calls so that you know when you get a call what it’s for due to the time and date.

 

  • Get a Dedicated Phone Line for Calls – Having a dedicated line or at least a unique ring will help alert you to the call. You’ll want to set up your calls so that your customers call you instead of the other way around as it eliminates the need for you to remember anything.

 

  • Read Their Questionnaire Before the Call – You can sign into the scheduling software to read the questionnaire, or you can set up a Zap (Zapier.com) to force the system to put the questionnaire into a special Dropbox or file on Google Docs.

 

  • Set Up Follow Up Information to Go Out Automatically – Once the call is finished, you’ll want other information to go out to your lead automatically so that you can close the deal if you did not already on the call. You can use tags and triggers within your autoresponder using IFTTT.com or Zapier.com to make it happen automatically.

 

Discovery calls help you get more clients and close deals. However, due to the fact they can be time-consuming, it’s best to go in with a plan. Use the customer’s answers to the questionnaire to help guide your meeting in a way that showcases what you can do for them based on their needs.

 

Follow up as soon as possible within 24 hours after each discovery call with an offer giving them a few days to consider your offer but setting a deadline so that you can avoid overbooking yourself. This process works wonders for booking more clients for the one-to-one service provider or coach.

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Automate Your Community Management

Building community builds brand awareness, provides amazing feedback so you can get more product ideas, and builds stronger relationships. When you can find the people talking about you online and respond, it turns social media and community into a powerful tool for you to build relationships and a better business.

 

Building community for your business will increase brand awareness, teach you more about your customers, and provide amazing value to your customers now and in the future due to all the incredible insight you will derive from the community.

 

  • Invite Your Buyers to A VIP Support Group – Creating a group for your buyers to come to ask questions and get answers, and other support is a fabulous way to encourage the community to help each other.

 

  • Ask List Members to Come to Your Private Facebook Group – Make it a habit to invite anyone who joins your email list to your private free Facebook Group. You can get to know them and they you and move them from interested to delighted faster due to the fact actual customers will back you up.

 

  • Invite Interested Parties to a Product Development Group – Some of your customers may be interested in conversing with you on a deeper level helping you essentially create more products for their needs.

 

Using the tools of the trade help make community-building easier and more effective. These tools will make your job easier, and there are plenty to choose from depending on your needs and budget.

 

NapoleonCat.com

 

Manage your social media through this platform. You’ll be able to see all feeds in one view so that you can deliver the best customer care to them on any platform from one spot. Plus, you’ll get top-notch analytics. After all, you can’t know if what you’re doing is working if you’re not studying the metrics.

 

Some features include the ability to answer repetitive questions automatically with templates, hide spam messages automatically, and even delete offensive material based on your list of insulting words without having to view them yourself.

 

Heyo.com

 

This software is a platform that allows you to run contests. Community and social marketing are all about engagement, and nothing creates more engagement than the ability to have a good old friendly competition. You can use this software on any social media platform, across multiple platforms, and even in SMS via mobile devices.

 

Grow your email list, get more accurate leads, and make your customers happy with this software. Whether you want to run a sweepstake, a photo contest, or send out a quiz to your audience, this platform will do what you need.

 

Taggbox.com

 

User-generated content is the most important type of content you will deal with when building a community. It’s also some of the most powerfully compelling content for any new person to see when buying your products or using your services.

 

Whether you want to build a hashtag campaign, boost virtual events, or even help build a social wall for your in-person events, Taggbox.com can help you get it done and automate most of it.

 

Building and managing the community you create due to your brand allows you to get better user feedback, provide amazing support, increase brand awareness, and build exceptional relationships. If you really want to boost customer interactions and create raving fans that not only want what you have but want to tell others about it, invest in building community through all your social accounts with your like-minded ideal customer base.

 

 

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Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Social Media Marketing

marketing planThis list of social media marketing automated software and tools that you can use in your small business is not complete. There are so many options today that anyone can find the right tool for themselves at the right budget. There is no reason not to use social media marketing automation because the price is very reasonable for most platforms, and the ROI is outstanding.

 

  • Hootsuite.com – Aside from all the ways you can automate social media marketing using this software, they have an exciting training program through their Hootsuite Academy, where you can learn all things marketing and even get certification. Whether you’re publishing, engaging, or monitoring, Hootsuite can help you keep it all in one place.

 

  • Loomly.com – Manage all your social media content from posts to ads in one place. Not only that, the software will give you ideas about what to post based on trending topics and related events. They also have a great way to keep track of your content assets like photos, videos, notes, links, and templates.

 

  • Activecampaigncom – This marketing and sales automation platform is fully featured and offers almost anything you need to run your small business marketing program. Their solution offers automation with email marketing, customer relationship management, sales, support, and more all in one platform.

 

  • SproutSocial.com – This platform offers features to help you with social media engagement, publishing, listening, and analytics, all from a central hub. Publishing across platforms at one shot easier is essential today, especially for the one-person business.

 

  • Sendinblue.com – This platform offers email marketing, CRM, SMS marketing, engaging chat, and more that you can personalize for your audience. You can also automate your segmenting and make your transactional emails better than ever.

 

  • Sharpspring.com – This is being billed as a revenue growth platform that offers a suite of sales and marketing tools to bring your marketing automation to a whole new level. Build on the funnel idea to help you build your list and get more leads by increasing engagement due to focusing on the entire customer lifecycle. Get chatbots, landing pages, dynamic forms, and more.

 

  • BuzzSumo.com – Every marketer needs to find, produce, and publish as much relevant content as they can for their audience. This platform helps you discover and research your audience. Use this software to find influencers to help you market your products and services.

 

  • Mention.com – An essential component of social media marketing is engagement. It can take a lot of time to find places to engage with your customers but not if you use this platform that allows you to monitor the web to find out what their audience is saying so that you can join the conversation.

 

  • Socialert.net – There is no point in using hashtags if you can’t figure out who else is using them or what is going on with them. This platform enables you to track keywords, hashtags, and your social accounts for activity, making it easier for you to engage with your audience.

 

  • Zapier.com and IFTTT.com – These two platforms allow you to create applets that perform tasks for you automatically. For example, want to create a list of new list members who purchased your book with phone numbers and dropped into your Trello account so you can call them? If you’re asking for the right info, you can use one of the applets or zaps to tell your system what to do.

 

When determining the type of automation to use, first decide what you want automated, know your budget, and then find the right tool. Anything you do on a repetitive basis is game for automation. It might seem like it’s only going to save minutes, but those minutes add up and will improve conversions as well as boost your results from social media marketing.

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Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Email Marketing

There aren’t many business owners today who aren’t aware of automated email marketing technology that uses autoresponders. If you’re not sure, autoresponder software like Aweber.com will send out messages to your list members based on either your schedule or a behavioral trigger that you set up and define.

email marketing

Two ways to automate your email marketing:

 

  1. Trigger Based Email Messages
  2. Drip-Fed Scheduled Messages

 

A trigger-based email message is set up to be sent to the subscriber based on something they do. For example, if your customer downloads a free report, or clicks through to read a specific blog post, or even if they simply open a particular email, you can set up your autoresponder to automatically deliver specific messages to them based on what they did.

 

A drip-fed email message is simply set up to deliver based on the schedule you choose in a specific order. Usually, the messages are a sequence and often referred to as your “autoresponder sequence.” For example, if you offer a free report about a specific problem that you solve, the customer downloads the report, which puts them on that list, which triggers the system to start the drip schedule.

 

Besides these two ways you can automate, you can also use the automation features inside your software to segment based on new information you obtain from your customer such as demographics data, and product purchased, product not purchased, how they learned about your solutions, and more. Frankly, if you can think it up, you can create a segmentation trigger.

 

When you automate your email marketing in this way, you can create more targeted and personalized messaging, create customized landing pages, and even use split testing for your emails to create better results from your email marketing. You can also use the native software to examine delivery rates, view rates, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more to make it all work better together – mostly automatically.

 

The trick for getting this right is to choose the right software for your needs. Some small business owners using a combination of Aweber.com and a WordPress site will work fine, but for some others, they may need a more robust platform to work with, such as Ontraport.com or Clickfunnels.com.

 

Write down the functions you’d like to have now and in the future. Choose your software based on longevity, functionality, and growth – but of course, also consider your budget. Fortunately, most email marketing software choices have options that can grow with you based on your usage. You can find solutions for as little as $20 to start and on up to thousands of dollars, depending on how you’re using it. The main thing is to do your due diligence checking out the software you want to use to ensure that it works for your needs. For example, some autoresponder software expressly forbids affiliate marketing – if you want to build an affiliate marketing business, you don’t want to start with that choice.

 

 

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Tools and Tips to Help You Automate HR Management

From time tracking to expense management, automating your human resource management will save time and money.  Anything that happens on a recurring basis is ripe for automation. Tasks like data collecting, file creation, document sharing, form filling, and more can all be done using the software in a way that eliminates the need for an HR person to do these tasks and frees you up to do more.

 

  • Contractor and Employee Onboarding – When you bring on a team member, they need to have access to information about your company, including branding information, document templates, and more. If it’s important that your people comply with a particular thing, it needs to be in the onboarding process.

 

  • Offboarding – When someone leaves your company and moves on with another, it’s a good idea to survey them about why so that you can improve. Use your HR system to send an automated exist interview via email that they can do on their own before they leave. Plus, once they fill out the exit survey, they can also be automatically sent other information such as COBRA info.

 

  • Vacation Requests – If you have employees, they may want to leave, even contractors, if you rely on them to do regular tasks on a long-term contract, offering a way for them to let you know they’re going away is always going to make everyone’s life easier.

 

  • Expense Claims – If you reimburse your people for expenses related to the work you do, letting them automatically enter a request for expenses is a lot simpler when done via computer technology and reduces the paperwork and time needed to process such requests.

 

  • Payroll – Allowing your employees to enter their own time in a system that creates the paychecks is a great way to cut down on your need to do data entry. All you have to do is approve the time, and the check or direct deposit for their pay happens automatically.

 

  • Training – Whether employees or contractors offering company training is helpful to them and can improve their work. You can offer branding information and train them on using all your systems without having to do it individually for each person you bring on board.

 

  • Time Management – Let your contractors and employees keep track of their own time using the software.

 

  • Benefits Management – Let your contractors or employees take advantage of their benefits on their own. Self-serve, saving lots of time.

 

  • Tax Forms and Filing – Most bookkeeping software and systems automatically offer tax forms and filing options depending on your needs.

 

Even if you don’t have a bunch of employees and only work with contractors having everything together in a centralized place organized according to the laws and regulations where you live is going to free up your time and help avoid issues in the future.