Tag: Automation

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Why Digital Marketing is a Vital Tool to Use as A Solo Entrepreneur

Digital marketing uses the internet, social media, mobile devices, and other electronic tools to reach customers. It is also known as online marketing, and it has been around for decades. It’s become an essential part of every business’s marketing strategy. Digital Marketing includes various techniques from SEO to email campaigns, from Facebook ads to content marketing. It is about understanding what your customers want, which will help you sell your product or services to them.

 

The following is why digital marketing is critical to use as a solo entrepreneur:

 

Brand Awareness and Visibility

From social media to email marketing, entrepreneurs can use these tools to connect with and reach their target audience. As a solo entrepreneur, you need to understand digital marketing because it can help you grow your business by reaching out to more people and increasing your customer base.

 

Improved Customer Experience and Relationships

Digital marketing plays a vital role in developing customer relationships and improving your customer experience. Entrepreneurs need to have a fundamental understanding of using digital media to ensure positive customer interaction. If your audience doesn’t understand your value or can’t use your products and services quickly, they won’t have an enjoyable experience. You retain an audience by giving them a good user experience and providing high value through content.

 

Cost-Effective, Scalable, and Sustainable

Digital Marketing is now more affordable than ever before, and it’s easier to get started with. Businesses can invest in advertising their products and services with a relatively small budget, and the potential customer base is exponentially more extensive.

 

Increased Sales and Profitability

Digital marketing can increase sales and profitability by providing a more efficient and direct reach to your ideal customer. It is easy to increase your revenue when your target audience knows about you and what value you can provide. Content optimized for search engines, Facebook ads, and lead magnets are three great ways to increase your sale and profitability through digital marketing.

 

As you can see, digital marketing is crucial for any business owner who wants to succeed today. You are unlikely to find your target audience or effectively communicate with them without it. On top of this, digital marketing also enables you to find new opportunities for your products and services. So, if you need a way to target potential clients interested in what you do and want to learn more about your work, you must invest in digital marketing.

 

 

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The Technology You Should be Taking Advantage of as an Entrepreneur

Using technology can help you reach your customers easier and more efficiently as an entrepreneur or small business. It can also help create more valuable products or services and improve customer service and communication. In other words, technology is a business partner or tool you can’t or don’t want to refuse.

 

Here are the different technologies you should be taking advantage of as an entrepreneur:

 

Chatbots and Other Customer Service Tools

Improving customer service is important for retention. However, all the best marketers know that keeping a customer is more manageable than finding new ones. This can simply be done by using chatbots and other automated tools that help to answer questions or even schedule meetings instantly should they need more help.

 

Project Management Software

Keeping a project organized is essential to making the most impact and benefiting your target audience. Project management systems like Trello and Asana ensure you meet deadlines and get the work required to produce and complete a successful product.

 

Marketing and Finance Tools

Tracking your finances is important to the overall success of your business. It helps to be sure you pay the right amount of taxes and have enough income to continue. Wave accounting and QuickBooks online are just two examples to try.

 

Cloud Technology

Today, most businesses generate a lot of content that requires storage and processing power. This can take up a lot of space, be expensive, and be hard to manage without a proper IT department. Dropbox and Salesforce are two examples of cloud services that allow you to store important data such as client information and more.

 

Automation Tools

Automation is key to saving time as well as money. So many tasks are essential to how your company runs, but they really don’t need human interaction to get it done. This is why tools such as Zapier can be so beneficial. They help automate tasks, so you don’t have to do it yourself.

 

Data Tracking

Data tracking is important to help keep track of your marketing and overall results as a business. For example, compare sales numbers per quarter to see which marketing strategies impacted. In addition, using data can easily save you time and frustration as you learn how to communicate with your target audience.

 

Each of these tools or technology helps you better communicate with your target audience, improve your products, reach a wider audience, and increase your overall success as an entrepreneur. While technology can be beneficial, it is important to note that it is only as valuable as the user. In other words, don’t expect the technology to work for you without learning how to use it first. Take your time implementing each of these different tools to see which ones provide the most value or are worth your time implementing.

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Five Tools to Grow an Engaging and Valuable Brand Community

Brand or online communities allow you to reach more potential customers, increase your revenue potential and credibility as a brand. However, these benefits do not come easy as they require a highly engaged community, constant interaction, and unique content. Thankfully, many tools can either automate or make the process easier and faster to accomplish. This way, you can spend your time where it matters most, creating more value for your target audience.

 

The following are five tools to utilize to grow an engaging and beneficial brand community:

 

Fuel Cycle

 

A marketing research cloud that drives brands to communities with powerful insights and information that can improve the success of your business. The information provided on this platform helps you perfect your brand message, transform the customer experience, and work more closely with your target audience to make important decisions in real-time. In addition, their user-focus interface and smartphone application are specifically designed to increase engagement and participation.

 

Sprout Social

 

This community-building platform offers many tools, such as managing all your social profiles from one dashboard instead of signing in to each individually. This can really help you collaborate more with your coworkers and clients while also getting more information to help you deliver even more of what your customers want.

 

Brand24

 

This social media monitoring solution can help you find any conversations online about your brand, products, and even your competitors all across the web. In addition, this information can help you create more products, services, and engaging content for your audience as you stay informed about what people are talking about even outside your personally owned communities.

 

Grytics

 

This system enables you to build your community engagement with real-time data and analytics established by insights into your community. As a result, you will gain useful knowledge about your community’s needs to develop closer and more profitable, mutually beneficial relationships.

 

Taggbox

 

If you’re interested in encouraging and using more user-generated content in your communities, this option offers that to you. It enables you to curate social media content that you can embed on your website or really any screen. In addition, engaging with your audience on their own content will encourage even more discussions and thus create even more user-generated content.

 

Give each of these different tools a try to see which one benefits you and your community the most. Remember, just because one doesn’t work doesn’t mean the other won’t either. Each tool solves a specific problem. Overall, tools allow you to streamline the community building process to create more relevance and value for your target audience. The more value you provide, the more profits and other benefits you gain in return.

 

 

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Social Media Marketing

 

 

 

 

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Six Instagram Story Hacks to Use for Business

Just about everything you do on this platform relies on your use and understanding of the benefits and power stories provide. However, due to Instagram’s popularity, it can be hard to stand out against the competition to make a real impact and keep your audience interested and engaged.

 

Here are six Instagram story hacks to use for your business to provide your target audience maximum value and turn them into repeat visitors and customers:

 

Utilize and understand All Editing Features

 

Take the time to get to know how to use every single editing or other features Instagram has to offer. Instagram wants to keep people on their platform and provide you the tools to keep your customers there through these features. So the more time you take to learn it, the better you can take advantage of their benefits.

 

Create Progression Posts

 

Again, a goal for Instagram and you are to keep people active and engaged. If you want your viewers to stay around, create stories with slides or frames that work together to tell a full story instead of using single posts. In order words, don’t just share one story with a short frame of your product. Include extra details such as how to use it too.

 

Host Live Q&As or Other Events

 

Get your audience involved even more by answering their questions or showing off your products live. Q & As offers a fabulous way to build your community and advance brand awareness while answering many of your viewers’ or customers’ questions.

 

Take Advantage of Instagram Highlights and Shopping Feature

 

These two features are must-haves to get the most benefits from this platform. This is how you can make your stories last longer than twenty-four hours so your viewers can continue to receive the value if they were not there while it was live. It also provides you tools to add your brand colors to increase your brand awareness.

 

Mention Other Accounts

 

Account shoutouts are a professional way to increase your exposure and build the community with your niche or industry. The best trait to have as a business owner is generosity. The more you give and share to others, the more likely you are to receive more back. Additionally, when you post a shoutout, their audience will see your content, while your audience will likely view their content—a win for both businesses.

Use Tools and Pre-Schedule Your Content

 

Tools are important in order to keep up with the constant action required on Instagram. Of course, the amount you post depends on your target audience’s schedule, your niche, and what kind you want to create for your stories. However, the fact is still clear that frequently posting throughout the day is key to staying at the top of the newsfeed and better grab your audience’s attention.

 

As you can see, taking advantage of each and every feature the platform has to offer is the key to creating engaging and interesting content. The more features and tools you use, the more value it provides, keeping you at the top of your audience’s mind and preventing your competition from taking the lead. Add each of these ideas to your social media content plan to add the variety, consistency, and engagement you need to be successful.

 

Four Fun Ways to Use Instagram Stories Polls and Questions

 

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Five Tools to Automate Your Social Media Stories

Due to the high-value social media stories and other content brought to companies, third-party solutions and products emerged. These solutions were designed to make it easier for brands or businesses to take full advantage of the benefits social media marketing brings without breaking the bank or taking up too much time.

 

Many things in social media require constant work and are quite tedious. Not something any one person can do sustainably to see results or achieve your goals with social media – making it that much more important to take advantage of these tools to automate certain portions of your social media content plan or make it easier and faster to produce high-quality content.

 

The following are five tools to help automate your social media stories:

 

Hootsuite

 

Hootsuite offers a thirty-day free trial to get started. With Hootsuite, scheduling all your social media content ahead of time across many different platforms will save you more time and free you from frustration. Then, view what your customers or audience thinks, access image access to make regular posts, or evaluate your personalized insights to see what is working all in one easy-to-use interface.

 

SocialPilot

 

Never run out of content ideas with SocialPilot’s unlimited keyword search tool. Discover trending content, create it and schedule it ahead of time to automate your social media marketing. View all your social media comments, posts, and messages easily from your Facebook pages or groups all in one place organized for better communication. SocialPilot works with many of the popular platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.

 

CoSchedule

 

A marketing calendar allows you to see all of your projects from different platforms in one area that you can share and work on with a team. It can be easy to get lost in communication and make your social media stories inconsistent or disorganized if you can’t properly work with your team or keep your project all in one place. Don’t let your content projects be scattered between emails, spreadsheets, or cloud storage.

 

Sprout Social

 

Get to know your audience better with Sprout Social, a tool that gives you the knowledge and information you need to create better social media stories or content for your target audience. Real connections make purchases, and that’s what this tool helps you do by understanding their needs and then doing the work to create a plan that meets them. They also provide tools that help you publish content, manage your workflows, influencer engagement, and view analytics.

 

PostPlanner

 

Automatically post your content and keep up with your daily posting schedule with PostPlanner. A tool that allows you to set your posting schedule, republish content with one click, or tailor your post to maximize your reach. It also has a feature that filters through Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to provide the best or most trendy topics and ideas to create more stories or social media posts that convert.

 

Give each of these tools a try to see which one provides the most value to your brand and overall objective. The idea is to free up your time so you can use it where it matters most. For example, create engaging, interactive, and highly valuable and beneficial content for your followers or paying customers. In addition, using these tools can help you automate the process and plan ahead to get the most impact from your social media stories and other content.

 

Schedule Your Daily Activities Based on Your Goals

 

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The Facebook Story Strategies to Follow for Business

Facebook stories are short clips, pictures, videos, audio clippings, or other animations shared at the top of followers’ Facebook or Messenger app and to the top right above the newsfeed of the desktop version. All a follower needs to do is tap on the profile picture of the story content they want to watch to view the content.

 

A blue ring will appear around the profile picture of Facebook users who have new stories for you to watch. These stories give businesses a more fun and attractive way to market to their target audience, increasing their success on the platform and as a sustainable and functioning business.

 

Here are five Facebook story strategies to follow to further grow and market your business on this platform:

 

Completely Fill in Your Facebook Page

 

Don’t leave any information out that Facebook asks for when you create your new page for your business. The most active pages have the most information for their audience. You’ll want to link them to your website, your other relevant content on the net and provide any answers they need to make a buying choice.

 

Enhance Your Facebook Stories with Creative Tools and Music

 

The tools Facebook offers to upgrade your stories are filters, graphics, words, and also music. You can replace any background sounds on videos captured for Facebook Stories using your Smartphone simply by using Facebook’s own editor in your phone. It’s not hard to do at all. Click around and give it a try so you can learn your systems and tools.

 

Keep Track and Up to Date with Facebook Stories Analytics

 

Use your analytics to do better. Don’t trust your own opinions about how your stories or posts are doing. Trust the metrics captured instead. This way, you can improve with each content update by doing what your audience wants most instead of what you happen to like.

 

Link Your Account with Instagram

 

The same company owns Facebook and Instagram, so you must go ahead and connect your Facebook account with Instagram to make use of both and double your views.

 

Use Facebook Story Highlights

 

The stories you create are automatically saved in your private story archives, which you can make live again whenever you want to. In addition, you can use these stories that were captured and shared to build a highlights reel so that your audience can learn more about you easily.

 

If you want to gain the most reward out of your Facebook story content, you must implement these strategies for your business. These tips ensure you use the platform and its features correctly and wisely to gain your audience’s attention and keep them interested and active with your brand. The more interested and engaged they are with the value you provide, the more likely they will purchase your products or services.

 

Struggling With Social Media? A Calendar And System Can Help

 

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Important Influencer Performance Metrics

When you begin an influencer marketing campaign, you must figure out what metrics to track. Part of goal setting includes identifying the tracking metrics, so it won’t be as hard as you think to accomplish as long as you take the time to set up your goals and objectives properly.

 

Here are the top metrics to keep track of depending on your influencer marketing goals:

 

Audience Growth

 

How has the influencer grown its platform over time? If you want to ensure that they are consistent in their efforts, you only need to check the metrics to find out. You can easily check by looking at their stats which they should provide to you, or you can use a third-party system to help like Socialblade.com but realize that these are only estimates.

 

KPIs to track for audience growth include:

 

  • Number of subscribers – How many subscribers are they getting each day, and how long did it take?
  • Social media followers – How many people follow them on other social networks, and how long did it take them to get to the level they are?

 

Brand Awareness and Reputation

 

While you aim to create more brand awareness for your brand and improve your reputation, you must ensure that the influencers you choose also have the same goal so you don’t accidentally select someone who doesn’t represent you properly.

 

KPIs to track to determine awareness and reputation:

 

  • Page views – How many viewers are going to find you on that platform potentially? You can find out by how many average pageviews the influencer is getting to find out how it might work out for you.
  • Impressions – Even if they don’t click, the information still shows and is called an impression. So the more people who view, even if they don’t click, the more awareness you’ll build.
  • Social media followers – How many followers does the influencer have now, and how many do you have now. Again, knowing how this grows during the campaign will help you see if it’s working or not.
  • Brand mentions – You can set up an alert with Google or use a third-party app like Hootsuite.com or Brandwatch.com to track who mentions your brand web-wide.

 

Engagement Rate

 Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Engagement

One of the things that really help build your business online is engagement. So if you choose influencers who are good with engagement, it’ll boost your own engagement. Once the customer clicks through the influencer’s mention, they’re going to expect the same sort of engagement and personality from you.

 Free and Low-Cost Automation Tools You Can Implement Today

KPIs to track to ensure your engagement is what you want it to be:

 

  • Likes – Getting likes on your posts is one way to notice engagement and increase your reach. Ask your audience to like your posts to help.
  • Shares – When your audience really likes what you’re posting, they’ll do more than like. They’ll also share. Sharing will expand your brand in a multitude of ways that can’t be duplicated any other way. People trust their friends, and if a friend shares, it’s much more powerful.
  • Comments – This is a better form of engagement than the other two in many ways because useful comments increase reach and help you get to know your audience better.

 

Website and Social Media Traffic

 

You can’t get any type of engagement or sales without traffic. So one of your main goals and objectives is always going to be traffic generation. Of course, when you get more traffic, you make more money, but of course, you want the right traffic.

 

KPIs to track to ensure you are building your influence via traffic generation methods:

 

  • New users – How many new people visit that site, influencer, page, or product each day?
  • Session time – How long they are sticking around is also a good indication of whether they’re consuming the content or not. You want your pages to be “sticky” and keep them as long as possible.
  • Total number of sessions – How many times has that same person come back to your information?
  • Pageviews – How many pages views have you delivered for that campaign, product, or advertisement?
  • Click-through Rate (CTR) – This is how many times someone has actually not only viewed the page or info but clicked and followed your CTAs. If you get 100 page views and ten clicks, that’s a 10 percent clickthrough rate.
  • Cost per click (CPC) – Likewise, knowing how much it costs you to get those clicks will also inform how much you can afford to pay for advertising and influencer marketing. If you’re making $100 a click on average, you can reasonably spend 33 bucks to get that click.

 

Sales

 

Of course, all that work you are doing, the hiring and working with influencers and offering amazing value, is ultimately to make sales. So, therefore, of course, you must track sales. You don’t even have a business until you make sales.

 

KPIs to track to ensure you’re making a profit from your sales:

 

  • Sales conversion rate – How many clicks and views does it take for you, on average, to make a sale? Knowing that helps you determine how many touchpoints you need to create.
  • Number of sales – Finally, tracking how many sales you’re making during any period you want to follow can help determine the cause of those sales so you can repeat it.

 

Lead Generation

 

Did you know that most people will not buy anything from you by going to your website and clicking to buy unless you’re pretty famous, like Amazon or Etsy? But if you take that traffic, you receive it and turn it into a lead. Then, you can boost your conversion rate exponentially. After all, once a customer is on your e-mail list, you can now promote them and communicate with them anytime you want to.

 

KPIs to track to ensure your lead generation is working:

 

  • Signups – How many people have signed up for the freebie or low-cost offer you have promoted to them?
  • E-mail Subscribers – How many people subscribed to your newsletter due to the promotion you created?

 

Finally, track your return on investment or ROI for every KPI listed above. No matter your goal, you should always keep track of your ROI to ensure you are not spending more than the value you receive from the influencer contract. Again, it’s easy to determine by simply doing the math. You can keep track in a simple spreadsheet or use the platforms you have with their native tracking ability.

 

 

 

 

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Yes! You Can Automate That

Automation can simplify your life and provide you more time to focus on the things that truly matter to you. It leads to better communication, higher productivity, and overall success in your business and life. The secrete to gaining more free time or time to accomplish more tasks is automation.

 

Here are five things you can automate in your business and at home:

 

#1: Grocery Shopping

Companies like Shipt, Instacart, and Cornershop by Uber have created a business model to shop and deliver your groceries for you. Grocery shopping can take hours and sometimes be stressful. Let others do it for you. Pick the items you want and the time you wish to deliver, and you’re all set.

shopping

#2: Inventory Management

Keeping up with inventory is costly and time-consuming, even if you have a small business or just buying groceries at home. Setting up a proper inventory management system right away is crucial. Software like NetSuite and Shopify will do this for you after the initial setup.

 

To combat this at home, create laminated lists for each category and mark the items off as soon as you throw them away. This way, you know exactly which items to buy again when you create your next grocery order on Shipt.

 

#3: Budget and Expense Management

Keeping track of everything on paper isn’t needed anymore, and in fact, you are only opening yourself up for mistakes if you insist on staying old school for everything. Accounting software such as Wave Accounting or QuickBooks provides the tools you need to set up a budget, generate sales or other business reports or pay your bills or taxes on time in an instant.

 

#4: Task Delegation or Chore Assignments

Trello, Basecamp, and other project management systems are an easy way to streamline your task delegation. These systems have many different tools and widgets that make it fast and easy to communicate and send or share resources to different or the same people. Chorebuster.net is another excellent resource that automatically assigns, schedules, and sends printable chore lists to the whole family.

 

#5: Contact Forms, Autoresponders, or Other Online Marketing Materials

Pop-up forms or other plugins should be downloaded to your websites or blogs to make email collection almost automatic. If someone has a question, contact forms are a great way to keep it organized too. Other programs like Zapier can help automate your social media campaigns by scheduling the posts for you.

Free and Low-Cost Automation Tools You Can Implement Today

Thankfully as technology advances, your life gets easier with automation, so you can spend your energy and time where it’s needed. One reason you want to work for yourself is to gain free time. You might as well set yourself up to achieve time freedom.

 

 

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10 Ways Small Business Benefits from Smart Automation

All businesses benefit from smart automation. Automation today is not expensive. You can implement much different productivity-improving automation free and inexpensively that will not just save time but will save money and increase your revenue exponentially.

 

  1. Increased Scalability – When you automate, even if you’re just one person, if you choose what to automate wisely, you’ll be able to scale your business in ways you may not have thought possible.

 

  1. Reduced Errors – There is no way around it, but machines, once set up properly, make fewer errors than humans. If you can set up an automaton that works, you’re going to reduce the errors you’re used to making and letting by. It’s not about perfection, though. It’s just about being able to do something simple without having to worry about the errors once it’s set up.

 

  1. Better Customer Satisfaction – When customers get service fast like they want, and it’s accurate and timely, they are always happier with you—today’s customers like using self-service automation and don’t mind using chatbots at all.

 

  1. Reduced Labor Costs – When you can automate instead of outsourcing, this is always a good thing because technology is cheaper than a human being. Your time is also worth way more than your chatbot’s time.

 

  1. Better Work-Life Balance – Automating things even that take you five minutes a day can add up and save you so much time that you start experiencing that elusive work-life balance people love to talk about.

 

  1. Use Resources More Efficiently – When you set up automation, it is always more efficient than human resources. Not only does it work more accurately, but it also costs less to start with than hiring a person.

 

  1. Decreased Operating Costs – When you use technology to increase productivity, you can keep your operating costs lower because you’re not using extra human resources or your time, which is always more expensive than tech.

 

  1. Improved Decision Making – If you have an accurate picture of the research involved, which using automation can help you with, you’re going to make better business decisions. Imagine if you set up a Zap to send reports generated in Google Analytics to a Dropbox for you to view every Friday – so much more straightforward than having to get the reports yourself.

 

  1. Boost Productivity – When you have to do fewer steps to get to the deliverable, you will become super productive. Remember that there is a lot more to being productive than movement or being busy. Finishing projects and tasks makes you productive.

 

  1. Increased Competitiveness – When you can get more done in less time and done accurately, you’re going to please customers more, and that’s going to make you more competitive.

 

When you decide to implement automation in your small business, choose from the things you do right now, already, that are repetitive in nature, and you can’t go wrong—no need to invent new things to do until you automate what you already do every single day.

 

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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.