How to Automate Your Business as a Solopreneur

As a single person, your most valuable asset is your time. After all, you don’t always need extra people when you can use your own sweat equity. Being a freelancer is the cheapest and fastest way to start a small business. But that comfort comes with a price. There are several unique ones The challenges that come with being a loner. One is that every aspect of the business rests on your shoulders and there are only so many hours in the day to complete each task.

Some days it may seem like all you do is one administrative task after another. And even then you may not be finished yet. Working this way rarely allows time for your business to grow and can really Drain your energy and motivation. You’ve probably even thought about hiring an assistant, but you may not be ready for that commitment yet.

The good news is that technology can often act as our own personal assistant. One way is automation. Finding ways to automate your business is a great way to find more time in your day.

What is automation?

Automated processes may seem like you need some kind of robot to do your job, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes this involves technology doing things for you, such as creating rules in certain systems to trigger processes when certain conditions are met.

Automating your processes means creating templates and systems for you to use on the go when similar situations pop up. In other words, don’t reinvent the wheel, automate your processes.

Create email response templates

Email automation is an easy way to free up some time throughout your day while improving your mood. After all, many people don’t actually like going through all the emails, prioritizing them, and responding.

The truth is that emails are a distraction that keeps us away Doing more meaningful workAnd your email processes will automatically keep you out of the inbox

One of the easiest ways to save time on your emails is by creating templates. Do you often receive emails for similar situations? This is the perfect time to create an email response template. To do this, take some time to write a well-thought-out template response for that situation that you can customize for different clients or business partners. No need to sit down and write the same basic response to each of those emails every time they pop up. Write it once and then change the details to suit the situation.

To keep it organized and easily accessible, create a Word document with headings for specific situations and then place the template after the headings. From there, you can create an automated table of contents where all you have to do is click on the title in the table of contents to find that template.

Use a canned response extension

No more scrolling through pages of pages in your document.

If you use Gmail as your email application, you can also take advantage of the Canned Response extension. This plug-in allows you to conveniently save your templates in the Gmail application so that all you have to do is select the specific template you need in your new email draft. How easy can that get?

Start saving time responding to emails by creating templates. It doesn’t have to be a big project. As the emails start coming in, write down your responses and save them. In no time you will have a nice collection of templates for future reference.

Apply inbox rules

You can actually create rules to automatically send emails to a specific folder or take a specific action based on specific criteria. This can be based on sender, subject line, and the like. Do you have a specific client or business partner you don’t want to miss an email from?

You can set your inbox to automatically flag email as important or sort it into a specific folder based on the sender. Or maybe marketing emails and newsletters are clogging up your main inbox and important emails are getting lost in them. You can set up a folder for them too, so those marketing emails are out of the way.

Stop wasting time scrolling through your inbox for specific emails and keep them neatly organized in folders or with labels.

Social media schedule

In today’s market, social media is crucial to getting your business out there and finding new customers. However, social media can take up a lot of time from your day. After all, to be successful you must post several times a day and on different platforms. Fortunately, there is Social media scheduling platform Which allows you to create a post that can be posted on various social media sites. You can schedule them ahead of time so you don’t have to constantly interrupt your day to post.

Just write a post and select which social media platform to post on and at what time This means no more time spent switching from one social media platform to another to type the same message. Since they can be scheduled, you can batch the job and type in days worth of posts at a time A huge time saver for those who don’t want to fall behind in their marketing.

Automatically schedule meetings and book appointments

Have you ever had a long email chain that mostly suggested meeting times back and forth until you finally found common ground? Well, the good news is that you can avoid this with certain scheduling tools.

Website eg Calendly And YouCanBookMe Allows you to automate this process. First, you set it up to sync with your calendar and show your availability, and then your clients simply go to the custom link and choose a time. An easy way to avoid the time and hassle of those long email chains just for one meeting. It will also make your clients less frustrated, and therefore happier.

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This article was originally published in September 2017 but has been expanded and updated

Article Tags:

Featured · Find Your Way · Marketing · New Startups · Social Media · Solopreneur · Technology

Article Category:

Entrepreneurial Lifestyle · Find Your Way · Grow Your Business · Marketing · Sales · Social Media · Solo · Technology