43 - Tip Tuesday - Automating Your Business With Christian Psencik

Christian is an IT person by trade, and he loves technology, and after starting his own business, he was finding that there wasn’t enough of him to go around.  So he started to set-up his own automated systems.  In his own words, he likes to have ‘the internet robots go and do his bidding’.  Christian had an ‘ah-ha’ moment when he found out that some of his systems were what a lot of other entrepreneurs were paying their VA’s to do.

What’s the first tool that you would recommend?  One of the most flexible and basic tools is a tool called If This Then That.  It allows you to connect two internet systems together, so for example, Evernote and Dropbox or Twitter and Facebook.

One thing Christian does is instead of writing down all of his ideas.  He has an If This, Then That rule set-up where if he comes up with an idea, he tells ‘Siri’, and then she adds it to the end of a specific note in Evernote.  So this helps to get all of his ideas out of his head, so he can focus on what’s important.

Explain a little more of how if this, then that, really works.  So the first portion, you say ‘if you send a text message to a certain number’, and then you can provide a certain number.  So then once it’s set-up, you have the trigger in the recipe (the whole statement), then the second part is what it’s supposed to do.  So you would say attach the contents of this to an Evernote document. 

Do you actually set-up the rules all within If This, Then That?  Yes, you do right in the their website.  All of your rules are kept private, unless you make them public.

When it comes to things like Twitter, you do have to be careful because if you’re automatically sending a Tweet, it could be flagged as spam by Twitter.  However, you could set it up through a 3rd party service, like Buffer. 

So what are some more examples on how to utilize IFTTT?  You can set-up auto social media posts to get things out to the world.  So every time you create a podcast post, you can automatically send those out to your social media outlets. 

Another tool you can check out is Zapier.  Check this one out (there is a paid tier to this service), but this is great if you’re using a CRM system.

Another one is Wappwolf, what it does, it’s called the Dropbox automator.  It can create certain triggers based on when you add some items to Dropbox.

We also talked about some automatic Twitter tools.  Particularly Buffer for scheduling Tweets, along with Hootsuite.  

Pinterest is a harder site to create any automation around.   That is in the process of hopefully being changed.  Still TBD on when that's going to happen.

More About Christian:  Christian Psencik is an automation expert over at www.ProlificSuccess.com, a blog (and podcast coming soon!) all about business productivity and using technology to help automate your business and your life -  “letting you work on building your business, instead of spending all your time just keeping up with business”.  Topics include using services such as IFTTT, Evernote, Dropbox, Asana, and many others.  For over 15 years, he has worked in tech support and administration and is a self-proclaimed IT “expert.”  He is also a huge fan of tech gadgets and in general all things tech and geeky.  Christian, also co-hosts the daily podcast “Days Drama: The Day Of our Lives Soap Opera Podcast” with his wife Vin Psencik.  Every day at www.DaysDrama.com they recap the daily events of the TV show to listeners all over the world.