Put Your Social Media on Auto Pilot

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Patrick

I’ve recently been playing around with a few options for automating my social media posting. There’s a few commonly known solutions – like Hootsuite – that work very well.

But being the automation nerd that I am, I wanted to find a solution that would automatically syndicate all of my WordPress blog posts to all of my social media channels in a way that’s appropriate to optimize each channel (for example twitter locks you at 140 characters, while facebook allows you to have a thumbnail image and longer text).

My New Favorite App – IFTTT (If This Then That)

My favorite aspect of Infusionsoft is that I can set up automation triggers. If I want to trigger a certain outcome based on an event, all I have to do is set up the appropriate actions and rules. For example, if I want to have a followup email sequence automatically send to a customer after a specific product is purchased, all I need to do is set up an action set to make this happen.

But what about social media? I want to be able to publish a new post to my site and have it automatically syndicate across all of my social media channels – Facebook, twitter, google+, linkedin, etc.

I’ve found a few solutions that attempt to accomplish this, but I wasn’t pleased with them because each of them had a substantial delay between the kickoff action (publishing a post) and the resulting effect (publishing to social media). I wanted this to happen immediately!

Then I stumbled upon IFTTT. With this amazing (free!) app, you can create “recipes” that work very similar to actions in Infusionsoft. For example, take a look at my recipes for syndicating my materials across social media as soon as I publish a post:

As soon as I finalize and publish this post, it will automatically post a snippet to my Facebook fan page, Twitter, and Linkedin. But what about Google+? Although it isn’t natively supported yet, I have a hack for you: Set up a new recipe to watch for a facebook fan page post to go live, then once it does, have that post to Google+ through Hootsuite!

The greatest part is that you can customize how each snippet will look. For example, with Twitter I only have room for the very basics (title of the post + a shortened link), but for Facebook it will automatically post the title, description, and try to pull a featured image.

Need help getting these set up? I’ve shared a few of my “recipes” here. Click each of them to create your own off of my models.

WordPress Post publish to Facebook Fan Page

WordPress Post publish to Twitter

Imagine how much time this saves if you are posting to all of these multiple times per week! Talk about saving time through automation.

Taking Automation Further

Do you pay any virtual employees or business expenses through Paypal? If so I have a cool recipe for you:

Any time I make a payment through Paypal, this recipe will automatically save a copy of the receipt to Evernote. The possibilities are endless and only limited by your imagination.

How much time would this save in your business? Post you answer in the comments below.

Why A Launch Plan Can Save You Big Money

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Patrick

In today’s post I interview my good friend and business systems engineer Kelly Azevedo. Kelly is the founder of Shes Got Systems – where you can learn all about creating systems that run your business so that you can focus on your big goals and let your systems handle the details.

Kelly has worked in start up, growing, six figure and million dollar online businesses with a variety of entrepreneurs. She’s managed programs varying from private client coaching and small groups all the way to larger programs serving hundreds of clients simultaneously. Familiar with the systems and behind the scenes support of these successful entrepreneurs, she’s created easy to implement and powerful systems to help you reach the next level.

Here’s the transcript:

[hr]

Hey this is Patrick Conley from AutomateToFreedom.com today I’m talking like a good friend Kelly Azevedo of She’s Got Systems.com. Kelly is a systems engineer who can keep you how to save money during your launch by having a really efficient plan so that you know what everything that’s going on and that you have a game plan so everything looks great.

Am today we’re going to talk a little bit about the advantages of having really a solid plan for you’re your next launch.

So welcome Kelly

Kelly: Thanks!

Patrick: Cool. Okay. So Kelly today were gonna talk about how a launch plan can save you money in your launch and why would you want to plan it out instead of just weighing the whole thing.

Kelly: I think of a launch a little bit like a road trip and you’ve got to have a destination in line of your goals but you actually have to know how you’re gonna get there. And so it’s a different between drop things in the car and driving around for a few hours or few weeks and actually having a GPS and a map and a plan so that you know what you’re gonna be doing and you don’t waste a lot of energy trying to reach your launch goals.

Patrick: Okay. Yeah that’s that sound ideally logical for me. Am so why do you think that some people despite maybe knowing that they decided to role that logic the way than just go for it and plan their launch without really setting it any date or of any sort of a road map.

Kelly: I think they just naturally get excited about something new that their offering and so you know if you hear like hey were going to Disneyland you wanna get in the car right now and start going am and you know it maybe a while before you realize like you know you forgot walking shoes or you forgot something really critical and then you think I can’t go back now I just have to wing it. And it can mean that you it’s something you can’t enjoy the experience as much because forgotten something really critical or you just didn’t plan. So it it take some self discipline to hold yourself back and right that plan down so that you follow to it but it means that you have a much better journey getting there and you’ll have a better end result because you put a little bit planning at the beginning.

Patrick: Okay. Yeah that makes a lot of sense. So what are the biggest benefit you think of of just deciding on a plan and building building on this format before like I know obviously this can save you money coz your not gonna be worrying about spending a lot of money on contractors who aren’t ready but am can you just give kinda brief of overview with which do we expect the benefit from it.

Kelly : Mostly you know am when you set your goals and you have some bad bench mark am if you need to expand what you’re doing coz you’re not reaching the audience that you want. Am you know that when you’re half-way through the launch process so instead of continuing to delay the the date of your launch or waiting to launch the program with all the people who join. You know half-way through if you need to step up your marketing effort or if everything is going to plan you can kinda relax. And and that means you know you’re spending less energy writing around trying to figure out what you need to do but you also saving a lot time in the process and of course money because you’re not hiring people to didn’t have to read to work they did for you because days changed.

Patrick : ah cool so I know you are a pretty often a launch manager you’ve done some cool project ah without naming any name you need to tell us ah maybe a couple of things that went wrong when people didn’t stick to a plan like that.

Kelly: Yeah I think the real common is the am when people finish a program and they get really nervous because they don’t have anything else coming up and they just throw something out there say “we are doing this event this sign up and its always very yawring because people haven’t been prepared with the marketing methods without writing why they need it. And they are certainly aren’t really to am to take in those new clients. So it comes the hard part of what do we do now. But there was those plan like throw it something out there and were filling this program today and its very very chaotic and the client will sense that will stay away because they know you’re not ready. (Patrick: Right) Am and the other extreme is when people who say I want a thousand people on this program and its my first time launching it and I’ve no list and I’m not gonna like launch until a thousand people signed up. And then they just never launch because they don’t reach their goal. And they haven’t said about realistic goals so they are just never launching and they could serve ten people and get some money on the door be happy and then launch it again 20 more people and then 30 and then 50 and a 100 at a time but they set such a big goal that they’re not gonna reach they don’t end up launching at all. And it is not helping anyone.

Patrick: Totally. Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I think that’s kinda ah that’s realness for anything in life just like people go to the gym and they want to bench press that the like 300 pounds that they don’t wanna started you know ( Kelly : Yeah but they’re years old and then can’t really do that. ) So I know one of your specialties is helping people pretty big systematic launches and they came up with program and pretty recently keep as self a little bit about that.

Kelly: Yeah I do a free teleclass calls get out there launch coz I think no matter what you’re list size is and no matter how big or complicated your plan can be can absolutely get started and get out there. So its something I offer for free on my site so that you can start seeing how you should be getting out there right now and then for those people who needs some extra support I do like I said launch planning and support am anywhere from just strategizing all the way up through managing a six figure launch so that you know wherever you are in your business your launch is more successful because like I said everyone put so much in online business on their launch and if they’re not planning correctly or they have goal and or accessible that than its really easy to get frustrated to put in a lot of money and not see those return.

Patrick: Right, totally cool that sounds great. I think that a lot of people would benefit from that. So for those my readers out there listening who haven’t heard of you, where can they find more about you and learn more launch class and all that.

Kelly: Ah you can get the launch class recording at ShesGotSystems.com and am I have a lot of resources there on the site or you can always contact our teams who contacted and a lot of what kind of you know want help need or you need the class recording am and we send those out to people all the type.

Patrick: Cool. Sounds great. Thanks a lot Kelly

Kelly: Thank you.

Patrick: Talk to you later.

[hr]

Your Turn

Have you ever launched a product without a plan? What issues came up that you didn’t expect? Need help planning your next launch? Contact Kelly at team@kellyazevedo.com

Is Your Data at Risk? Automate Your Data Backup!

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Patrick

I love writing about the incredible opportunities we have to automate our marketing, sales, followup and general business processes. While my content typically covers ways to grow your business in terms of growing your audience, today we’re going to look at a critical piece to this process — backing up your data!

It’s scary to me how many business owners rely nearly 100% on their computer and website for their income, yet don’t take the most basic steps towards backing up their online empire. What happens if your laptop gets stolen, or a your computers are lost while traveling, or your VA accidentally destroys your website files?

Take a few minutes to do some very basic work automating your backup processes — and gain piece of mind knowing that you can quickly rebound from a catastrophe!

Backing Up Your Computer

For your personal or business computer, there’s 2 basic methods of backing up your data: physically on another storage device, and virtually up in the “cloud” — I recommend BOTH. In my mind you want to conquer both methods in the event of a worst case scenario.

Backing Up Locally

If you’re on a Mac computer, I love the built in Time Machine tool. It’s easy, automatic, and pretty much fool-proof. For windows, here’s a few options.

Step 1. Find or purchase a removable hard drive. These days with the huge size of media files, I’d recommend at least a 1 TB drive:

Western Digital My Passport 1 TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive

Step 2. Set up Time Machine for Mac or your choice for Windows. If you’re limited on hard drive space, be sure to back up your essential files at a minimum!

Step 3. Make sure to regularly plug in your backup hard drive and run your backup solution so that you actually have versions to revert to in a pinch!

Backing Up “In The Cloud”

My favorite backup tool is DropBox. I don’t know what I’d do without it… I use it for literally just about every important document that I have. It’s free for small data use, or pretty cheap if you want to use it for a lot of files.

Step 1. Download DropBox (Mac or PC) and install.

Step 2. Decide which folders are important to you (if you’re running a business, this is stuff like contracts, client info, etc. that would be terrible to lose in case of a disaster!) and add those to your dropbox folder.

Step 3. Let dropbox do it’s magic and Voila! You now have an awesome online backup of your important files!

Step 4 (optional). *Ninja automation trick* I also use a program to backup my DropBox because I am somewhat paranoid about data loss. I use Cubby – which is currently in Beta testing. I use this simply to mirror my dropbox folder as an additional backup.

One of thing things I LOVE about Dropbox is it’s version control abilities. If you make a big mistake and ruin an important file, you can look into your file history and revert back to a previous version. This can be a life saver!

The real beauty of using a cloud solution such as Dropbox is that you now are covered and able to get back up quickly. Imagine that you are on a trip in Europe and some jerk snatches your shiny MacBook Pro while you are using the restroom. Although it’s still super frustrating to lose your computer, you can now go to the Apple store, buy a new one, and download dropbox. After an hour or two on a decent internet connection — you’ll automatically have all of your important files downloaded onto your computer. It’s amazing!

Backing Up Your Website

Now that we have your important computer info backed up, it’s time to focus on your other empire – your website! For us online entrepreneurs, our website is basically just as important as our computer.

If you’re using WordPress on your website (which I highly recommend!), you now have access to an awesome plugin that will save your skin: WordPress Backup to Dropbox.

Install this by searching for “WordPress Backup to Dropbox” under plugins, and click “Install Now“, then “Activate“

You’ll then see a new “WPB2D” button on your left hand menu. Click this and you’ll be prompted to link to your Dropbox account in the settings.

I set my account to update weekly to my Dropbox account. However, if you’re making super frequent changes to your site, you may want to set this to a more frequent schedule. If you website is huge, you can also choose to exclude certain files to save some space.

Taking Action

How secure and backed up is your data? Do you have a plan if something happens to your computer or website? Leave your thoughts below!

*image credit: Eastlaketimes

How Can Lawyers Use Infusionsoft Automation Marketing?

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Patrick

I recently watched a funny video about using Infusionsoft to power a law practice. You can check it out here:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6D3XQILrjg&vq=hd720

Traditionally, we can think of some great ways that a law firm would use a fully functioned CRM solution. Keeping your client data up to date and clean is essential for a solid business! But how could we utilize the advanced automated follow-up abilities of Infusionsoft?

As with many professional service businesses, lawyers face an issue of deliver valuable content to clients who’s issues vary greatly. Depending on the practice, you could be dealing with estate planning, traffic violations, criminal cases, tax issues, and on and on. So how do you set up a system that will automatically send the right targeted information to the right people?

Segmenting Your Leads

The solution is through properly tagging and segmentation. By monitoring your incoming leads closely, you can apply tags that automatically segment your leads into groups that address their specific issues. For example, leads who are coming to you for traffic violations could be served by receiving a specific follow up sequence that details all that they need to know about points on their drivers license, how to dress for court if needed, and what information about their vehicle and the incident will be required to work on the case.

By segmenting these leads on the front end, you can save yourself tremendous time sorting through your leads on the back end. You’ll have the piece of mind that the right information is automatically filtering to the right people!

Just as importantly, you can automate your internal processes. Let’s examine your on-boarding procedures for when a new client visits your office. As your client signs the original welcome packet, your assistant can enter their information into your Infusionsoft system so that the new client welcome sequence is triggered. The client will receive a friendly email welcoming them to your practice, followed by a questionnaire and instructions on what to do next.

Now this is where the power of automation truly kicks in. In a perfect world, the client would promptly fill out the information and return it to your office. However, we know that everyone has a lot on their plate these days – so what happens if your new client forgets about the email? We can automatically trigger a reminder email to the client that sends a few days after the initial meeting, as well as a task reminder to your assistant asking them to reach out to your new client via phone.

Automating Your Followup Process

Similarly, we can automate all of the next steps of the process: setting up an appointment for your new client to come back into the office, tasks for your assistant to make all of the appropriate legal copies, etc. Ready to reward your excellent new client? Use a service to send out a free gift such as cookies automatically once they have completed their assigned tasks…. who doesn’t love getting cookies in the mail?

Complete the sequence by sending out requests for testimonials and referrals, annual followups, and more – all automatically!

Interested in using Infusionsoft to power your business?
>> Click here to check out an awesome free demo! <<

*image credit

How Effective Is Your Sales Process?

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Patrick

Keeping track of your prospects through your sales pipeline is one huge aspect that separates newbie small businesses from those generating serious income and impressive conversion rates.

I recently listened to a fantastic interview on Mixergy with Justin Roff-Marsh — the Founder of Ballistix, a management and marketing consultancy, specializing in Sales Process Engineering. I generally love everything on Mixergy, but this one really piqued my interested since my background is in engineering and systematically breaking down and optimizing a process.

Sales: Person or Process Driven?

Justin makes a fairly outlandish claim in the world of traditional sales: that the effectiveness of a sale is centered around the optimization of the sales process, not the salesperson. He makes the comparison of modern manufacturing methods compared to the artisan era of building.

We know that by tracking the history of manufacturing — accuracy and repeatability increase exponentially over time when using an assembly line (where each step can be broken down into its smallest pieces and optimized) as compared to a single craftsman building the entire widget from start to finish.

Justin believes that similar to manufacturing – sales can be improved by breaking each step of the process into its smallest elements, optimizing, and focusing each member of the sales force on being razor sharp at one particular piece of the process.

Automating and Optimizing Sales to Increase Conversion Rate

Whether you agree or disagree with his premise, we can learn from his company’s success and emulate his process through automating marketing and sales procedures.

In Infusionsoft, we have an incredibly useful tool at our fingertips: The “opportunity” sales pipeline. Using this tool effectively ensures that each prospect in the pipeline receives the same process and the sale isn’t dropped through the cracks.

Take a look at this sample opportunity pipeline in Infusionsoft:

Keep in mind that this process should be reflective of your business staff and operations — but it’s a great example to showcase the process. As a new lead comes into the process, he or she is marked as a “new opportunity” and the sales team is notified. If a direct phone call connection cannot be made at first, the sales team must leave 3 voice mails trying to connect — this builds consistency and helps to make scientific observations about where the process needs improvement.

After working the prospect and attempting to make a sale, the sales rep will mark the sale as “won” (and indicate which product was sold) or “lost” with a reason that the prospect was not able to be converted into a customer. This is fantastic from an analytical standpoint. Given enough data, we can start to determine where the holes exist in the sales process and make corrections iteratively!

This system scales with the complexity of the sales process, but it can and should be applied to any business that is selling products (aka all of them!).

What pieces of this methodology could you implement in your business? Need help setting it up? Check out my service packages.

How to Skyrocket Your Business with an Affiliate Program

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Patrick

Check out this video where I answer a few commonly asked questions about setting up an affiliate program for your business:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwMBGWhQYHs&vq=hd720

Is your business leveraging the power of an affiliate program? If not, what’s stopping you? Using a platform like Infusionsoft, you can set up an affiliate program that is fully automated — your referral partners can sign up automatically, promote your products, earn a commission, and increase your bottom line and audience.

Share in the comments: What’s your biggest obstacle in setting up your own affiliate program?

Want to Increase Your Sales by 80%? Use Automatic Followup

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Patrick

Followup is one of the most important practices in a good business and a key to increasing sales.

Take a look at this static released by the National Sales Executive Association:

[box border=”full”]

2% of sales are made on the 1st contact
3% on the 2nd contact
5% on the 3rd contact
10% on the 4th contact
80% of sales are made on the 5th-12th contact

[/box]

Why is following up so important to your success? We are all SUPER busy. We have lives packed to the gills with responsibilities, tasks, interruptions and more — and in the hustle of our everyday life we often lose track of our intentions.

Can you think of a time where you forgot to reply to an email or follow up with a prospect? It happens to all of us! That’s why automatic followup is so incredibly powerful. Using tools like Infusionsoft, we can design an automated system that takes care of the followup for us.

Keep in mind that situations change – a product that isn’t needed today might be the perfect fit in 4 months. Take the time to set up a system that works FOR YOU so that these opportunities aren’t slipping through the cracks.

Remember that in business, like life, following up too quickly can be a sign of neediness and desperation which is an easy way to lose clientele. Design your followup system so that it feels natural and authentic.

Can you think of at least one way that you haven’t followed up with leads or clients that you can implement now? It’s time to put it into action.

Need help designing a campaign with intelligent follow-up in Infusionsoft? Click here to schedule a discovery call and we’ll get you set up with a system that works for you!

—

*Photo credit

How An Affiliate Program Can Grow Your Audience

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Patrick

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8slH_XZEeo&feature=plcp&vq=hd720

There’s a common misconception that running an affiliate program is only good for driving extra sales. While this is definitely a big perk, it’s certainly not the only reason.

An affiliate program, properly designed and executed, can drastically increase your audience. This means more customers now and, more importantly, more prospects for future product sales.

In fact, many top entrepreneurs openly admit that they will run affiliate programs where they actually pay out MORE money in commissions then they earn in the sale.

What?! Why would you ever want to run a campaign that intentionally loses money? Well these smart guys have figured out that they are likely to make so much additional income on future sales, that it actually dwarfs the losses from the affiliate launch and they are willing to take the initial hit.

Running an affiliate program is one of the fastest ways to grow your sales and audience, but it’s not magic — you MUST have products and services that are high value and WOW your customers. Without this critical component, your launch will backfire and actually hurt your reputation in the marketplace.

As in all good businesses, providing high quality service and great products is the cornerstone of successful growth and integrity.

Interested in setting up an affiliate program for your business?

[button link=”http://www.patrick-conley.com/contact”]Click Here To Contact Me[/button]

*image credit: buddawiggi

Livin’ the Good Life with Automated Marketing

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Patrick

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x8WS7_r7Dk&feature=plcp&vq=hd720

Last week I attended Fabienne Fredrickson’s conference in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I had an amazing time with a bunch of great entrepreneur friends, and made many new connections that I’m sure will lead to some pretty fantastic opportunities in the future.

One of the greatest parts of building an automated marketing system is that you have the freedom to take a trip like I did without worrying about missing out on potential leads. I was gone for about a week and didn’t sweat it because my emails, facebook posts, and more were being sent automatically without me touching a thing.

Location independence and freedom are two cornerstones of the modern online entrepreneur movement. However, they both require some big work up front.

Have you started building an automated marketing system yet? If not, what’s holding you back? Even if you aren’t ready to invest in a premium solution like Infusionsoft (check out my free guide to find out), you can still build some great automation with tools like Aweber and Mailchimp.

I want to know — what’s holding you back from getting your business automated so that you can focus on your passions? Leave your answer in the comments :)

*image credit: avrene

Are Your Split Test Results Lying to You?

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Patrick

Statistical Significance in Split Testing

In Marketing, we LOVE split testing — and for good reason — it’s a fantastic method of optimizing a campaign for the best conversion rates and ultimately biggest profit margins.

However, one very important thing to keep in mind when performing these split testing experiments is the “statistical significance” of the results from a split test. For those of you who’s eyes just glazed over when I dropped the word statistics… I’ll try to keep this topic high-touch and easy to digest.

If you look up the wiki on statistical significance, you’ll find that we’re essentially attempting to predict if the results we get from a split test are meaningful and repeatable.

Why is this important?

Let’s imagine that we are attempting to test the effectiveness of 2 headline options on the sales page for our next launch. We want to figure out if headline “A” or headline “B” is producing more sales.

Here are the theoretical results after sending 1100 visitors to both sales pages:

[hr]

Example #1

[twocol_one]Headline “A”

# of visitors: 1100

conversion 5%

[/twocol_one]

[twocol_one_last]Headline “B”

# of visitors: 1100

conversion 9%

[/twocol_one_last]

[hr]

Using a Statistical Difference calculator, we can determine that the difference is 4%, with a comparative error of 2.1. Don’t worry if you don’t understand the math behind it, just be aware that a higher comparative error is bad!

The part you should care about is that the answer is “YES“, there is a statistical difference. We have statistically proven that Headline “B” is converting better, so we’ll go ahead and run all of our advertising dollars towards Headline “B”.

Now what happens if we reduce the traffic to the site during the test? Can we still be sure that Headline “B” is better? Let’s suppose that we were only able to drive 200 visitors to each test. Are our results still valid?

[hr]

Example #2

[twocol_one]Headline “A”

# of visitors: 200

conversion 5%

[/twocol_one]

[twocol_one_last]Headline “B”

# of visitors: 200

conversion 9%

[/twocol_one_last]

[hr]

Checking the calculator again, we now see that the comparative error has jumped up from 2.1 to 5 (remember, higher is worse!). And the result is that there is NOT a statistical difference between our results.

What does this mean in practical terms?

Say we have $10,000 to spend on advertising for this campaign. From our quick calculations, we have proven that the results from Example 2 could be a total fluke. We didn’t have enough visitors to the site to validate that the results are meaningful! So now we really DON’T know what headline should yield higher results without sending more traffic to verify. Better do some more testing!

Have you ever run a split test with interesting results? Post your story below in the comments.