Use simple, event-based automation to avoid repetitive tasks.
Craig and John Paul discuss the immensely powerful Automation tools to multiply the power of your web applications. Save time and increase your results by automating tedious tasks in your Arts Business.
If you start to embrace this, you will discover all kinds of amazing uses that you never thought possible for your business.
Useful links:
Zapier: https://zapier.com/
If This Then That: https://ifttt.com/
Video:
[embedyt]http://youtu.be/J7XMNUsO0Qo[/embedyt]
Podcast:
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Video Transcript:
John Paul: Hi, I’m John Paul Fischbach. I’m the Chief Alchemist here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. I welcome you to another Hot Tip Tuesday. In the studio with me here today is our IT Guru Craig Lambie and he has a really cool hot tip to share.
Craig: You might have heard of ‘automation’ and how much this can really help your business.
John Paul: It saves time.
Craig: It saves so much time and having to do sort of menial tasks over and over. There’s two services out there on the internet that are really useful for automating things. Zapier is one. You see it down at the bottom of the screen here, and “If This Then That”, IFTTT.com. Both of these services actually allow you to set up little ‘if this happens on the internet’ so I make a Google calendar event ‘then this should happen’. I send an email to a certain email address or I post something on Facebook. Any sort of things that you do already it can actually automate those things for you.
John Paul: But it triggers them based on some action. Some action triggers some other action that you setup to automatically happen. That’s brilliant.
Craig: I recommend Zapier over If This Then That. It used to be the other way around but Zapier has a lot more technical filtering ability which is more useful.
John Paul: What is the filter?
Craig: If for example you wanted to retweet a certain tweet but you didn’t want it to bounce backwards and forwards, repeating, repeating, repeating. To stop it from doing that then you can put in a little filter that says only retweet if it hasn’t already been retweeted. That’s like a filter.
John Paul: If they were to go to that website is the Zapier site pretty self explanatory? Could people just figure it out by just following their instructions or are there videos that you can watch?
Craig: Zapier, I haven’t seen any videos on either of the sites. If you search YouTube though there’s videos on absolutely everything so YouTube search ‘how to use Zapier’ or ‘how to use a recipe’ they usually call them or ‘Zaps’ actually on Zapier. They’re ‘recipes’ on If This Then That.
John Paul: That will save you heaps of time by not doing those tasks over and over again just Zap them.
Craig: Just Zap them.
John Paul: If this has been a helpful tip for yourself please like the video. If you know somebody who needs this automation tip please share this video with them. If you’ve got a question for Craig about any of these things ask the question below or make a comment below. We’ll try to get back to you and keep this conversation going.
Here at the Arts Incubator we want you to more than survive. We want you to thrive and saving time is one of the ways that you can really thrive. In order to thrive you need to subscribe so check back with us and they’ll be more times when we have Craig in the studio for more of these cool automated guru IT kinds of tips.