How to Automate Almost Everything

I’ve been using Zapier for a couple of years but I’ve only really turbo-charged my Zapier automations this year. Before that, I had been using If This Then That since it launched in 2011 because you could create a bunch of integrations for free. 

In the last few years, though, Zapier has really taken the lead in automations with thousands of software integrations, and many online services, including Sprout Studio (affiliate link), only use Zapier, and don’t offer integration through IFTTT, so if you wanted to create automations between platforms, you pretty much had to start using Zapier. Which I did.

At first, I was on Zapier’s free plan. Zapier’s free plan gives you five integrations, which they call “Zaps,” and up to 100 tasks per month. Each time a zap runs, that counts as one task. Now, I use their Starter plan, which is $20 US a month on an annual plan, which gives me the ability to create 20 zaps, multi-step zaps, includes filters so I can put conditions on the data moving between services and formatters so I can alter and structure the data coming from one application before passing it into another application.

One of the first integrations I created for my business was to take some lead info I was getting from Sprout Studio and insert that into a table in Airtable so I could build custom audiences for Facebook Ads. But since I was getting more than 100 leads a month and Zapier’s free plan limits you to 100 tasks a month, I needed to upgrade. Boy, am I ever glad I did. $20 USD a month is nothing to sneeze at. It’s more than my website costs. It’s more than Sprout Studio’s Lite plan. It’s more than I spend at Starbucks every month.

Well, maybe not. And I guess that’s a good point because if I’m spending more than that on caffeine every month, the question becomes “Can $20 a month buy back more than $20 of my time?” If yes, then it’s worth it.

Just last week I created a zap that automatically publishes every new podcast post from the Studio Builder website to:

1. Our Facebook Page;

2. Our Instagram account;

3. Our Twitter account;

4. My LinkedIn profile; and,

5. the Studio Builder Community Facebook group.

I’ve also set up similar zaps for my Blackwood Studios blog and my commercial photography blog.

It took me about 30 minutes to set up and format, but now that’s five social media posts for every episode that I never have to make again. If each of those posts only took me about one minute to do, including the time it takes to open a new browser tab, find the box, paste the text, and hit enter, that’s five minutes for every episode, three episodes a week, for 52 weeks a year. That’s a total of 780 minutes saved every year. 

I couldn’t imagine spending 13 hours a year copying and pasting text into different social media platforms. That seems like a complete waste of my time when I can pay a computer to do it for me, better and faster and more consistently than I ever could. And I don’t have to worry about forgetting to do it, getting bored of doing it, or worse yet, getting distracted by the infinite scroll of any one of these platforms and falling down a rabbit hole of distraction.

So, because I pay for this Zapier starter account, I’ve been spending my time lately figuring out how Zapier can save me even more time, and I want to share a bunch of ways you can think about using Zapier to either save valuable time or creating integrations that allow you to do some useful and even some fun things.

Zapier Automation Ideas

• Save all new Sprout Studio contacts to Google Contacts

  • Leads as new contact

  • Bookings convert lead status to “client”

  • When leads are closed (not booked), they are updated in Google Contacts to have their data stripped and name changed to DELETE

• Airtable for Facebook Ads custom list

  • Changing lead status in Sprout Studio updates Airtable to include budget information

  • Allows me to sort list by budgets and exclude 

• Update Blog Posts to all Social Media outlets via RSS Feed

• Share your Instagram photos to other SM as native posts

• Share YouTube videos to Social Media

• Backup Vimeo videos to Google Drive/Dropbox/Box

• Convert new Sprout Studio Leads/Shoots into Printed Documents (Google Cloud Print)

• Add new tasks to ClickUp when you get a new lead

• Add leads gathered to your email list

  • Outgrow/Hello Bar/Leadpages/Instagpage

  • ConvertKit/Mail Chimp/Aweber/Infusionsoft

• Collect form responses as new rows in an Airtable or Google Sheets

• Save Liked Videos on Vimeo to Motion Inspiration Airtable

• Record Bookings as Event Conversions in Facebook Ads to help track ROAS

• Post new image to Instagram and save it to Adobe Creative Cloud Library

• Have your studio management system bookings be added to your accounting software

Automation Example:

This Airtable inspiration board is automatically updated whenever I like a video on Vimeo.

Other Zapier Integrations

• 17hats

• Acuity Scheduling

• Asana

• Aweber

• Calendly

• ClickFunnels

• Constant Contact

• CoSchedule

• Dubsado

• Eventbrite

• Evernote

• Flodesk

• Freshbooks

• Google Sheets

• Gravity Forms

• Hello Bar

• Honey Book

• HubSpot

• Infusionsoft

• Jot Form

• Kajabi

• Later.com

• Leadpages

• Mail Chimp

• ManyChat

• MeetEdgar

• PayPal

• Pinterest

• Quickbooks Online

• Slack

• Square Payments

• Squarespace

• Stripe

• Tave

• Teachable

• Thinkific

• Trello

• Unbounce

• Wave Accounting

• Weebly

• Wix Automations

• WordPress

• Xero Accounting

Fill in the Gaps with IFTTT

• Keep Facebook and Twitter profile photos in sync

• Get notifications on Your Phone when Your Studio Door is Unlocked (August, Nest)

• Automatically turn on lights and set the temperature before a shoot (Philips Hue, Nest, Honeywell)

• Log your Phone Calls to Google Sheets

Summary

Think about all the things you don’t like doing, that are meaningless, mindnumbing tasks, such as syncing transaction records in from your studio management system into Quickbooks for your bookkeeper. Write them down. Make a list. Start simple. Open up a free account at Zapier and create up to five simple integrations that will save you time.

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Steal These Automations!

Here are the links to some of my Zapier automations that you can copy to get started with your own.

• Broadcast new blog post on all social media channels and log into MeetEdgar library (zap)

• Log Google Reviews into Airtable base (zap)

• Repost photo to own Instagram feed when tagged in an Instagram photo (zap)

• Add new Sprout Studio Lead contact info to Airtable base (zap)

• Add new Sprout Studio lead to Google Contacts (zap)

• Record new Sprout Studio booking in Facebook Offline Conversions (zap)

• Liked videos on Vimeo are saved to Airtable inspiration board (zap)

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