It’s been a while since I sent out my first “geeking out” post. I’m going to make these kinds of post “sporadically regular” so that when my brain is full of techiness and I can give you my full insight into a new tool, system or way of doing something then reel it all off in a post to you in one go.
★ Graphy (Previously Spayee) – I was a little sceptical of this at first and I was leaning towards Podia for online courses but Spayee (pronounced Spay) has so far surprised me.
For a little more insight, I am using StudioCart to make payments which then tags a new course member inside ConvertKit. Zapier then triggers and adds the member into the course in Spayee. You can do the exact same thing with ThriveCart.
I still have a bunch of testing to do so we shall see how it goes!
★ Publer – Over the years, I have bought so many lifetime deals for social media scheduling and I left them on the back burner waiting for one of them to do everything that I used SocialPilot and Planoly for and I am so excited to say that Publer has exactly what I need which means I have cut my expenses. Hooray.
I love that I view my IG feed in a similar way that I can view it in Planoly and schedule group posts via a CSV upload. It’s such a time-saver just like SocialPliot was for me.
★ Loom – I have used Loom for a while but only ever for quick screen recordings but now I am using it to explain more complicated stuff to clients on the fly instead of waiting for Zoom meetings to work through things that can’t really be written in an email. I’m also planning to start using this for the course I plan to put in Spayee and a couple of tutorials that I will be recording for the launch of my Divi Themes.
For $8 a month, it’s a bargain and a no brainer if you need to make quick screen recordings for clients or are using a course platform that requires videos to be hosted elsewhere.
★ Otter.ai – I recently turned a client’s PLT (Paid Live Training) into a course by splitting up the 90-minute training into 7 smaller videos then I used Otter to transcribe them to pull out key points to put alongside the videos. It’s brilliant because it does a ton of leg work for you but I will say that you still have to comb through and make the transcription easy to read and digestible. It’s a hard job transcribing text but Otter cuts your time down massively so I highly recommend it. It’s perfect for creating show notes for podcasts, turning live videos into blog posts and expanding course content from the videos.
★ Dubsado – Dudsado came back into my life recently after I decided that 17hats just wasn’t for me anymore and wow… I honestly don’t even know why I left anymore. It just makes VA life so much easier.
I now have automated invoices, decent canned emails and my workflow for onboarding gets everyone on the right page so much faster. Let me know if you want to see what that looks like and I will ping over a screenshot.
I have also recently set up my VA retainer referral programme so that my clients and friends can recommend me and earn either 10% of the first 3 invoices of the person they referred or if they are a current client a discount on their next 3 invoices with me. It feels so good to have finally boxed that off.
We all know that our inboxes can get a bit overwhelming and so I wanted to make my ‘lead follow up’ to-do, a task that I didn’t need to drop into my inbox to be reminded of so my current favourite Zap is: Trigger = New Lead in Dubsado. Action = add to Asana as a task for the following day. Which then pops up on my phone as a notification the following morning. You can copy the Zap and use it yourself here.
Other stuff:
★ I just joined a new membership (I might also be joining another soon too – Maybe in Sept when my little girl starts nursery 🤔) and I have also added a group programme to my schedule, so I might give you a bit of insight into those on my next email. They are both low cost too which has me intrigued…
★ I’ve finally created an Everything page (Thank you, Elizabeth Goddard!) Have a nosy here and please send me a link to yours if you have one. I would love to find out more about what you do and maybe dig around and check out your systems and stuff 😉🤓
Anyway, that’s me done. I could talk all day about tech and systems for business so I’m giving this series a name: ‘Gem’s Techy Spotlight’ to match the blog posts I started a few months ago.
