I’ve been on a little bit of a bender lately trying to get together lots of software that will hopefully help automate a lot of the things that I do.
I have four or five VAs that work for me overseas who do an amazing job but there’s even parts of coordinating them that could use some automation.
So here’s a list of a few of the things that I’ve bought mostly off AppSumo lately, which are really helping me to transform the way I work. The first one that I got was an email marketing program.
Most of us are encouraged to use MailChimp because it’s free and it’s a great tool, and that is all true.
But with a view to grow larger and with the need for a fully functioning automation and workflow engine, I bought vBout off AppSumo.
It wasn’t the only time they’ve been on AppSumo but I think business is going better and it might be the last time.
The cool thing about vBout is that I have a list that I’m growing on the website through a competition offer and also through quizzes on the website.
And as that grows, I then create automations in vBout that do some cool stuff. One of those things is driving or parsing people that have subscribed to a list through to a Facebook audience on Facebook for look-alike targeting later on.
I don’t actually run any Facebook advertising, but it’s good to know that if I do want to run an ad or a promotion or a competition for anything that I’m doing, that syncing that look-alike audience into Facebook means that I can do, targeting around people who look just like the people who like to visit my site.
This is automated of course. The other automation I have is sending them an email after they sign up and thanking them for being a part of the list.
I’ve also built up some other interesting automations. One of these I’ve now replaced with a different tool which I’ll talk about in a minute.
But in vBout I had created a flow that I would send to people doing requests for guest posts, and that would be an automation that I triggered through Zapier.
I no longer use Zapier and I’ll tell you more about that either in this post or in a later post. But if I had an email in my Gmail of someone requesting a guest post, all I would need to do is tag them with a tag.
And in this instance, I used the tag guest post. And that tag then automatically sent their details to vBout and put them into an automation workflow which sent out an email to them telling them the requirements and all the details and what they needed to adhere to if they did want to do a guest post.
The larger your site gets, the more guest post requests you’ll get. So this is a really good one for filtering through anybody that’s just looking for a cheap back link.
I don’t do a lot of guest posts or accept a lot of guest posts, but every now and again there is a real collaboration opportunity between two sites that I may not want to miss.
By streamlining this process I don’t have to reply to each individual guest post and I just hit that tag button in Gmail and it’s all taken care of via Zapier into vBout.
Another automation I had which was similar, was an automation to reach out to brands to request PR updates and any products that they might want us to review.
We get approached a lot by other brands who just automatically reach out to us. But from time to time, there’s specific brands I’d really like to get hold of their products and review.
So with this one, it was a separate list that tied into a workflow. And I would simply take any of the press and PR email addresses from the brand’s websites and drop them into the flow.
The negative of this is that I couldn’t customize each email flow automatically before it was sent. So, it was a relatively generic email, but it was well enough written and there were some responses.
I’m now not using this flow because I’ve moved onto a new tool I got on Saleshandy which has been really good. And Saleshandy allows me to do cold outreach emails and build up sequences.
There’s really not a lot of difference between doing it in Saleshandy and vBout. But for some reason, I just find it a little easier in Saleshandy and I’ve had a really good response rate.
It could be just that the emails I’ve written are very good. But I’ve written an entire sequence of four or five emails that continue to go out until a response is received, and usually this is received within the first one or two emails.
Another tool that I’ve bought to hopefully help me with targeting later on is Growmatik. This was another AppSumo purchase, and I haven’t really figured out how to leverage this best just yet.
I’m using a vBout popup for competition entry and subscription to the list.
Growmatik has a lot more micro-targeting opportunities in it, which I just haven’t time to explore it yet but will one day.
Growmatik has lots of potential and has a very simple interface.
So, if you’re looking for something that will do easy popups and targeted embedded forms and lots of other cool stuff, then it’s definitely worth checking out.
I’m a bit cheap and I don’t like to pay a lot for software. So, a couple of the analytics tools that I’ve purchased were Labrika and Plerdy.
Plerdy is a lot like an affordable Hotjar alternative which provides session recording, heat mapping and information about what your customers do while they’re on your site. It was an absolute steal because it is a very powerful piece of information.
So, if you do want to look at people and what they do when they’re on your site, then Plerdy is excellent for that. I believe you can also do little popup polls just like Hotjar if that interests you.
There’s lots of segmentation options of drilling down into the data and month-on-month they just keep making further improvements.
Labrika is more of an SEO analytics tool which helps me identify technical problems with the site and any opportunities that I should be aware of within the technical structure, and SEO functionality to ensure that I’m presenting search engines the very best possible site to assist with ranking.
These two tools are also very powerful but do require some digging to get into. Not all of these have the nicest user interface or user design, but they are very functional and can provide some automated reporting.
If you were running an agency, these would also be very good because you would be able to provide some automated client reports on what’s going on on the sites.
In terms of SEO keyword research, I bought Ranktracker on AppSumo a long time ago, a lower tier, and I just haven’t found it as easy to use as some of the other keyword tools that are available to me.
I have tried to stay faithful to it and dig into it, but it has been slow and the complexity of understanding the keyword research hasn’t always been straightforward.
I don’t think it’s a bad tool at all. I just don’t know if I bought enough units or tokens that allow me to research a number of keywords that I want to research.
It’s constantly on my list of to-dos. I have a reminder that pops up regularly saying “Set up Ranktracker properly.”
So, I will persevere with that one. But the keyword research tool I use that is both affordable and incredibly simple for both my YouTube research and my website research is Keysearch.
And Keysearch is a much more affordable version just for keyword research than something like Semrush or Ahrefs.
There’s no doubt that those other tools are incredibly powerful but they also come at a hefty price. And with a startup mindset, it’s hard to commit to those additional dollars each month.
I’m sure it’s worth it. But until I have the time or the resource to manage my own account, then I will stick with Keysearch which gives me a very good quick search, keyword difficulty and keyword search volume engine to quickly make decisions about what posts I should be writing about.
I actually have a VA who has access to Ahrefs and he is a wizard at finding low-competition keywords for me.
The final thing I wanna talk about and this is by no means the end of the list of software that I’ve purchased over the last couple of years especially on AppSumo.
But the last piece of lifetime-deal software that I bought was Pabbly. This was not through AppSumo and it cost me a fortune.
But it has done an amazing job of automating a lot of my workflow and a lot of the challenges I have as a solopreneur.
Pabbly is effectively a Zapier alternative and allows you to create automations between software that might not be possible any other way.
You can access the API basically between two tools and Pabbly will create the engine in the middle, to connect each API point. And it also handles webhooks really well.
The reason I upgraded to one of the higher tiers is because it also has an email parser. An email parser basically means you can send emails and if they’re structured in a similar format, you can extract data from that email.
Here’s an example. When a task in our ClickUp is marked as published, that Pabbly will then collect the information from ClickUp via email.
ClickUp will send an email to Pabbly to a specific assigned Pabbly email address.
Pabbly passes the data out of that email that I’ve told it that I want, and then Pabbly takes that information and posts it into a Google spreadsheet.
This is what I use to pay my content manager. So as a task in ClickUp is done, it’s added to the spreadsheet and it’s very easy for me at the end of the week to add up the hours and pay her.
I could use ClickUp time sheet tools, but you have to upgrade to a higher tier to get that. As I say, I like keeping it lean and cheap.
Another cool thing that Pabbly does for me is between vBout and MailChimp. I have an issue with the theme on my site, which means that the RSS feed doesn’t always register to show updates.
It’s an issue that I continue to work on, but in the short term, I really needed to keep sending out daily or biweekly emails from updated posts to subscribers. MailChimp can parse the RSS feed from the website correctly and so it takes it from Pabbly.
This automation says when a user joins vBout, via say the competition entry form, then reply to them with a thank-you explaining what happens next, add them to my Facebook audiences and then send the email address to MailChimp through Pabbly.
It’s just an example of how much you can automate and customize your business as a startup, and I’ll talk more about this as the journey goes for side million [SP].
So, if you have any questions or any challenges you’re facing, let me know and I’ll be sure and happy to help.
I’m gonna break down each of these tools and more in detail in future posts, but if you have any specific questions, I’m here.
Ask in the comments or contact me directly through the contact form.
Mark
