3 Tools to Boost Your Business and Productivity

Transcript

How much better would your life and your business be if you close more leads and get more done each and every day?

Hi I am Carmen Sognonvi, and in this video I am going to share with you three cool new tools that I discovered recently that have really helped me out in my life and in my business.

Now our martial arts school, Urban Martial Arts, only opens in the early afternoon and I have always been very conscious and very concerned that we were really missing out on possibly a lot of great opportunities of phone calls that were coming in, in the morning.

Obviously any time we got in we would return all messages and voicemails that we got right away but I felt like by not having a live person answering the phone in the morning we were really missing out.

And so I discovered this great service called Call Ruby. And they are a virtual receptionist service.

So basically what you do is forward your phone calls to them and then when you are not there to answer your phone they will actually pick up the phone as if they were one of your staff memebers and they will literally pick up and say “Hi thank you for calling Urban Martial Arts, how can I help you?”

Now what I love about this service is that it has really allowed us to maximize the leads we are already getting and I have been so amazed by the call volume that we are getting in the morning and we were just missing out on all of these leads.

Because one thing you have to understand is that a lot of people don’t like to leave voicemail and when they cannot reach a live person it basically makes them feel as if they have reached an abandoned business.

So by not having that option you are possibly missing out on a lot of leads you are already generating.

So that has made a great difference for our business and you should check them out at callruby.com.

Now one of the unfortunate side effects of being a business owner is that you tend to put your business first and your personal life last.

Which means there is a lots of little details that are just not getting done.

Now you probably have heard of traditional virtual assistance and in my humble opinion most of those are a total waste of money but that will be a topic for a different video.

But what I want to talk to about is a great service that I found recently called Fancy Hands.

And Fancy Hands is a virtual assistance service that is structured very differently. So basically the way it works is that you pay a monthly membership and depending on what level you have you get a certain number of tasks that you can use each month.

And those tasks can be anything from making a doctors appointment, researching something, transcribing a video.

They are very flexible with what they are able to do.

What I really appreciate is that the tasks is not considered deducted from your account until the whole thing is done.

So the task isn’t simply like hey I made this phone call and left a message so there you have used your one task for the month.

You do not get deducted until the task is actually completed.

There are so many stupid little things that I have been putting off doing for a long time that I’ve actually had Fancy Hands help me out with.

So definitely check them out at FancyHands.com.

Now social media is obviously very valuable to business but as you know it can also be a bit of a time suck.

So the next tool I want to tell you about really helps to streamline what you do online can automate a lot of things that would usually take you a lot of time to do manually.

And that tool is called IFTTT.

Which stands for If This Than That.

And you can find it at ifttt.com.

And basically what this tool allows you to do is connect the different social media accounts you have along with other different tools and services that you use and it basically allows them to talk to each other in automated ways that you can sync and configure how you want.

Just to give you some specific examples of how I use it, what I do is I have rules set up so that if I am reading a blog post in Google reader and I hit the star button and I star that post, it will automatically schedule a tweet of that blog post for me.

And at the same time it will automatically save it to my Evernote account.

Because obviously I found it valuable enough I may as well automatically save it.

So something used to take me a lot of copying and pasting and getting URL shortner and this and that and logging into twitter or one of my clients and doing all of this, now its literally one click of a button and it’s done.

And I also have a rule set up for YouTube.

So any time I add a YouTube video to my favorites it will do some of the similar things, it will create a tweet that goes out and it will also add it to my Evernote account.

So check it out IFTTT.com.

There is all kinds of cool formulas out there.

The ones I mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg.

There is really a lot you can do with this tool.

If you found this video useful I would encourage you to sign up to get e-mail updates from me.

You will get more great tips on how to run a successful local business along with some occasional special offers from me.

To get started all you have to do is fill out the form below since you’re already on my blog or if you’re watching this video elsewhere you can head over to carmensognonvi.com/newsletter and sign up there.

Thanks for watching and not love to hear about what tools you have discovered recently that are making your life easier.

So leave a comment below.

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