How to Build Systems for Your Business | Zapier

Want to scale your business? The first step is to develop systems and automate your processes. In this video, I'll provide a simple demo of how I used Zapier to automate posting new video content.

Transciption

0:00

One of the topics that is on every entrepreneurs mind is how do I scale my business. And the buzzword we consistently hear is to implement systems. Systems help us to scale our business and remove ourselves from redundant tasks. But how do we actually build out these systems? Well, I'm going to show you how by walking you through a simple example of how I use Zapier to develop systems and ultimately save time for when I create content. My name is Ariel Herrera with the analytics area channel, we bridge the gap between real estate and technology. Now, even though today's is not specifically real estate focused, it's going to help you to get into that mindset of building systems. Now, if you like this sort of content, then please subscribe to this channel as well like this video, so I know you want to see more like it. Alright, let's get started.

1:01

So what exactly are business systems? Well, here they're defined as what allows us to start building and growing our business by eliminating all those redundant tasks. So you can imagine, think about when you have to sit in a chair and you're going from application to application you're copying and you're pasting and you're doing the same task, you find yourself doing it at least one time per week. Well, this is actually really redundant because it's actually pulling you away by doing operational work, instead of actually maybe doing the front forward work such as getting more leads or clients. So what I use to solve this is Zapier. Zapier is a really neat tool. There's several like it that allow you to connect your different applications together. And one of the things that drew me to it is that you could do it without code. Now even though I'm a big Python geek, I do have a need to offload some of my projects over to a VA at some point down the road. And I don't want to worry about having to hire someone with the skills of being able to write code. So what exactly is a zap? Well Zapier does is that it automates different processes. So for example, it has right here type form. So whenever someone fills out a form, send a notification to a team. And they also can't have many more apps. If we go up here to explore, you could look at popular ways to use Zapier, we see it connects to social media. It's also really beneficial for marketing. And it connects to applications that I use like YouTube. So one of my biggest constraints that I had, which was what drew me to Zapier is saving time on creating content. Now I love creating content. However, the process of actually getting it on board takes a bit of time. And because it takes me time, I'm slower to create videos, especially the ones that I'm really passionate about, like the code alongs. So I actually built my own zap and I'll quickly show you what this looks like. So when you have a Zapier account, you're able to create some folders and in there you can have your own zaps, which are the flows of all these applications connecting what I wanted to do is automate a process of finishing a video and uploading it to different applications. So I started off with was creating a Google Forms which took me only about 10 minutes or so to do. The thought process is in the future after I finish a video I can have a VA follow this process. But as of right now I want to create the systems in place before that occurs. So I have here in my forms, who the assignor is so who is signer to make sure this video gets uploaded, which is myself as of right now what the episode title is published date, which this all comes into play later on when it's posted on social media. The YouTube video to upload thumbnails description if I have a guest will say if it's a podcast, it's going to follow a different flow. Now a lot of the stuff I was keeping in my head so I consistently had to go back and forth to update different things like maybe I forgot to add tags to a video. But now that's all in one place. And I have some required forms. Like if you see here tags has a red asterisk means that I can't continue on unless I fill this out. So this is a really good check for me alone just to make sure I go through all the steps. There's always more we could do in terms of automation. So now step into Zapier. This always starts off with a trigger and then it has actions afterwards. So the trigger itself is whenever there's a new response whenever I fill out this Google form because I have a new video to up Upload, it will then trigger the rest of follow. So I use a little bit of Python in order to format some of the items that are coming back from that form. Mostly just taking some dates and formatting it in a way that's a little bit more preferable, that can actually be done within Zapier, but it takes additional actions which the More Actions you have, the higher the cost could be down the line. Okay,

5:27

so now I have my action, I format my form. And then what I set is for Google Drive, because what happens is any attachments that you have in the form is going to be sent straight to your Google Drive. So I have an automatic action that goes to find the video, it automatically uploads the video to YouTube. And because in my form, I filled out a bunch of things like tags and the name of the video, what happens next is within here, I was able to specify, hey, in my form, grab where I am put in the title, and make sure that when you upload the video, the title is there. It's doing that it takes a description, tags, and so on. So this is automatically done, because it actually takes some time to upload a video to YouTube, then I also require to make sure I have a thumbnail, the thumbnail is those images that you see on top of the video that's also saved to Google Drive. When I do the form, it uploads and then it's instantly picked up. The reason why it's picked up is I use Hootsuite to send this out to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Because there's Hootsuite integration, I can actually have this whole piece automated. So again, going to set up action, we could see here I specify what social profiles I want to point towards, then what the text is going to be and what time it's going to be scheduled, then unfortunately for YouTube, there isn't a sophistication there where it can make the entire description in one spot. So I do have a template that I've created in Google Docs. And this automatically fills up the template. So I just clicked on there. And we could see the template now has information on the published date, each description links, guest names, and more. My previous process was had I had a Google Doc that I just kept cloning, and then editing, which is of course very manual. And it's something that I thought, well, it's only takes me an extra two, three minutes to do. But once you notice that you're doing is to three minute tasks repetitively, that's when you know you need to implement a system because you are opening yourself up for errors. And you're also limiting your time. Lastly, what I do is I actually do use Python in order to create tasks automatically in Asana. So there are some things that still need to be done. Because there are some limitations with Zapier in terms of what libraries they can have in Python, I actually create my own web app. So like an API, and I point towards it in order to send in some information and automatically create tasks. And Asana, which is a project manager tool. Next step is I send myself an email. So away, I'm aware that everything up to this point has been successfully uploaded. And if it's a podcast, which I recognize in the form over here, down here, I specify if I have a guest or not, usually if I have a guest, it is then a podcast. So I look for that. And if it's a podcast, I then create tasks in Asana of things to do for our podcast. So for example, I need to make sure the audio is clean. And I also need to go back to the person who was the guest and send them an email that the video has been edited and they can share on their page as well. last steps is I find the audio podcast. And then I also create the production file for it. So these were all steps that I was doing manually each and every time. And now this is just smoothly automated. So this is the real neat part of using a tool like Zapier to do automation. And what I want you to do is get into a mindset of starting to build frameworks. And the best way to start is just for one, maybe two weeks, write down all the tasks that you're doing on a notepad. And then every time you're doing it again, put a little line and see at the end of the one to two weeks Oh, this is a task that I'm doing eight times in total over a two week period that needs to be automated. I love to hear some of the systems that you've put in place, whether it's real estate specific or just in general for your business as well as the tools that you're using to. So please leave comments below. And thanks so much. For Watching

Transcribed by https://otter.ai