If you currently have a business of your own or even a little website or blog empire, you likely already understand the demands of your attention and how fast a day just flies by. And when you start to factor in the many different facets of your business, such as your website, blog, content creation, marketing and social media… it’s amazing that any of us are actually getting anything done at all!
The good news is, there are plenty of tools, tips and solutions out there to help with productivity, automation and scheduling.
Today, we are going to take a look at some of the best solutions out there, why the are helpful and how to start implementing such tools and best practices into your daily life and work place. And if you are only to implement just one or two of these methods, and are able to save 5-10 minutes per day, that adds up to many hours of saved time and improved productivity over the course of a year!
Let’s get started!
Scheduling Tools for Business Owners that Manage Employees
For business owners (even ones that are working online), one of the hardest things to get comfortable with, is expanding and managing new team members. Whether they are virtual assistants, social media managers or individuals in a working environment, they all need to have schedules and a mindset that allows to work on what needs to get done on a daily basis.
A perfect example of a solution that is used by millions of business owners and team managers, is Zoomshift.
Through the use of this web-based platform, anyone can start building out their work schedule in minutes, while also reducing payroll costs, and simply having the necessary tools in place to make sure your team is always working and arriving on time.
In the world of online marketing and virtual teams, such a solution could prove valuable with any of the following members in place:
- CEO/Business Owner
- Project Managers
- Content Creators
- Social Media Team
- Virtual Assistants
- Sales and Outreach
No matter how big or small a team or agency might be, the benefits of using scheduling software to get more done is vast.
And as Tim Ferris has said in the past, “You need to know what your unique strengths are and be willing to delegate.” — and this is exactly why bloggers and online marketing need to focus on building a team around them to get more done.
Blog Content Writing and Scheduling Tips
WordPress has completely changed the face of the internet and how we all create content on it. Not only is the process of going live with a site extremely fast and easy, it’s also made the process of scheduling content and auto-posting a whole lot easier as well.
When it comes to scheduling content out in WordPress, that’s simple enough. Write a post, save and then select your publishing date.
The real problem often comes in the form of planning, patience and knowing when and how to promote your latest content.
For times like these, a simple blog post calendar can really help you understand what your content scheduling looks like, while also giving you time to prepare for promotions, site comments, user emails and social media engagement after your content goes live.
Hubspot has a nice free download for anyone to try out.
- How do you write an editorial calendar?
- Why do I need to fill out the information requested?
- How do I create a marketing calendar?
- Is there a calendar template in Google Docs?
- What is an editorial calendar for social media?
- How do I create a email marketing calendar?
And if you’ve been thinking about your options of whether it’s a better idea to stagger your content publishing, or releasing them all at once — it’s usually a better idea to focus on the quality of the content, releasing them over time and making sure they each receive the necessary amount of social promotion and backlinks from other relevant posts.
Automated SEO Reports and Competitor Analysis
For all businesses and brands on the internet, there is a massive need for search traffic and no matter how much you create, or how great your content is, it’s basically your site against the entire world when it comes to SEO.
Google only has a few free organic listings, and billions of websites are competing with each other to obtain those top rankings. And while this process isn’t much of a manual one anymore, there are SEO tracking and audit tools that can help speed up the process of your analysis and competitor research.
One of the most popular and fastest growing solutions out there is Zutrix.
By creating a free account on this platform, site owners can run full site audits on their own properties, while also bring able to track SEO rankings and results not just for their own sites, but also of their competitors as well. Through the use of these detailed reports and an easy to use interface, real-time notifications, charts, reports and Google rankings are always available.
Other notable solutions in this space are Ubersuggest, Ahrefs and SEMRush.
Social Media Scheduling and Automation Tools
Of the many different areas of the internet that suck up the most time, it has to be social media. With more than 3 billion active users spread across major social platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok… the amount of time absorbing content is just insane!
And while this is perfectly fine for anyone just sitting on their mobile device and looking to waste time, it’s not a good use of time for social media managers, content creators and business owners.
Instead, this time can be better spent scheduling out social media content and posting across multiple platforms, through the use of any of the recommended solutions below.
- Hootsuite
- HoneyBook
- Loomly
- SproutSocial
- MeetEdgar
Each of them are unique in their own way, but the common goal is to make it easy for users to schedule out their content and save time. In fact, by spending a few hours a week (or month) on scheduling, this can greatly improve your focus and productivity, as it will clear out a lot of wasted time that would be spent going live with content on different platforms manually on a daily basis.
And with social media scheduling in mind, also make sure you are posting content during the busiest times of the day.
How to Get the Most Productivity Out of Your Day
With so many different things on our plates every day, and new distractions popping up out of nowhere, it’s more important than ever to make sure you have structure, automation and scheduling in place.
In order to get more done, you need to delegate out the simple stuff and automate wherever possible.
The good news is, automation and scheduling software solutions are now more accessible and cost effective than ever before. With all of that being said, it’s now time for you to scan through the list again one more time, and see which of these tools and solutions can help you start saving more time, while also increasing productivity on a daily basis.
