by: Justin Brooke
Unfortunately, we’re only dealt 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, 4 weeks in a month, and 12 months in a year. That will never change, but we are constantly needing more time to scale our businesses. For instance if it takes us 1 hour to make $500 (everyone’s rates will vary) then to make $1,000 we need 2 hours right?
Thinking purely in a linear logical manner it would seem that you would then reach a glass ceiling since there is a finite amount of time. After all we still need time for meals, sleeping, and family.
However, as a smart entrepreneur you’ll start to realize the power of leverage. By harnessing the power of leverage you can turn a finite amount of time into an infinite amount of time.
For example, if you don’t have enough time to do your work… Get someone else to do it for a cheaper amount then what you would have made during that time. If I charge $500 an hour but can get someone else to do that work for $250. Then I have saved myself an hour to make another $500. Plus I still made $250 on top of paying for the other guy to do my work for me.
Now I’ve made $750 in one hour instead of $500! What if I had 5 people working for me? What if I only had to pay them $20 an hour instead of $250?
People aren’t the only things you can leverage. There are all kinds of tools and systems you can leverage to maximize your earnings per hour or per effort spent. Here are 5 tools I use to save time and maximize earnings
Canned Responses
A canned response is a pre-written response to commonly asked questions. As an information marketer who sells dozens of downloadable courses I’m constantly getting questions to my inbox. 80% of these questions are exactly the same though.
Things like, “I lost the download link” or “how do I find my password if I lost it.”
We pre-write the answers to these questions and then just copy/paste them into the email. This saves us the time of having to write these out every time. If we save 2-3 minutes 10 times per day then we’ve added an extra 20-30 minutes onto our day to do other more important tasks.
Depending on which email client you use you may or may not have this feature built in. I’m loving that Gmail just added this feature into the Gmail labs. If you are using Gmail just go into your settings at the top right of your user interface. Then click on the labs tab and you’ll find “canned responses” about half way down the list of add ons.
If you don’t have Gmail you may have to look around or do what we used too. We just kept a live running document of all the questions and answers to those questions that we were getting. This was great for when we hired someone to start doing our email support for us since they already had the answers to 80% of our emails.
Gmail has just made this really easy for us though. Now we can just load all our responses into their system and not have to keep another document open all day. You can ever setup a filter (which we talk about below) that will automatically send out canned responses based on a keyword found in the email!!!
To Do Lists
This one is one of the most common most heard about methods of saving time. Yet, SOOO many people aren’t doing it. The power of to do lists was best described to me by Kirt Christensen. Kirt says “Just like a computer with lots of programs open and starts running slow, so will your brain if you are constantly having to remember lots of tasks.”
When you create a to do list you are effectively closing out all the open programs in your brain. Which lets your brain run more clearly and faster because now everything is on a list and it doesn’t have to juggle all your thoughts at once. Now it can just focus 100% on the task at hand.
Not to mention how AWESOME it feels to cross a task off of a list.
There are tons of applications you can use for to do lists. Personally, I don’t have the organizational fortitude to keep up with software based to do lists. I’m more of a whiteboard/yellow note pad kind of guy when it comes to lists.
However, if you want some cool resources for to do lists then I suggest Gmail Labs again for the Gmail Tasks add-on. People using Outlook have had this feature for years but Gmail now has it also. If you want something a little more robust then that I highly recommend RememberTheMilk.com (also suggested by Kirt). RememberTheMilk has the capabilites to sync with your email and cellphone so you are always on top of your tasks.
Re-purposed Content
You’ve heard it a million times “Content Is King.” I’ve noticed that the amount of content I produce directly affects my traffic and income levels. That’s why I’m always trying to think of how I can use one piece of content for multiple pruposes.
Here’s a little system I shared with my mastermind buddies last weekend…
Step #1 = Do a live Ustream show about a popular topic (make sure to record)
Step #2 = While broadcasting turn on some sort of microphone to record your audio
Step #3 = Send your Audio out to iTunes and all the podcast directories
Step #4 = Send your Audio to CastingWords.com for quick/cheap transcribing
Step #5 = Embed your video broadcast and transcription into a blog post on your blog
Step #6 = Mass submit your transcription to the article directories
Step # 7 = Bundle all 3 versions of the content onto a squeeze page and build a list
Using those 7 steps I’m able to take the content I made in a 20 minute Ustream broadcast and massively redistribute it all over the web. This gets me a ton more backlinks, traffic, exposure, sales, and subscriptions.
Signatures
When I send out an email I have a pre-written marketing message that follows along at the bottom of every one of my emails. This includes links to my websites and even a signup link to my affiliate program.
In Gmail you can set it up in your settings so that this signature will be automatically posted to every email. And I just found out that you can do this with your autoresponders and broadcasts if you’re using Aweber like we do.
Using the {!Signature) tag you can add a pre-written signature to the bottom of every email you send out to your subscribers. I was doing this manually for awhile and saw a 30% increase in the amount of income each email was bringing in.
I just added a signature that said “Recommended Readings” and then added affiliate links to my favorite reports and books on Amazon. I would make 2-3 sales per email I sent out in addition to the normal promotions in my email. Plus, this is a soft sell and doesn’t piss off your subscribers like a hard sell would.
Filters
This is a little more advanced in regards to email clients. Just about every email client I can think of and have ever used has this feature though. Basically, a filter creates a “rule” for your inbox. Then your inbox watches for signs of this “rule” and implements the action you told it to everytime it see’s the “rule” happening.
For example I hate getting those notification of payments received emails from Paypal (I used to LOVE seeing them) but now they come in so often that it’s cumbersome to keep removing them. That’s why I used a filter to create a rule that told my inbox if it ever see’s those emails to just automatically place them in their corresponding folder.
Now I never have to see them even though they are coming in all day long. They just get filed to their correct folder automatically. You can ever set these up to auto-reply to certain emails. There is a lot you can do with filters especially with Gmail’s new canned response feature. I hope you’ll check it out and get creative.
Wrap Up
If you’ll implement those 5 tips into your business I can promise you’ll see drastic changes in time efficiency and maximized revenue. None of them are all that hard to implement either. Just takes a little discipline and they almost run themselves.
Do you have any time saving tips for us?
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