I have a confession to make, and it's not going to surprise anybody.
I am really, really bad at social media. I kind of hate it. I hate that I need to like game algorithm. I hate that I need to format my LinkedIn posts to essentially force engagement. But my friend Chenell Basilio, who has the Growth in Reverse podcast, which I would strongly recommend, shared a strategy I really liked and it was basically, you know, ask a question and then ask a question that requires a personalized answer for each commenter and then share a solution and plug your mailing list.
Now, I will say I did a very bad job at plugging the mailing list. I was so focused on solving the problem, which is like a whole other thing that I need to talk through at another point. But, I posted what's one repetitive task eating your time? Comment below and I'll share how to automate it.
So, I'm going to go through all of these comments and kind of talk through the solutions. I will link this LinkedIn post in the show notes. I plan on doing this again very soon. So if you haven't, you know, if you want to have an answer to a question like this, you can either write in at streamlinedfeedback.com or you can follow me on LinkedIn, and I'll post that very soon.
Now, I will say I did get some nice feedback from Elizabeth Howell on a recent episode, so I want to give her a shout-out really quick. Elizabeth said now she recommends Corey Koehler who was on the show recently. So she said.
“Loved this episode. I loved the specific examples and use cases for different AI platforms. Every time I learned how someone else is specifically using an AI platform, I gain a bit more confidence around trying out different strategies myself. This was a super helpful episode”.
So, thank you, Elizabeth Howell, for both recommending Corey and for the nice feedback. I will say over on my newsletter, I have been talking more about how I'm trying to use AI even though I am AI hesitant. And so if you are interested in that, you can sign up over at streamlined.fm/join. You can join the mailing list over there. So, okay. Let's get into this.
What's one repetitive task eating up your time? The first comment came from my good friend Alex Sanfilippo. He said,
“Today, we started posting reels, shorts, and videos on TikTok. I'd love to just schedule all of them and have it done for the next 90 days like everything else we do with our podcast episodes. It looks like they have built-in schedulers. Any advice or thoughts?”
I definitely like the idea of using a built-in scheduler because I feel, though there's no hard evidence, that your reach is limited with third-party schedulers. That said, you could probably really automate things with Zapier.
And here's the automation that I recommended.
Keep a Notion or Google Sheet a Notion or Google Doc with the video name, text, hashtags, and publish date.
When a row is updated, Trigger Zapier to grab the info.
Have Zapier schedule posts using Buffer or another social media app.
Similarly, there might be a way to do all of that via RSS feeds, though I'd need to think through that, and the trigger there would be a new item in the RSS feed.
The problem is that Zapier can grab videos from like a Dropbox or Google Drive link. So if you're uploading to say TikTok or Instagram, you can do that. Right now, with podcast RSS feeds, there's no video tag in the RSS feed, so you'd still need to do something separately.
So he said, “ Super helpful. ”
But this is, you know, this is something that I've considered for a while. I have an automation that will take video scripts and break them into, you know, links like social media posts that sound like me, and I'm very specific about making the content for that platform.
Now, I am recording from the Karma Studio here at Kit Studios in Boise, and I'm here for Craft and Commerce. And Nathan Barry spoke at another event that I was part of, Jay Clouse's The Lab Offline. And his repeated advice that I've heard plenty of times before, but hearing him say it hit differently.
He said, “Pick a single platform and do it well.”
And so I think this is what I would, this is what I will consider doing again. I hate social media, but I think, you know, I want to pick LinkedIn and do it really well. And so for me, if LinkedIn has the direct Zapier integration or Buffer, that's how I would do it. Kind of schedule everything within Notion, send it to Buffer or Publer via Zapier, and hope for the best with those schedulers, basically.
My friend Vin Thomas said, “Dishes! If you can help with that, I'll be impressed.”
Look, I have a dishwasher, so that's automated. Loading the dishwasher, that's a different story. I'll have a nine-year-old next year, so I think she'll be able to load the dishwasher.
Talica, I think Talica Davies, I think I'm saying that right, said, “Making my kids lunch”, which I thought was really funny. We did have a further conversation. I said, so much of my brain power goes to this in the morning. How do I pack a lunch for my kids that's different enough from yesterday that they don't eat the same thing while being similar enough that they'll actually eat it?
And something that we're going to try for next year, right? Two of my, or two or three of my kids, we'll be able to get hot lunch next year. And so hot lunch will help. But I think like I'm just gonna keep an Apple note that my wife and I share and we're just going to say hey, Mondays is… this Tuesdays is… this instead of trying to figure it out because like we worry that our kids are gonna get sick of this food, but if they really like it, they probably won't.
Now, she also said, she said, “but also anything email related or a summary of weekly client calls. Fathom helps me with that now.”
So, I said for email, another person, Matthew Campbell, asked about this as well, and I made some recommendations. I linked in a comment. So I'll jump out to that in a minute.
But I said for summaries of clients' calls, I'm working on, I was working on that now. And so ideally transcripts of Zoom calls will be saved into a Dropbox folder that I can ship off to ChatGPT. I am not fully doing that yet because the app I use to transcribe Zoom calls doesn't have that automation. But I do get the transcript, and I upload it to ChatGPT with a custom prompt.
And this is what I've done.
I've set up a custom project for different types of calls, so discovery calls, coaching calls, et cetera.
And then I have like pretty in-depth prompts for each of those things. So this is something that's kind of always in flux.
But eventually, I suspect I'll be able to automatically send the transcript over to Zapier, get the prompts, and get everything I need back into a Notion document or something like that.
This is in the same thread. So Matthew Campbell asked about checking emails, and I said,
“So I have a blog post. I'll link this in the show notes too. I use a combo of Sanebox and Todoist to organize my emails. And then I also have like so for certain emails I have Zapier watching my email inbox for certain emails sent either by subject or sender, reading those emails for certain keywords, and then processing them.”
This is something I'm really working on. I wanted to get more sophisticated with LLMs, but I really haven't. I haven't jumped into that yet. It's probably something I'll do on a live stream. So, subscribe to my YouTube channel.
But this is a really interesting one because I think like Sanebox and Todoist keep my inbox light. But as far as automatically reading my emails, there's some context checking I want to do right now. I heavily use filters, but I think LLMs will allow me to be a little bit more sophisticated than something I'm doing now. Not as sophisticated as me reading the email, but a little bit more sophisticated than what I'm doing now.
Adam Walker asks, “Finding guests for one of my client's projects or podcasts. What do you got?”
Okay. So, I said my first recommendation is PodMatch. It will surface guests for you. That's like a dating site for podcast guests and hosts. Shout out to my friend Alex Sanfilippo again, but a couple of other thoughts. An intake form for people to self-select. I currently have this for my, you can go to streamlined.fm/apply, and then I have my VA and ChatGPT do some initial research.
Now, I talked about this in the blog post I wrote, more recent than this LinkedIn post called My Brown M&MS, and I have a very specific ask on that form. And so if they don't answer that question, then it's easy. I filter out and automatically reject them. If they do answer that question, then my VA does the initial research, and I take that and do some deep research with ChatGPT.
Google alerts for titles or other keywords to serve as experts in your client space. Podscan, which is essentially the same thing as Google Alerts, except PodScan will also alert you of, in podcast mentions, so you can find people willing to do podcast guesting.
So, like if there's a certain subject you're looking for or a certain niche or a certain type of guest, you can put it into PodScan. That's podscan.fm. And if you know, if that surfaces, if that subject surfaces for you, you can see the person talking about it and reach out to them.
And then you know, this is again something I'm thinking about doing with ChatGPT, but run a zap that asks ChatGPT or some AI search to find guests every month, or what books in the client's niche are coming out.
And I think that's a really interesting one. Again, like, you know, as I record this, I'm in the summer, there's a lot of travel, the kids are out of school. But my live streams are going to focus around, you know, building more AI agents, I think, and I think that's a really interesting one.
Okay. Dylan Redekop. Dylan, I'm sorry if that's, if I'm saying your name incorrectly. He said,
“Reviewing our podcast episodes and creating YouTube chapters manually for the YouTube description.” I've tried AI, but it kind of sucks at getting the timing right. I said, yeah. This one is tough. For the reasons you mentioned, AI is not actually good at detecting chapter markers.
What I do is I record an ECAMM Live, and one of my Stream deck buttons is, It's built into ECAMM Live. It's called the marker button. And so I can press that button and it'll create a timestamp. It'll also make an alert box where I can type in a quick note.
And so I'll usually push that button when I'm recording, since his episodes are edited as are mine, you know, I write down what I say at the beginning of the chapter and find it in the transcript. So like, you know, I'll take the edited episode and then I will, in my notes, I'll say like, chapter starts, at you know what I say, blah, blah, blah. I'll search for blah, blah, blah and find the timestamp there. It's not perfectly automated, but it is a lot easier and it comes in handy, especially like if you are doing segmented shows. Like, the button on the stream deck is great. I know that there are shortcuts that can do that too, and I've been messing around with those as well. But I haven't gotten them to a point that I really like yet, or at least not one that is something I can make available, because I'm using like a pretty specific app.
Carol Brouwer says social media posts are also a repetitive source of procrastination. I said, okay, this is great. Something I do. So I do talk through this in another episode of the Streamlined Solopreneur.
I record a video or audio.
I put the file in Dropbox. Zapier watches that Dropbox folder, sends the audio to be transcribed and processed via ChatGPT.
ChatGPT creates the posts and sends them to Notion.
And then I set aside time each week to schedule out the posts. And I link to that episode, and I link to it on YouTube. So there's a little show-and-tell feature.
My friend Mick said, “Fatherhood”. I said, I suspect if I could answer that, I'd be very wealthy.
So those are all the questions that came through. I hope you found this helpful. If you have a question about automation, you could always write in anytime at streamlinedfeedback.com. That’s streamlined with a “D” feedback.com. Also, follow me on LinkedIn and YouTube. I'll have those in the show notes and in the description because I will post this question again.
And if you tune into the live streams, you could always ask me in real time there as well. So let me know what are you struggling to automate? streamlinedfeedback.com.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time. I hope you find some space in your week.