6 tools that save me time every day in my business

IMPORTANT: THIS TRANSCRIPT IS AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED. WE GIVE IT A QUICK CHECK THROUGH BUT WE DON’T CORRECT EVERYTHING AS IT’S INTENDED TO HELP YOU FIND PARTS YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO AGAIN - NOT AS AN EXACT TRANSCRIPT. SO THERE MIGHT BE A FEW QUIRKY WORDS/PHRASES HERE!

:: 00:02

There are so many amazing tools out there that will save you time in your online business and also help improve your workflow. I'm Janet Murray, I'm a content and online business strategist. And in this episode of the courageous content podcast, I'm going to share six of my favorite tools. Now, before we get stuck in a few disclaimers. So first off, most of these apps or tools have some kind of free trial,

:: 00:30

but any pricing that I do share will be true to the best of my knowledge at the time of this podcast recording. And that's June, 2022. I'd include links to all of these tools. And if I am an affiliate for that particular product, then I will make that very clear in the show notes, along with the link, but just to be upfront,

:: 00:49

I only ever recommend products or services that I absolutely know and love. So let's get stuck in here's six tools that save me time in my business every single day. So first off there's cap wing, I use Kaplan for video creation and editing social media videos in particular, although you can use it for editing any type of video. My favorite feature is the captions tool.

:: 01:14

It's the best tool that I found for adding captions to videos, which I think is really, really important for accessibility, but also because a lot of people tend to be watching social media videos on their phone with the sound down. It's also easy to add backgrounds you've created in canvas to make your social media videos look visually pleasing. And there's now a small library of music as well.

:: 01:37

And that's copyright copyright-free some of my favorite features and there are many include the resizing feature. So if you create, for example, a video for Instagram reels, you can easily resize that for Twitter or Facebook in a couple of clicks, the flipping tool, which I recently discovered. So you might record a video whereby you're holding up some kind of document and because you've recorded it in the sort of selfie mode,

:: 02:03

all the letters are the wrong way. Round with one click, you can flip that video around. It's so clever. Another feature I really like is being able to upload your own fonts for captions. Cause I'm quite fussy about captions. There's so much more I could tell you about Kaplan. So many other amazing tools, but you can get started from about $16 a month.

:: 02:23

And as with most of these tools, I think there is a free trial next up there's e-comm live. So I use e-com for hosting virtual events, including my annual concept planning event, courageous content live. We had to host it online for the past few years. If you came to that event, you'll know it was super professional, like TV show quality,

:: 02:41

and also my annual Christmas market. What I love about e-com is you can create different scenes and backgrounds. You can add captions and comments onto the screen live, make it really interactive. You can put people's names up on the screen and their titles, and you can bring in prerecorded video and a whole host of other clever staff and actually bring him pre recorded video.

:: 03:03

When we run virtual events, one of the things we ask all of our speakers to do is to create a backup recording of that video, because you just never know what's going to happen with tech. And actually a couple of years back when courageous content live was online because of COVID one of our speakers, Steve Dotto, not sure what happens. We did our test run or practice run.

:: 03:25

Everything went smoothly. But when we went to bring him in, there was a glitch with his internet. And so we had to use the backup recording, which was amazing. It was so slick that people thought we'd done it deliberately to show how organized we were. We hadn't, but Ecamm live makes that really easy. There are also loads of cool ways that presenters can use Ecamm with tools like zoom.

:: 03:47

And you'll be able to hear more about that if you're coming along to my courageous content live event in November. So it's happening on the first and second in Newcastle, there will be a virtual version of that, and tickets will be going on sale near it to the event. Ecamm is our lead sponsor for the event, which I'm really excited to share.

:: 04:05

And the econ team will be leading a workshop on repurposing and batching your content. And we're also hoping there'll be able to share more about how you can use it with tools like SIEM, so that you can really up your game on webinars and live classes that you're running quick note on e-com it is only compatible with Macs. If you have a PC, a similar type of tool is restrained.

:: 04:28

You can get started with e-com for about $16 a month, next up there's Zapier or Zapier. And that's a tool you can use for tech integrations. Fabian is a tool we use to help the various apps and tools that we use in my business. Talk to each other. So for example, we use a zap and that's basically what they call it when you integrate two or more apps together using Zapier.

:: 04:52

Yeah, so we use a zap to link our chat bot to our email marketing provider active campaign. And that means we can effectively tag customers who purchase a digital product by the messenger bot. They get attack in active campaign, which is our email provider. And that's what allows us to deliver that digital product to them. And any follow up emails, another example for you.

:: 05:15

So when I created my courageous content kits, I wanted my clients to be able to listen to the audio training that goes with it on the go and not just inside a membership site. And I wanted people to be able to listen via their usual podcast app on their phone or tablet, wherever they usually listen. But my private podcasts are hosted on captain eight,

:: 05:34

which is also where I host this podcast and more on that later. So we've used a zap to connect active campaign, email marketing provider with captain or podcast host. So when somebody buys one of my courageous content kits, they automatically get sent the email to subscribe to the captivate private podcasts it's really cover. And there's a whole ton of clever stuff that you can do.

:: 05:56

Like, and by the way, if you're listening to this thinking, oh, this all sounds a bit tacky. I am not a techie person. And I have set up zaps. All of the things that I'm talking to you about here, I have set up myself in the past. Now I have a team of people to help me, but I have done all of them myself and could do all of them if needed.

:: 06:15

And I'm certainly no techie expert pricing is APR. It starts at about $16 80 a month, I think at the moment next up there's active campaign. So we use active campaign for email marketing and automation and what that means amongst other things. There's many, many things this can do for you. We can automate sequences of sales emails. So for example,

:: 06:35

as I'm recording this, I've got a webinar happening today. And we were able to automate all of our promo emails for my free webinar. But of course you can also do that for paid products or services. We also use it to automate the delivery of email lead magnets and follow-up emails and nurture sequences. And again, using the example of the webinar,

:: 06:53

we can automate the reminders for the webinar, all of which can increase your show up rates. And the more people you get to show up on a webinar, the more effective that webinar is likely to be in terms of sales. And there are many other features that we can use to increase sales and conversions, including looked not booked emails. So if you're on my email list and you've ever clicked on one of my products or services,

:: 07:13

you may know that you get an email from me at some point that says, I noticed that you've been checking out whatever it was and invites you to share many questions or to say, if there's any information that you might need, or sometimes the reason why you haven't bought that's really helpful today. And all of that can be automated with tools like active campaign.

:: 07:33

So it literally can be happening while you're asleep or while you're on holiday. We also automate the delivery of digital products. We send reminders to clients about live classes, reminders, events in my membership. So it can save you a lot of time and pricing for active campaign starts at about $29 a month. Interesting note here is that until last year, I think it was,

:: 07:53

we were using Infusionsoft and that's not actually now known as keep. The reason we switched because Infusionsoft is amazing is because I felt as the business owner that I didn't want to be using a tool that I couldn't use myself if needed. So I was fine with Infusionsoft in terms of sending broadcast emails. I was fine with looking up customer records and seeing what people have bought and all that kind of stuff.

:: 08:20

But when it came to building out campaigns, Infusionsoft is quite a specialist tool or keep it's called now. And I had built campaigns before, but to be honest, not a great use of my time as a business owner, but it's quite complicated and it is very easy to mess something up. We had a situation last year when a key team member who looks after Infusionsoft was taking air quite suddenly and finding somebody to jump in and sort your Infusionsoft or keep campaigns is not only hard because there's not that many specialists about,

:: 08:54

but they have this certification thing where people can pay a lot of money. I think it is to get this certification and then charge ridiculous amounts of money per hour for consultancy when that's not actually what you need, you might just need somebody to dive in and do the technical part. And this really brought home to me, something that I had been thinking about for quite a few years,

:: 09:15

that you need backup plans, you need contingency plans. And by the way, I have a great episode on this with Diane Mayer, which I'll link to in the show notes about creating contingency plans in your business. But it's much easier to find someone who's specialists in active campaign, if your key person isn't available. And also it's much easier I think to use as the business owner,

:: 09:36

if you do want to do it yourself now, there are plenty of other similar email marketing providers convert kit. MailerLite, I've heard good things about those, but I can't speak from personal experience when I have used MailerLite, but not for quite some time. And a lot of it is down to personal preference, like how you get on with how it looks inside and how intuitive it feels for you.

:: 09:57

It's quite personal. Same goes actually for podcast hosts, say I'm going to be volunteer captivate. Now I use captivate to host this podcast, the courageous content podcast, and also the audio training that goes alongside my content kits. So I actually know mark Asquith. Who's one of the founders of captivate. And what I think comes across really strongly with this tool is that it's created by podcasts as for podcasts is the kind of things that come to mind are reusable show notes,

:: 10:26

templates. So if you find it in your podcast, show notes that you're often sharing the same links as we are. You can set up a template. So you don't have to input that every single time. You can almost say adds calls to action on your podcast. Player, say links to your products or services, for example, or a key lead magnet.

:: 10:44

They also have a shareable podcast website, which you can use to direct people to the various places that they can listen to all the different apps that they can listen as well. Easy to customize that and add your own branding. There's also a guest booking feature to make it easier for you to book guests in for podcast interviews. I haven't used that feature myself,

:: 11:01

but it looks really good. And there's a new integration I'm really excited about with descript. So that's an audio and editing tool. And I was introduced to that recently by Ian Anderson gray he's our live event producer for greatest content live, live video expert, and you can edit your audio inside descripts and you can also mark up any cuts or changes for an editor that you might be working with and generate transcripts as well.

:: 11:29

So really keeping an eye on that because I think that's going to be so useful. And I was sent the other day, I noticed a free month to try descripts paid version. I've got the free version at the moment. Another thing about captivate is it's really nice looking and it's a real smooth experience when you're using the app. And if you are a podcaster and you've used another podcasting platform,

:: 11:52

I think you'll know what I mean. Some of them can be really clunky. They can be really difficult to use, like, say for example, if you're trying to find out how many people have been listening to your particular episode or in a particular country or on a particular type of device or whatever, it can be really clunky and difficult to find that information.

:: 12:10

And captivate is just really easy to use at one of my favorite features on the analytics, by the way, is a podcast comparison tools that you can actually set up Searchie is where you can look at which of your podcasts performed the best in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days or whatever. And that can be really helpful in terms of helping you plan your content forward and knowing what content is really hitting the spot with your audience and help you to see which podcast titles are working the best,

:: 12:39

that kind of thing. So there's so much more I could say about that, but it really is a great tool. Finally, there's a Searchie. So we use Searchie for video hosting and transcriptions. Now up until recently, we mainly used Wistia for video hosting and a little bit of Vimeo, but not only did it start to get really expensive because with Wistia,

:: 12:56

you pay per video. And I had a lot of videos going back to, I think, 2015, but getting captions onto videos was a challenge. So you had to order your captions from somewhere like rev. So you pay a few dollars for that and much more actually, if it was videos for a membership site or for a digital product, and then you'd have to upload them and you could do it,

:: 13:17

or you can do it inside Wistia, but it costs more to do that. And again, if you're creating a lot of videos for something like a membership site or an online course, then that can quickly add up in terms of cost. What Searchie does is it automatically generates a transcript and captions for any video that you upload, which is just perfect for course,

:: 13:37

creators, but also for coaches and consultants. So for example, when I do a one-to-one or when I'm doing group coaching, I can send my clients a recording of our zoom calls and say, you don't have to listen to the whole video. You can just use the little search tool to find the key word or phrase the bit where you think, oh,

:: 13:54

what did she say there? And go straight to it rather than having to listen to the whole thing back, which is invaluable, I think, and also great for membership content and online courses as well. Searchie it also has great integrations. So you can link it with your zoom account, for example. So every time you do a zoom call, it's automatically uploaded to Searchie,

:: 14:14

which is a great improvement to your workflow. It's uploaded, you've already got your captions and your transcript. So that saves you time. And you can also create playlists of videos, which can be handy again for memberships online courses. And I've also used it to get captions for my podcast to upload those to captivate. But actually I'm hoping that the script might make that easier for us going forward.

:: 14:39

Searchie is also starting to test hubs that will allow you to sell digital products straight from Searchie. So effectively it will become like a course hosting platform that looks to me like it's quite early, but it's quite exciting because you can host your learning in there and also actually sell it from there. Or it certainly looks to me, but that's where it's heading.

:: 14:59

And you can get started with Searchie from $29 a month. I'm not sure if I said the price for captivate, but a $19 a month. And I do have an affiliate link for captivate. So just to be upfront about that. So have you found that useful? I could talk about this stuff for hours. And as I say, I'm not a techie person at all,

:: 15:15

but I do like making my life easier and I do like increasing sales and all of these tools. Ultimately what it comes down to is they are helping you to deliver a better standard of customer service in those cases, to get your products or services in front of people, to help your customers have a better experience, but also helping to increase conversions. Ultimately,

:: 15:40

these are all tools that are going to help you to make more money in your business, further down the line, or stop wasting money. So they are all super valuable. I hope to follow up with a few more episodes like this because I've only really scratched the surface with the tools that I use. There's definitely at least one more episode here, but I hope you found it helpful.

:: 15:58

And I would love to hear from you actually about the tools that you find useful in your business. Perhaps you found some alternatives to some of the apps or tools that I've talked about here. And the best place to connect with me is on Instagram. I'm at Jan Murray UK.