On New Year’s Eve, I wrote out a publishing schedule for the year. If I even do a tenth of what I have written down, then it will be my busiest year by far. And that is just my own projects. Client work is yet to be determined, as none of my customers have put their orders in for the next month or so yet, barring a few odd jobs.
The publishing schedule is a topic for another day.
If you are a freelance writer, then you need to think about automating stuff. Some of the technophobes will have shed a tear at that statement, but it’s true.
What about creating a cover template in photoshop so that you just slot in new stock photos when a new book is finished? That’s easier, but still pretty techy.
Luckily, there are some automation tips that are really easy.
One is emailing. You can get an email service that will allow you to send emails out to a schedule. This is great for marketing. I use aWeber, but Mailchimp is another popular service. Those are great.
But it can be even more low-tech than that.
Wen I started writing for freelance websites and got paid a penny a word, it occurred to me pretty quickly that if it took me five minutes to write an email saying, “Here is your work, hope you like it, let me know” then that was five minutes and a couple of hundred words I didn’t make any money on. When you are earning a cent a word, those things make a huge difference.
So I wrote an initial email quoting. I wrote an email delivering the work. I then realised I couldn’t send the same one template email over and over, so I wrote a series of about five different emails depending on how many times the person ordered from me.
It took about five minutes to write each of these emails, and the half an hour I spent on that process means I’ve saved probably a hundred hours or more in the long run.
That was low tech. I just have five wordpad documents on my desktop which I open when I am delivering an article.
The example above shows that whatever you’re doing, there are going to be elements which are repetitie, mundane and time-sapping. Those are the things you should automate.
There are a million programs out there to help you automate things like keyword research. You can also make your own programs with very little knowledge.
Here is an example of that:
IMacros is an extension for firefox or google chrome. It allows you to create “programs” by pressing a record button and then doing a task on your browser. Once you have done your repetitive task, you stop recording. You then press play, and the computer does the task for you again.
It’s easy. Within about five minutes you can use it to fulfill real world problems.
For instance, in my first five minutes, I created an email login program. When you write for lots of different sites, it is easy to get lost in all the different logins and emails you create. Logging into them manually is painful and some email clients will freeze email accounts if you don’t login regularly.
So I signed into one account. Then I logged out and signed into another. I did this while recording.
Now, I just press a play button and watch whilst the script zips through all my inboxes. I can quickly see if there’s anything that needs addressing when I see the inbox.
There are a million things you can do that make the processes you have to do easier or non-existent. You should look out for them when you can. I’ll go into more detail in later posts as I find new ways to do things.