Automating Writing Tasks Can Free Up Hours Each Day

Automating writing tasks is essential if a writer wants to get more done in a day. There are only so many hours, and with a huge workload getting the word out, automating routine tasks is a way to get more done.

As I market writing services, coloring books and book, I’ve found that I’m running out out of time in the day. I mean, there’s a LOT to get done if I want to build a tribe of engaged and interested followers and still provide useful information and book to those people.

You want to know what I have to do every single day?

• Create a writing related YouTube Video. This is getting faster as I become better at making videos, but it still requires time.
• Post a link to that video on Facebook and The Writing King facebook page, LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Like, Subscribe and comment on a dozen writing related videos on YouTube,.
• Listen to those videos while doing other things.
• Add a few of those videos to my resources page.
• Find half a dozen blogs related to writing, comment on them, and, if they are good articles, add them to my blogs resources page.
• Post videos and blogs to groups (within their rules) on Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Examine group topics from Facebook and LinkedIn for past day and comment on them as appropriate.

Add to that maintaining a schedule of publishing a book every week, attending networking and writing critique meetings, and working projects for clients, and, well, you can see that there is no time left in the day.

Important tasks such as building an email list, working on newer books, taking courses and so forth were dropping by the wayside. An email list is by far the most important thing, and there just hasn’t been time to deal with it.

I decided I had to automate and do it big time or the tidal wave of undone tasks would overwhelm me.

My Marketing Strategy is Based on Blog Articles and YouTube Videos

Blogging and Vlogging (Video Blogging) is the basis of my marketing strategy. I’m a writer, and because of that I love to write articles on my blogs that help people. This fits in nicely with building a following, since I offer information that people need and want.

I have four main blogs.

• The Writing King – Topics related to my books (daily article)
• Richard Lowe – Personal blog (occasional articles)
• Goodleaders – The conversations with Influencers site (1 podcast every couple of weeks)
• Richardlowe.Guru – My books

Each of those blogs (except for Richard Lowe) has an associated YouTube channel, Facebook page, and LinkedIn company page.

Each article and video gets shared all over the place, and needs to be shared now and in the future on a recurring basis.

Are you beginning to understand the overwhelm problem? Just think about how much work this is on a daily (5 days a week) basis.

Finding the Right Automation Products to Manage Social Media

My requirements for a social media management product are very simple. I need something that will let me define posts for the future, and I want them to recur. The only platform that supports recurring social media posts if Socialoomph.

What do I mean my recurring? I want to say, “post this once every other month forever.” It’s hard to believe that none of the other products, including the king of them all Hootsuite, doesn’t let you do this. For me, this is basic. I write a nice blog post, I want it to be posted forever to the various social media platforms.

I looked at a dozen social media automation tools, and unfortunately all of them are expensive, and all of them are lacking in something or other. However, all of them do the basics – let you post to social media on a schedule and help you manage your social media.

• Hootsuite – Super expensive and very complicated. I quickly realized I’d spend more time managing Hootsuite than I’d save.
• Tweetdeck – Basically for Twitter, which I’ve found is the least useful social media platform.
• AgoraPulse – Expensive and complicated
• Socialoomph – Difficult to set up, complicated, and limited (basically Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest). But it does support recurring posts.
• Buffer – Expensive and limited (I mean, only 100 posts? really?)

I looked at over a dozen more products and the features, costs, limitations and complexities have all merged together into a confused soup in my head.

After spending an entire day looking at all of the options, I decided:

Socialoomph – For my needs, this is by far the best option. It supports scheduling, finding followers on Twitter, posting to all my social media (FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Twitter). This runs a little less than $40 a month.

Zapier – This handle application lets you define triggers (something happens) and actions (do something.) It’s similar to IFTTT, except far more. Zapier is $20 a month. Why spend that money when Socialoomph will do most of the functions?

Also, SocialOomph can’t read a blog and create social media posts from the articles. Zapier does that nicely. Thus, when I publish a blog article or a YouTube video, it gets automatically posted by my Zapier workflow to Facebook, a Facebook page, A Facebook group, AND Twitter. That alone saved me an thirty minutes to an hour a day.

Note: IFTTT is an alternative to Zapier which is free of charge. I chose Zapier because it supports workflows such as “if this than do this and this and this and this.” IFTTT only supports “If this happens than do this.” If you are short on money, IFTTT can be made to work.

So the total cost for all three products is about $60 a month. But when the proper automation is set up, they will save me dozens of hours monthly.

What About Automation of the Mailing List?

I use aWeber for my mailing lists (I have several of them) because it’s inexpensive, has lots of built-in features, and integrates with just about everything.

Sending out regular emails to a mail list is vital to building a following, yet given everything else going on I just haven’t had time to deal with it.

With some reading of the aWeber documentation, I discovered a great feature: RSS campaigns. This means you create a campaign in aWeber and tell it to read an RSS feed. All WordPress blogs come with RSS feeds, and that works perfectly with aWeber.

It turned out to be amazingly simple to create a weekly email to my mailings lists (one for each blog) from the RSS feed. In less than an hour, the automation was set up. Now my mailing lists will get regular updates as I write articles on my blogs and I don’t have to worry about it.

So What is the Procedure for Automating Writing Tasks?

Now I have a standard procedure that I follow each day, and automation is a big help.

• Write a blog article for The Writing King.
• That will automatically get picked up by Zapier and posted to the appropriate media.
• Manually create a recurring post in SocialOomph for the article to post to social media every couple of months.
• Create a video for The Writing King
• Again, Zapier will let my social media know all about it.
• Manually create a recurring post in SocialOomph for the video to post to social media every couple of months.
• There’s no need to worry about the mailing list – that’s automatically created and sent out once a week.

Conclusions

Unfortunately, there is not one good automation tool out there that does everything. All of them have their value, and you’ll have to look at them to decide if they do what you need.

However, once you get the automation set up properly, you’ll find that regular tasks become routine.

The most important result for me, besides saving the time, was that I was forgetting to do a lot of this cross-posting. Now, it’s done for me and I don’t have to remember, or, more often, kick myself for not doing it at all.

I will be writing additional articles that delve deeper into each of the automation products and how they can be used to help a writer get more done.

References

Here are a few articles and books that may help you with marketing your books.

• Blog Promotionology – The Art & Science of Blog Promotion – Incredible book with lots of tips about how to promote your blog.
• 7 Steps To Automate, Schedule And Delegate Your Blogging
• The Top 10 Marketing Automation Blogs you Need to Read

Products Referenced in this article

• Buffer.com
• ifttt.com
• Mailchimp.com
• Socialoomph
• Zapier.com

Richard Lowe Jr

Richard is the Owner and Senior Writer for The Writing King, a bestselling author, and ghostwriter. He’s written and published 63 books, ghostwritten 40+ books, as well as hundreds of blog articles.