Some things in your music career can be automated. If you’re reluctant to give something up, and it still needs to be done, there is the chance that automation could work for you.
One of the most immediate examples of automation is social media scheduling tools. Everyone knows that creating posts takes time. Then comes the actual posting, sharing, responding to comments, and so on.
Not all of it can be automated, but aspects of it can be. With the introduction of tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, everyone started planning their posts well in advance of them ever going up on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Spend an hour or two per month writing and scheduling posts, and you wouldn’t need to fill your queue again until the next month.
Then along came more advanced tools like Meet Edgar that would store all your content in a library and automatically publish based on the schedule you set up.
All these tools require human input, but overall, they make the process of maintaining a social media presence more streamlined. That’s the essence of automation. But there are automation tools for a variety of purposes.
With an increased focus on integration, resources like IFTTT and Zapier started emerging. These allow you to integrate various services (that are otherwise incompatible) with your devices.
With IFTTT, you can do things like:
- Set your phone’s wallpaper as NASA’s Image of the Day
- Tweet your Instagram photos
- Post a tweet using your voice
- Add YouTube videos you like to a Spotify playlist
- And much more
And once set up, all these actions happen automatically.
Automation can take many forms, and we could be here all day exploring different examples. The point is that software solutions exist for a variety of career and business applications. They often cost something, but they improve your life by giving you your time back. And that’s great news when it comes to boring, monotonous tasks that just eat away at your precious time.
With Music Entrepreneur HQ, initially, we invested most heavily in social media automation. This helped us get our content out to more destinations, increasing our traffic in the process.
These days, we spend more on tools that help us grow our email list, build sales funnels, host our courses, and the like. It’s better to have comprehensive, integrated solutions for these types of functions versus trying to glue together various free and low-cost solutions. Trust me – we tried it.
Again, automation doesn’t necessarily help you take tasks completely off your plate. But they can help you save a lot of time and money. And that’s often worth the cost.
