There comes a time in every entrepreneur’s life when you realize you simply can’t do it all yourself. 

When you start your business, you’re everything. But as your business grows, it becomes painfully obvious that trying to do everything is going to lead to:

• Frustration (when critical tasks don’t get done and deadlines are missed)
• Burn out (when you’re working yet another 12-hour day…but you started your business to get away from 12-hour days, right?)
• Overwhelm (when your to-do list gets longer and longer no matter what you do)

There are many ways to combat this business-growth hurdle, but one of the best ways to get more time back in your business is automation. Imagine a completely hands-off system that works for you even when you’re hanging out with your family or sleeping! 

But here’s an even better reason to automate: it lets you scale your business. Think about it, the less manual work you have to do, the more time you have to work on the money-making tasks such as networking and marketing. 

So what parts of your business can you automate? Almost everything!

Here are the four that I focus on in my business:

Traffic

There’s a time and place for using paid traffic, and if you’re new to business I don’t recommend using paid traffic until you’ve had success with organic marketing. Getting traffic is a common frustration for many nurse entrepreneurs, but it’s necessary for business. When I started my business, I struggled with trying to find the perfect way to market my business until I developed a content calendar and content repurposing plan. It took me a time to figure it out, but now I’ve finally found organic marketing strategies that work for me and it doesn’t feel like a ton of work.

Videos are my main form of content creation, and I repurpose my videos from TikTok, to Pinterest, to YouTube, to Facebook. It doesn’t take long, and I’ve gotten great organic reach for a little bit of work vs. spending thousands of dollars on ads that don’t convert well (ask me how I know this!). I write a few blog posts per month and in conjunction with the videos I create and the products I already have, I upload everything in Tailwind (Pinterest scheduler) and have 20-25 pins per day pinned on Pinterest automatically.  This process has gotten me thousands of organic visitors to my website without spending any money on ads! 

If you want to learn more about Pinterest and how to use it for your business to generate organic traffic, grab my Pinterest for Business Profit Planner.

Email Funnels

Let’s move on to what happens when a new subscriber joins your mailing list or buys a product from you.

Do they just sit in waiting on your list until you have time to send an email?

Add a little more email automation to capture more sales. 

While broadcast emails have their place—especially for time-sensitive promotions—make sure to also set up an autoresponder series to:

• Welcome new subscribers 
• Nurture buyers with regular emails to build up the know, like, and trust factor
• Make additional offers based on what someone has already purchased or shown an interest in

And the best thing? Once your autoresponder is set up, it will continue to work even when you’re not actively doing anything. 

Social Media 

While there are a lot of things in my own personal social media that involve manual creation and posting, a lot of it is automated. As I mentioned above, I use Tailwind for scheduling my daily pins. Another automation I have is that when I post a YouTube video, I set up a zap to automatically post to the ReNursing Edu Facebook page. The same thing happens when I publish a blog post. When I publish a blog, it automatically gets posted on my Facebook feed. You can set up tiny automations in any part of your business. If you haven’t checked out Zapier for automation, you should…it’s a lifesaver! Automate little things and save yourself hours of time each and every month. 

Communication Management

If you work with clients or have team members (contractors or full-time staff) then communication with them is important. Set up communication guidelines on how you’ll communicate for business projects. At ReNursing Edu, we use Slack for daily communications. Once per week we have a face-to-face Zoom meeting for any project updates. Slack is a great automation tool because you can set up workflow automations and connect different apps to Slack like Google Docs or set up a zap for anything that isn’t native to Slack.

There are dozens of options for automating every aspect of your business. You’ll find new and better tools to make everything run more smoothly as you grow. If you want to learn more about automating your business and learn other methods to help your business grow and scale, join Nurse Pivoter Academy – the only business membership for nurses who want to start, grow, and scale an online business. 

For now, implementing these four ideas alone will save you hours of time every month.