IFTTT & Zapier: Automate Everything on the Internet
When you automate the mundane you gain the ability to focus on what really matters to your clients.
Let’s talk about IFTTT
IFTTT is an acronym for “If This, Then That” It’s the relationship that all automation software uses. It literally works like that, but on a way more technical level of course. When connecting two different software together you are essentially filling in those pieces of the statement. You are saying things like “If George drinks a venti red-eye americano with an extra shot then send him to the bathroom immediately after the 3rd sip”.
IFTTT is a great way to get used to creating these types of IF statement triggers and actions. I consider them the easiest-to-learn automation platform available on the market. I heard about them after I was already using Zapier, and I was able to dive right in because I understood how these relationships worked. IFTTT and Zapier are almost the same and I would consider them friends rather than rivals. IFTTT has a lot more personal and none business-related functions that you can use so it’s a great place to start and not involve your clients from the jump. I use IFTTT a lot on the go to remember important dates for clients. I can’t remember everything my clients tell me about their lives outside of the gym, but I can create reminders in IFTTT that can do things like sending me a text, or email reminding me of something that’s coming up. I like to set these things up to be “non-device-specific” to avoid having to re-set these things up in the event that I lose or damage my device in the gym.
I suggest you start learning a bit using IFTTT and when you begin to better understand the trigger and action relationship then take the leap to use Zapier. Zapier does not have a big learning curve, but it is way more business-focused. IFTTT is also incredibly affordable.
Zapier is a service that acts as the “middle man” between two or more internet-enabled devices or services and saves us time and energy.
This is huge for personal trainers and those in the fitness industry because time is at a premium for us and we can’t be wasting time doing things that don’t need our full and undivided attention.
The best part about Zapier is the simple-to-understand workflow; you don’t need any knowledge of how the internet works behind the curtain. This was the most important feature for me early on being a personal trainer who used to look at “internet code” as a foreign language. I didn’t have time to train my clients, build my systems, and then also learn how to code to automate some of the busy work, so Zapier being easy to get into was an incredible convenience.
Play around for free
I played around and probably took advantage of their free tier as I was growing. haha.
The Zapier free tier used to be a bit more generous, and man did I milk it for everything it could give me, even as I was growing FITLETE, on top of my personal training business. I will say that with the free tier they offer now it is still pretty incredible and you get access to almost everything they have to offer. They do have some premium guarded features that they only reserve for paid plans, but if you really need them then you probably make enough money to be able to pay the ~$20 per month for their least expensive paid plan.
What can I automate?
If you’re like me then you haven’t found 1 single software that takes care of everything you need for your business. A modern entrepreneurial personal trainer has to do a tremendous amount more than only delivering quality sessions for clients.
Among other things we need to:
Bill/ invoice clients
Create memberships
program workouts digitally
deliver workouts in person
deliver workouts online
maintain a website
write articles for our clientele
maintain social media accounts
schedule pre-paid client sessions
maintain an accurate schedule for drop-ins or pay-as-you-go clients
accounting & bookkeeping
find continuing education
create courses
shoot and edit videos
create marketing material and ads
communicate with clients outside of sessions
remember important client dates
etc.
Zapier comes in to take the most time-consuming pieces of these responsibilities and makes them more manageable. Especially if each of these tasks is different software you use.
Let me explain with a really simple example that you can get behind really easily. We are all on social media and sometimes the cross-posting content is just a small daily time suck. So, with Zapier you can set up a simple trigger that says “If I post a new video to Instagram, then do all of these things with it after:
Share it as a native post on your Twitter account
send it to YouTube for edit and upload
share it on your Facebook page & group
Add the video and caption to your blog as a post
Save the video link and the caption to a new row in google sheets.
While this isn’t the most mind-blowing example I wanted to share it because it takes a bunch of steps you would have to do manually and combines them into one action that triggers Zapier to do the rest of them. If you have a paid plan for Zapier then all these steps can be performed with only using 1 trigger.
Zapier connects mostly business-centric services as well to help you stay on top of new leads, new sign-ups, adding new clients to a welcome newsletter, and triggering emails to send out based on when clients got started.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised how well the software you use can work together if you allow them to connect to one another with Zapier.