Steal This Workflow: How Automation Helps Authors Reach Their Audience

The hardest part of writing is actually sitting down and writing. If you're an author intending to publish your work, the second hardest part of writing is publishing. Not only do you need to tackle whether to go digital or physical, but where can you publish your work? Do you self-publish? How do you market to your audience?

Author Remake helps new authors publish and find the right market. Started and run by writer Alinka Rutkowska, Author Remake bridges the gap between publishing a story and making sure it finds an audience.

But in order to help aspiring writers, Alinka has to first find her audience and reach them. To help boost her SEO efforts, she uses Facebook Lead Ads to target authors who would be interested in her services on the social media platform. Once she has new leads, she uses GetResponse to send emails and market to them—and adds a bit of urgency thanks to Deadline Funnel's countdown timers.

Keep reading to steal Alinka's workflows and find new ways to turn your leads into paying customers.

Add Urgency to New Leads

One of the products Alinka offers, the 5-Figure Author Challenge, connects writers with over 25 experts in the world of publishing and marketing so they can learn how to get their work in front of a broad audience. One of the first steps in making those connections, however, is advertising.

With Facebook Lead Ads, Alinka shares the 5-Figure Author Challenge far and wide. She does this automatically using app automation tool, Zapier. When a new lead arrives from Facebook, Zapier automatically creates a contact in GetResponse.

With leads in GetResponse, Alinka's Zap (a workflow between two or more apps) automates emails to her clients and starts them on a countdown with Deadline Funnel. These countdowns let the customer know how much time is left before the next session begins, often prompting leads to sign up and become customers.

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Using these Zaps, Alinka keeps her day-to-day operation nimble and efficient. Instead of chasing leads, she spends this extra time championing authors: Another company of hers, LibraryBub, helps independent writers place their books in libraries. With a few automated workflows behind her, Alinka makes it easier for writers to find their books a home.

All images courtesy of Author Remake.

What's your story? Tell us how you use Zapier to do more. You can also read even more customer stories and find new ways to improve your workflow and productivity.

source https://zapier.com/blog/send-facebook-leads-getresponse/

Steal This Workflow: A Digital Marketing Company Automates Facebook Leads and Saves Hours Every Week

Drumming up business for your online store isn't as simple as launching a website. Beyond a great looking and functional website, you need a social media presence and your SEO has to be top notch. And that's just to get eyes on your products, let alone getting those potentials to become actual paying customers.

But, depending on the tools you use, you can cut through the complications. Edmonton's Be Epic, Inc., a digital marketing agency, simplifies and manages complicated processes for their customers. From social media management to SEO, web design to video production, Be Epic takes the complex and makes it digestible. When it comes to social media and advertising, Be Epic combines their efforts and automates their workflows.

To that end, Be Epic utilizes Facebook Lead Ads, the social media giant's homegrown advertisements. Paired with app automation tool Zapier, Be Epic automates lead creation for their clients in customer relationship manager (CRM) Ontraport and instantly emails sales reps the new leads' information.

Read on to see how Be Epic saves two hours advertising on social media every single week.

Send Facebook Leads to Ontraport

If you don't have a process in place when your leads start flowing, you'll be playing catch up while your leads move on. On Facebook, Be Epic runs multiple ad campaigns at a time, targeting different audiences for each client.

To maintain order, Be Epic funnels the leads into Ontraport using a Zap—a bridge between two or more apps.

So how do these Zaps work? When a new lead comes in from Facebook, Zapier takes that lead's information and sends an email to the appropriate sales rep. Then, Zapier creates a contact in Ontraport. For specific clients, the Zap continues on and sends another email to the lead this time.

Since each part of this workflow is vital and can be taken separately, we broke it down for you. Grab what works with your process and give it a shot.

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With automation, Be Epic took the complex world of social media advertising and simplified it. Their clients don't have to worry about how to generate stellar leads, and Be Epic doesn't spend hours each week transferring new leads between different apps. Zapier makes it happen instantly, giving Be Epic more time to spend with their clients—and grow their client list.

Want to see more Facebook Lead Ads workflows? Learn how eCommerce businesses, real estate agents, and other digital marketers use Facebook Lead Ads to connect with customers.

All images courtesy of Be Epic, Inc.

What's your story? Tell us how you use Zapier to do more. You can also read even more customer stories and find new ways to improve your workflow and productivity.

source https://zapier.com/blog/automate-facebook-lead-ads-ontraport/

How to Prioritize Decisions as a Team with a Questions and Assumptions Activity

As a researcher and general curious human, I love asking questions and learning how people answer those questions. So it’s no surprise that my favorite Design Thinking activity is aptly called Questions and Assumptions.

Design Thinking is a problem-solving method that puts people at the heart of how you think. And it isn’t just for designers, anyone can do it—and my hunch is, a lot of you already have.

Asking questions is essential when you’re building user-centered products. Creating experiences from user insight and data, rather than guesswork (a.k.a. assumptions) minimizes the chance of getting it wrong.

I learned and heavily used the Design Thinking exercise Questions and Assumptions at IBM, and I continue to use it here at Zapier to create a shared understanding of what we don’t know and what we think we know about our users. We use our product and talk to our users frequently—but, that can give the impression that we know exactly what our users problems are or what our users want. Maybe or maybe not, but that’s what’s so great about Questions and Assumptions—it gets all this out into the open for the team to work through.

This activity is great to do almost anytime–when kicking off a project, mid-project to track if you’ve debunked or answered any questions you started with, or if your questions and assumptions have changed over the course of a project.

Here's how to run a Questions and Assumptions activity to prioritize decisions as a team and discover more about your customers or audience.

Step 1: Prep for the Design Thinking Exercise

Before you begin, you'll need:

• Someone to facilitate the activity, and if you’re a remote company (like Zapier!), someone to coordinate the different portions if you are all working asynchronously.

• A space to work and collect your Questions and Assumptions. Ideally it’s something that’s flexible and editable–like Post It notes, Sharpies, and a wall—or a digital version like MURAL.

• A prompt for participants to react to. It can be a new product feature, idea, a hypothesis, or a problem you're trying to solve.

Step 2: Gather Questions and Assumptions

• Get your team together and, for 10 minutes, write down questions or assumptions you have about the prompt. At Zapier, we tend to do this part asynchronously, since you want independent contribution from team members before engaging in discussion.

• Once everyone has contributed, start reading what your teammates wrote. Again, at Zapier, we do this asynchronously using MURAL.

Here’s an example of what my team came up with during the ‘Gather’ portion. We then copied all of these sticky notes to a new MURAL board to prioritize them

Step 3: Prioritize on a Grid

Now that you have a nice pile of sticky notes, it’s time to decide as a team: What should we tackle first?

Draw up a 2-by-2 grid, big enough to accommodate all of your notes (or whatever medium you happen to be using). Label those quadrants, and start plotting!

Make sure everyone understands what the various quadrants mean before you start plotting.

• Risk: f we get this wrong we’re BIG trouble (high risk) vs. If we get this wrong, it’s not ideal, but the world will keep on turnin’ (low risk).

• Certainty: I’m really not sure, we should look into this (Uncertain) vs. I’m feeling really good about this based on previous work/data/findings (Certain).

Once all of your questions and assumptions have been plotted, it’s time to discuss that upper right quadrant—the things you’re least certain about and if we got them wrong, it would be bad news bears.

That’s the goal here, to come to a consensus as a team about everything in the High Risk/Uncertain area, determining what work needs to be tackled first.

Once you’re able to reach a consensus, it’s time to figure out how to answer those questions or debunk those assumptions. Make a to-do list, create a Trello board—whatever works best for your team.

We recently did this activity on my product team at Zapier—we uncovered an assumption about a new feature we were preparing to launch that we were fairly certain about, but if we got it wrong could be costly. As a team, we decided that research was needed in that area, and have started incorporating ways to uncover the answer in our current research projects.

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Questions and Assumptions is a simple Design Thinking activity that, with as little as 30 minutes, can get your team aligned about what's most important to address now for the most important part of your product or service—your users.

Title photo by Jonathan Simcoe via Negative Space.

source https://zapier.com/blog/team-decisions-design-thinking/

The 7 Key Ingredients in Successful Side Projects

For businesses, giving resources and time to side projects has proven over and over to be worth it. Slack, everyone’s favorite communication hub, started life as a simple tool for a group of game developers. Instagram was founded when the creators of Burbn, a location-based app for whiskey lovers, realized their users were sharing photos of more than just their cocktails. And Twitter, of course, was a silly little project spawned out of podcasting platform Odeo.

But what about for you? I’m sure you have some big, crazy ideas that have been sitting in the back of your mental closet for months, if not years. What if these side project ideas aren’t so "crazy" after all?

Side projects help us uncover new interests, promote divergent thinking (one of the building blocks of creativity), and can potentially take your life in an unexpected direction. However, that's also what makes them scary. They require time and money—and more importantly, you'll need enough motivation from the meaning the side project brings to keep going when it's tough.

So what makes a personal side project successful? After reading the stories of 10 creators, from a programmer-turned-author to a college kid who just inked a book deal based on his dog rating side project, I found these 7 common "ingredients" for starting, building, and launching a successful personal side project.

1. Find Something That Sits Between “Things You Enjoy” and “Skills You Want to Build”

It’s no surprise that side projects should be something you enjoy and find meaning in as well as can help you professionally. As Julie Zhou, product design VP at Facebook and avid side project champion explains, "Side projects work best when they live at the interaction of ‘Things you enjoy’ and ‘Things that help you practice a marketable skill.’"

via Julie Zhou, The importance of side projects

While this is simple in theory, it can quickly get murky. Start a side project solely because it will help you get ahead in your own job and you run the risk of that project becoming just an extension of your work. Rather than feeling motivated to spend time on it, you'll approach it just like another task on your work to-do list.

However, if your project doesn’t help you build a skill you can use in other parts of your life, you’re just having fun. Which is fine, of course. But won’t necessarily bring in a level of meaning to your life.

The goal then, as Zhou explains, is to find that sweet spot in the middle.

A good litmus test is that side projects are typically productive, not consumptive. That’s not to say side projects have to be 100% focused on production.

For example, you may be interested in building an app, but not (yet) have the technical skills to do it. So step 1 would be to take an online course on app development. Then, throughout the course, you could work on the app, knowing it will take a while, but always with that goal keeping you motivated.

2. Treat Your Side Projects as Experiments

From dog Tweets to a book deal.

The hard thing about side projects is that there’s a lot more of us in them than in our usual work. When you’re having an off day in the office or on a work project, it can be easy to push through. You’re getting paid for this after all, right?

But when we’re doing something for ourselves, that mental strategy for motivating us falls short.

Freelance web designer-turned entrepreneur Paul Jarvis, says that to get over this hump, we need to treat our side projects as experiments.

Experiments don’t "fail"—they simply prove or disprove a hypothesis. For example, despite my day job as a designer I had the hypothesis that I could also write an e-book. I then simply started writing. I didn’t focus on the outcome, how the book would be received or what others would think of it. I figured, "let’s give this a try".

Along with the simple framing exercise of seeing his projects as experiments, Paul offers some other sound advice for any side project:

• Focus on the task at hand. Not the end result.
• Don’t create and judge at the same time.
• Break the experiment down into the smallest tasks possible.
• Don’t repeat yourself. Experiments need to vary to get varying results.

A perfect example is Matt Nelson, a college student who started his WeRateDogs Twitter account as a side project before it ballooned to over 4 million followers and landed him a book deal. When he first started, the project was simply a way to learn and get better at his jokes, but it matured over time:

I thought I was part of this weird Twitter corner where everyone would do their best to entertain their own small followings. At the time, all the creators I knew who would support my stuff were all quite small and my only goal really was to try to entertain in those 140 characters.

The point here is that you’re simply trying something out with your side project. Rather than place the same level of importance on your side project as you do on your job, focus on getting something done. Getting early results will help you learn and grow.

3. Pitch Yourself

via Austin Kleon's Show Your Work

If you want your side project to be more than just a hobby, successful creators say you need to learn how to talk about it. This doesn’t necessarily mean going out and pitching your side project as if it were a business, but rather getting over the fear of being public about what you’re working on.

Before he built multiple startups (which all started as side projects) and created one of the largest design communities in Israel, Sagi Shrieber was just another design student with one side interest: He felt passionately about starting the first design blog written in Hebrew. Rather than building it in private, however, Sagi took the stage at a local event and told the 300+ room what he was doing and when he would launch (even though he didn’t have anything made yet).

If you have an idea you want to carry out, commit to carrying it out publicly. Those 300 people back then could not care less about me launching a design blog…but why did I make that move? I’d learned that if you want to get something done in life, you need to declare it in front of an audience, publicly, and not only to yourself.

Going public with your side project can give you the momentum to go through with it and also help you find a community of like-minded people to help you along the way.

In his book Show Your Work, artist Austin Kleon talks about the importance of sharing your work with the world, even if it’s not "perfect:"

Artists love to trot out the tired line, "My work speaks for itself," but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work affects how they value it.

When you don’t actively promote the work you’re doing, it’s easy to shrug off your side project as simply a hobby. But pitching yourself to both friends and strangers is a powerful way to say you value the work you’re doing. And hopefully by doing so, others will value it as well.

4. Charge For Your Work

Deliver value, then charge for it.

Selling seems antithetical to creation. One is pure, unadulterated originality, the other simply squeezing hard-earned dollars and cents out of another person. But if you want your side project to be a success (and it’s something you plan on selling), this is the wrong way to think about it.

Successful side project creators don’t think about price, they think about value. If you value the work you’re doing, and you’re creating something that has meaning to you, then there should be someone else out there who feels the same way.

As a full-time marketing director, Noah Kagan was no stranger to the art of sales. Yet, when he launched his side project, AppSumo, he still fell into the trap of feeling guilty about asking for money:

To get over this awkwardness about pricing, Noah reminds himself of a few simple facts every time he launches a new side project:

1. Whatever you’re doing, you’re creating value for someone else.
2. People pay for time. If you make something that helps them save time, they’ll feel good about paying for it.
3. It’s human nature to feel better about things we pay for. Going the free route isn’t always the best way if you want people to take your side project seriously.

"What happens when your friends give you their ‘great’ advice?” asks Noah. “Even if their advice is really, really good…most of us (including myself) don’t listen to it. Instead, most of us value what we pay for over what we get for free."

If you want people to care about your side project, you need to show them that it’s valuable. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to start charging. Even just $1 is enough to change your mindset from “no one cares about what I’m doing” to “I have actual paying customers”—and that’s a powerful switch.

This doesn’t mean you have to charge for what you’re making. Instead, it comes down to how you measure success. If you’re working on your side project to learn new skills or be a part of a community you enjoy, then success might come from simply sharing what you’re doing. If, however, success to you means starting a new career or building your own business, then charging is crucial to achieving your goals.

5. Find Partners, Collaborators, and Champions

Side projects are a great opportunity to not only learn new skills, but to work with people you’ve always wanted to. When we let other people into our creative process, we learn to challenge thoughts and values that have been so stubbornly ingrained in us.

As author Amber Sparks found when she started her latest book side project, we tend to be boring people by ourselves and “burrow into our own heads…We become feedback loops, escalating sound, repeating endlessly, signifying nothing but our own creative burnout.”

When you’re planning your project, think about who you could include. Who would be a good partner? Who could you ask for feedback from early on? Who will challenge the way you think and push you into uncharted territory?

6. Be Okay with Failure

Try, and try, and try again.

Big, audacious goals are great. But focusing too much on the potential end result of your side project can kill your motivation and leave you drained and bitter if things don’t go exactly as planned (and they never do).

Over the course of interviewing hundreds of people who’ve launched and grown side projects over the past few years, entrepreneur and side project coach Ryan Robinson found that the benefits aren’t always what they seemed at the beginning:

"Every single person I’ve spoken with has benefited immensely from unpredictably awesome opportunities that came their way because of their side projects," he told me during an interview.

"While some projects do go on to become a full-time business, even the ones that eventually fizzle out serve an important purpose. Building and launching a side project is about the experience, and the people you meet along the way."

It’s a sentiment shared by former Spotify designer and side project advocate Tobias van Schneider, who says side projects should always be "stupid:"

The only way a side project will work is if people give themselves permission to think simple, to change their minds, to fail—basically, to not take them too seriously. When you treat something like it’s stupid, you have fun with it, you don’t put too much structure around it. You can enjoy different types of success.

7. Keep Your Day Job (For Now)

When you have an incredible side project idea that ticks all the boxes it can be tempting to quit your job and run with it fullsteam. However, almost all successful side project creators built their project on the side while working a full-time job.

A steady income makes things easier in the early days of your project, of course, but perhaps more importantly, your day job can be a fantastic place to meet like-minded or inspirational people who will help you on your path.

Entrepreneur and author James Altucher started his web design and development side project while working full-time at HBO. As his side project grew, he used the contacts he’d made at HBO (with their permission, of course) to land contracts with companies such as American Express, People Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and Warner Bros.

For Altucher, his day job was more than just a paycheck. It was his best source of leads:
"You just need to put in the time, identify the right people, who are good and connected and are the decision makers who can say yes to you and just start meeting them."

However, as Robinson outlines in a post aptly titled "How to Avoid Getting Fired (and Sued) When Starting a Side Business" you should be careful how much you mix your day job and your side project. Specifically, you should avoid:

• Breaching any contracts or agreements you've signed
• Working on your freelance business during company time
• Using company resources, computers, or online tools within your freelance work.

While your day job is a great place to bring some structure (and payment) into your life while you’re working on a side project, you need to use your common sense. Your side project is your project. Not your work’s. Treat it separately and be respectful of the job you’re doing and everything should be fine.

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With an estimated 21–35% of our waking hours spent at work, it can be hard to justify spending what little downtime we have on a side project. However, each of the 10 makers highlighted in this article made the choice to build something for themselves in their spare time and changed their lives in the process.

But don’t think these people had it easy. Hindsight is 20-20, and these “ingredients” only came about from hard work and plenty of failure. Just take the example of Ryan Robinson, who didn’t know any of this when building his first side project and ended up losing his job and thousands of dollars. Today, he makes a living solely off his side projects and helps hundreds of other people do the same.

So, whether you’re looking to write that screenplay you always wanted to, learn to code an iPhone app, or start your own business, know that your side project can take you to unexpected and exciting destinations. Hopefully these “ingredients” will help you get there a little easier.

Want to get really inspired? Check out these 21 million-dollar companies that started as side projects.

Image Credits: Side products venn diagram via Julie Zhou; Paint palette photo by Daian Gan via Pexels; Show Your Work photo by Austin Kleon; Tips sign by Colin Davis via Flickr; Bent nails photo by Grieslightnin via Pixabay

source https://zapier.com/blog/personal-side-projects/

10 Signs That You're Headed for Burnout

In December of 2015, I moved my family 3,000 miles across the country to take a new job. In August of 2016—a mere eight months later—I quit my new job. But I didn’t quit for a new, higher-paying job, and I didn’t give a notice. I just stopped going. I didn’t show up for work one day, and I never went back.

Here’s what happened: I woke up one morning to get ready for work, and my brain and body went on strike. It was like that point after eating too much when your body refuses to swallow another bite. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go to work; it was that I couldn’t.

I didn’t know how to explain it to anyone—not my boss, my coworkers, or my friends and family back home who’d listened to me rave about the new position for three months before moving. "I just couldn’t do it anymore" sounds weak or lazy, and I’m neither. The truth was that I didn’t even really understand what happened.

Then a few weeks ago, I read a piece on Medium—Let’s Talk About Burnout"—by Stacey King Gordon who told a familiar story. After turning her freelancing job into a business and growing it to a nearly million-dollar company, she just walked away. The reason: burnout.

What Is Burnout?

"Burnout is the car crash you don’t see coming." – Stacey King Gordon

I always thought of burnout as just being tired of something. For example: "Pizza used to be my favorite food, but I just burned out on it." I was wrong.

Burnout is an actual psychological disorder caused by chronic stress. The term was coined in the 1970s by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger who noticed the symptoms of burnout in volunteers at a free clinic for drug addicts. Over time, the formerly cheerful and energetic volunteers became exhausted and resentful of their patients.

The commonly cited symptoms of burnout include "an overwhelming sense of exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment, and a sense of professional ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment." But these are just the ways that burnout manifests itself in daily life. Behind the scenes, chronic stress actually alters the structure of the brain.

Studies have shown that chronic stress thins the frontal cortex—a process normally associated with aging. As a result, burnout isn’t just something that happens and ends.

Burnout has long-term effects on memory, creativity, and attention spans. Additionally, people who’ve experienced burnout have less control over their negative emotions, meaning they become stressed more quickly and easily than individuals with a healthy brain.

Chronic stress has even been known to cause young professionals to suffer from strokes—a medical condition that primarily occurs in people over 65.

But perhaps more disconcerting than the short- and long-term consequences of burnout is its ability to go unnoticed. According to Dr. Sherrie Bourg Carter: "Burnout doesn't happen suddenly. You don't wake up one morning and all of a sudden ‘have burnout.’ Its nature is much more insidious, creeping up on us over time like a slow leak."

For this reason, it’s crucial to recognize the signs of burnout before it’s too late.

10 Major Signs of Burnout

Stacey King Gordon explains that the signs that she was heading for burnout were fairly obvious. She began suffering from insomnia, anxiety, and depression. She fought with her husband, stopped hanging out with friends, and felt alone—as though no one understood what she was going through.

My own symptoms weren’t quite so harsh, but the signs were there long before I moved cross-country. Sundays—once my favorite day of the week—were no longer enjoyable. I spent the entire day dreading work and feeling resentful that the weekend was over, even though it wasn’t over yet. I started feeling nauseous every morning while driving to work.

My solution to the problem was to take a job 3,000 miles away. The problem with my solution was that the job was pretty much the same thing I’d been doing for three years—just with more responsibility and complexity. I changed nothing but the wallpaper.

The burnout only worsened with the new job. The same old symptoms resurfaced after about three months, and then new ones developed. Tiny things infuriated me, and I felt incapable of doing my job, which led me to stop caring. All I ever wanted to do was watch TV because it kept me from thinking.

I ignored the signs because I thought they were the result of some defect in my personality. I never once attributed them to stress. But all of these symptoms are pretty typical signs of burnout:

1. Fatigue – You feel physically or emotionally exhausted. You stop exercising, start sleeping more, or fill your mind with distractions to avoid your own thoughts.

2. Insomnia – You have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep and commonly dream about work. Those dreams are occasionally—or frequently—nightmares.

3. Addiction – You pick up smoking again, start drinking more heavily, begin using drugs, or gain weight due to overeating.

4. Loneliness – You feel alone even when you aren’t. No one understands what you’re going through, and even if they do understand, they don’t really seem to care.

5. Feelings of Inadequacy – You feel unqualified for your job, like someone made a mistake hiring you. You may also feel like a terrible spouse, parent, child, or friend.

6. Anger – Inconsequential things infuriate you. You may have road rage, and you may find yourself in frequent arguments with coworkers, family, and friends.

7. Cynicism – You believe you’ll fail, so you have a hard time convincing yourself to start or try anything. You may also be overly critical of your coworkers' or boss’s ideas.

8. Numbness – You stop celebrating birthdays or holidays, and no longer find joy in professional accomplishments.

9. Illness – You have headaches, feel as though you’re having heart or breathing problems (likely from anxiety), or feel nauseous in anticipation of going to work.

10. Short Attention Span – You struggle to get started on tasks, miss deadlines, or procrastinate uncharacteristically.

Of course, any of these symptoms could be signs of general stress, but as Dr. Sherrie Bourg Carter says, "These signs and symptoms exist along a continuum. In other words, the difference between stress and burnout is a matter of degree, which means that the earlier you recognize the signs, the better able you will be to avoid burnout."

Stress vs. Burnout

If the difference between stress and burnout is the degree to which you’re experiencing symptoms, it’s important to understand how to differentiate between the signs of stress and the signs of burnout. The chart below shows some possible stages along the continuum. Use it to evaluate where you might be on the burnout spectrum.

Symptom	Signs of Stress	Signs of Burnout
Fatigue	You are less energetic and feel tired most days.	You are physically and emotionally exhausted and dread doing everything.
Insomnia	You occasionally have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep.	You have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep more often than not, possibly even nightly.
Addiction	You begin having a glass of wine after a stressful day to relax before bed.	You feel as though you’re incapable of relaxing without having a drink.
Loneliness	You go out less often and take fewer lunches with coworkers.	You go out of your way to avoid talking to others and may get frustrated when people talk to you or invite you out.
Feeling Inadequate	You speak up in meetings and/or volunteer for projects less often.	You feel as though all of your work outputs are garbage and wonder why you were hired.
Anger	Brainstorming or debating with coworkers irritates you, and conversations may be tense.	You have angry outbursts at work, hide in the bathroom to cry, or get into heated arguments with coworkers.
Cynicism	Your formally optimistic perspective has been replaced by pessimism.	You not only feel like nothing will work, you think it’s stupid to even try or consider things.
Numbness	You dread going to work and spend most of the day looking forward to leaving.	You feel ill at the idea of going to work, and you don’t even look forward to your personal time with friends and family.
Illness	You have headaches more frequently and either call in or work from home more often.	You’re often sick with colds, infections, the flu, or other illnesses because of a weakened immune system.
Short Attention Span	You forget things and have trouble paying attention during meetings and presentations.	You cannot focus on anything—possibly at work and home—causing a pile of up work and neglected responsibilities.

Note: This chart was compiled using data from Dr. Sherrie Bourg Carter and the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research.

If you’re experiencing multiple signs of stress, take steps immediately to limit your stress to avoid progressing into burnout. Get more exercise, limit the amount of overtime you work, make sure to get a healthy amount of sleep regularly, and—if possible—transition some responsibilities to someone else.

Related: The Art of Delegating

If you’re experiencing even one symptom of burnout, get help before chronic stress causes irreparable damage. First, talk to your doctor or a mental health professional to make sure what you’re experiencing is burnout and not a more serious condition.

Next, evaluate the causes of your stress, and take steps to stop doing the things that are causing your symptoms. As Dr. Carter says: "Burnout isn't like the flu; it doesn't go away after a few weeks unless you make some changes in your life. And as hard as that may seem, it's the smartest thing to do."

Avoiding burnout may mean going to your boss and having a painfully honest conversation, or it may mean finding a job that’s better suited to your personality, sensibilities, or interests.

Recognizing Symptomatic Behaviors Is Also Key

"By conventional definitions of success, I was successful. By any sane definition of success, if you are lying in your own pool of blood on your office floor, you are not successful"- Arianna Huffington

A former boss used to hound me constantly about doing other people’s work for them. He wanted me to intentionally let things fail to highlight the problems our department was encountering.

I couldn’t.

I stressed for months over every part of a project. I did anything anyone asked of me—sometimes secretly so my boss wouldn’t find out. I worked evenings and weekends; took my company laptop with me on vacation. All of the stress seemed worth it in the end when I felt the pride of accomplishing a goal.

I couldn’t see my own burnout because I kept telling myself the stress was temporary. Once the project was finished, once I was settled in my new home and job, and once I hit the next goal, the stress would subside. But it was never long after hitting a goal before I began anxiously pursuing another.

In an interview with Oprah, Arianna Huffington once spoke about her own experience with burnout—how she collapsed in her office and badly cut her eye in the process. There was nothing medically wrong with her. Her collapse was the result of chronic stress.

So she asked herself, "What is success?" And her answer was, “By conventional definitions of success, I was successful. By any sane definition of success, if you are lying in your own pool of blood on your office floor, you are not successful.”

It’s easy to view the signs of burnout as temporary, to convince yourself that they’re necessary for success or to minimize them for a time with the excitement of something new. For that reason, it’s important to also watch for behaviors that might put you at risk for burnout and not just the symptoms:

• Working overtime frequently.
• Working while you’re on vacation, even if you’re just "catching up on email."
• Checking work email in the evening, over the weekend, or as you roll out of bed.* Accepting new work/projects even when you’re already at capacity or overburdened.
• Taking time away from sleep to get caught up.

But perhaps the biggest warning sign is rationalizing the causes of your stress. High stress might feel like a constant in your life, but it's not normal. Even driven high-achievers need time for self-care.

Remember: Burning Out Doesn’t Mean You’re Weak, Incapable, or a Failure

This is my own Achilles’ heel when it comes to burnout. While writing this piece, I’ve had to talk myself out of deleting everything and starting over several times, thinking that I shouldn’t make my own weakness so public and permanent.

But I know that it’s not a weakness and that I’m not a failure even if I feel differently. There is ample evidence proving that people who’ve suffered from burnout move on to be highly successful in future roles.

• There’s the anonymous businessman in this Harvard Business Review article who went on to become the CEO of a major corporation.

• There’s Arianna Huffington who, after collapsing from burnout in 2007, went on to build such an influential digital property that AOL purchased it for $315 million a mere four years later.

• And finally, there’s Hillary Clinton who, after experiencing burnout during her first presidential campaign against Barack Obama in 2008, went on to serve as Secretary of State, and very nearly became the first female president of the U.S.

People don’t burn out because they’re weak. They burn out because they overdo it and live with stress for so long that their bodies take over in defense. But by the time the body takes over, it’s usually too late. Even after making professional and personal changes, the effects of burnout might linger for a lifetime.

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If you’re experiencing some of the signs of burnout, make changes to reduce your levels of stress. And if you’re not sure whether or not the stress you’re experiencing is normal, talk to a doctor. If nothing else, the conversation may be able to provide you with some much-needed perspective on your own definition of what it takes to be successful.

For ideas on how to reduce stress in your personal and professional life, check out these other stories:

• Stay Calm: How to Become More Emotionally Resilient
• 7 Scientific Ways to Kill Stress and Jumpstart Your Creativity
• How to Make Your Mondays More Productive (and Less Stressful)
• Strengthen Your Willpower: How to Build Perseverance and Avoid Distractions

Title photo by hiyori13 via Flickr

source https://zapier.com/blog/signs-of-burnout/

Steal This Workflow: How a One-Person Business Automates its Onboarding Process

When you build a business or a product from scratch, that becomes your baby or labor of love—but it can also narrow your perspective. That's why phrases like "see the big picture" and "you can't see the forest for the trees" often resonate so much. If you're in the thick of it day in and day out, an outside perspective might be what you need.

Offering an unbiased, no-nonsense look at startups, Startup Audits aims to guide startups to their next step. For a one-person operation, though, founder and auditor extraordinaire Bram Kanstein found himself bogged down by manual tasks. Creating documents, folders, and spreadsheets—as well as writing each individual email—meant Bram wasted time on repetitive work.

Bram went looking for a solution. App automation tool Zapier brought him a higher level of productivity. "[Zapier] allows me to plan the work I need to do for my clients better," he says. Now, Startup Audits automates the client signup process. Read on to see how.

Automate Client Onboarding

Before Zapier, Bram had to repeat a lot of different tasks for each new client. He'd create a folder in Google Drive and a Google Doc. He'd write a custom welcome email for each startup and send it off. Then he'd add the new client to Google Sheets, building a client database. Finally, he'd create a card in Trello to track and manage the work.

Rinse and repeat for each new client.

With Zapier, Bram found he could automate this entire process. With a multi-step Zap—a workflow connecting multiple apps—Bram condensed his onboarding process and now it happens instantaneously.

When a client purchases one of Startup Audit’s products, it triggers Bram's multi-step Zap. First, Zapier creates a folder in Google Drive for the client. Within that folder, Zapier then creates a Google Doc questionnaire. This questionnaire covers everything from the startup's mission and values to what sort of assistance they need. It paints a full picture for Bram and lets him get started faster.

Next, Zapier sends out a welcome email to the client through Gmail, which includes a link to the Google Doc. The email says hello, provides instructions and guidance, and introduces the client to Bram.

Once Zapier sends the email, the Zap adds a row to Google Sheets, creating a log of clients' requests and the price paid.

Startup Audits manages their client projects with Trello. After adding the client to Google Sheets, Zapier creates a card in Trello. Bram has his Zap set up to add a checklist to the Trello card, so he can keep track of each task this audit requires.

The Zap has one last step: Emailing Bram to let him know everything went off without a hitch and he has a new client.

With this one Zap, Bram automates the entirety of his onboarding process—from collecting client information to adding them to the database and sending them an email. While Bram uses Webhooks by Zapier to grab the purchase information, you can swap that out for your favorite form app, payment collector, or even try out webhooks.

You can use these Zaps for the same workflow or use specific sections to work more efficiently. Pick, choose, and be productive:

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"I think I've only discovered ten percent of Zapier's power and I'm already really happy!" Bram says. "When I get the notification of a sale, I know my client has received his/her instructions."

Thanks to Zapier, Bram spends more time with his clients and their startup than writing emails and adding rows to spreadsheets. Instead of a narrow focus on the day-to-day, Bram sees the forest for the trees and helps startups do the same.

All images courtesy of Startup Audits.

What's your story? Tell us how you use Zapier to do more. You can also read even more customer stories and find new ways to improve your workflow and productivity.

source https://zapier.com/blog/automate-onboarding-process/

WEN 61720 3/4-Inch to 2-Inch 18-Gauge Brad Nailer Review

Nail guns exist in a very crowded market and there’s pretty much a nail gun to suit every single scenario. At the end of the day though, most hobbyists and home-improvement enthusiasts will want to choose just one nail gun and that means they’re going to want something that easy to operate and that is versatile.

Is the WEN 61720 ¾-Inch to 2-Inch 18-Gauge Brad Nailer the nail gun that you’re looking for? It’s certainly a very affordable option, very light and convenient and not too hard on the eyes. We spent some time testing the product for the review and here’s what we found…

Product Description: Super Light and Breezy

One of the most important things when looking for a nail gun is the lightness and the ergonomic. Many applications will involve using these tools for long periods, whether you’re looking at roofing or you’re building your own furniture. That means you need something that you can use for long stretches without getting exhausted.

The good news is that the WEN 61720 ¾-Inch to 2-Inch 18-Gauge Brad Nailer is a small, light and colourful device that you’ll be happy to use for extended periods. The color is a nice bright blue and yellow which we enjoy but it’s actually surprisingly powerful accounting for its small size.

This is pneumatic tool, which means you’re going to need an air compressor to run it. The good news is that these can be found very cheaply these days and you can get some very small ones too. Air compressors last a long time and will be useful for a range of applications, so it’s a worthy addition to your tool set.

This is still entry level though and won’t be incredibly powerful. Still though, the WEN 61720 ¾-Inch to 2-Inch 18-Gauge Brad Nailer should be suitable for fireing 18-gauge brads.

It also has a good capacity with a 100-brad capacity. In our tests it performed very well with only the occasional jam. The good news is that a quick-release magazine provides you with easy access to the head, which means you can unjam your jams. You also get a depth adjustment feature, soft nose (to avoid damaging the material you’re nailing) and a carry case.

Pros and Cons: Amazing for the Price

This is an entry level nail gun, make no mistake. It’s not going to be up to the most demanding tasks and if you’re a professional, then you might want something more powerful to ensure that there is no job too big to handle.

But we’ve still a lot of positive to say about this nail gun and in particular, we’re really impressed with just how powerful it is considering the price. The WEN 61720 ¾-Inch to 2-Inch 18-Gauge Brad Nailer is remarkably cheap. It’s still very well made though, surprisingly powerful and with all the features you could need. The quick release magazine is a particularly well-thought-out addition and wins this model some more brownie points.

Finally, the design is the other pro. It’s so light, so easy to use and so ergonomic that you can happily spend all day nailing down the backs of wardrobes without getting wrist strain.

As mentioned, one con is that you may experience the occasional jam, but this is pretty par for the course with a small, entry level nail gun. The other con is that you’ll need an air compressor. This is normal but it does add to the price if you don’t have one already.

The other downside of course is that this is limited in terms of its maximum power. That means you’re going to struggle nailing into some materials and you may want to upgrade in future. But for hobbyists and a little home improvement, it should be up to most jobs. And more to the point, at this price it hardly matters!

Conclusion: More Than Meets the Eye

To look at, this is a rather unassuming nail gun that is somewhat plastic – although it looks nice with it. And that is what you’re getting too – there are no advanced features here and it certainly isn’t the most powerful in the world.

But in terms of entry level nail guns, this is one of the best. The only caveat is that air compressor – you may want to consider a battery operated tool if you want to save the additional expense or avoid having to carry an extra gizmo.

from Toolerant http://www.toolerant.com/wen-61720-34-inch-to-2-inch-18-gauge-brad-nailer-review/

source https://toolerant.tumblr.com/post/168776955520

Steal This Workflow: A Small Legal Team Gets by Without Administrative Staff

If there's one lesson to take away from Marvel's Daredevil, it's that running a law firm, Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law, with next to no administrative staff is hard work. That and dressing up as a vigilante to protect Hell's Kitchen will impact your career as a lawyer.

Two attorneys at Chicago's Chi City Legal opted to try something different: automation. While automated workflows might not quench your thirst for justice (although maybe they can…), automation can carry the administrative load.

To help them pick up the slack, they use app automation tool Zapier. With Zapier's efficiency, Chi City Legal can focus more time on their clients and their cases than on the busy work often associated with the law.

Automate Your Client Communication

Until we master the ability to stop time or add more hours to the day, there will be a limit to how many emails people can write and respond to. And yet, despite being a two-person operation, the clients of Chi City Legal receive timely updates on their cases. With Zapier, these attorneys are everywhere their clients need them to be when they're needed.

Using a multi-step Zap—a workflow that connects multiple applications—the Chi City Legal team automates customer communication without sacrificing casework:

"With the click of a checklist on Trello, [Zapier] calls out to Google Sheets with related scripts to send clients automatic updates," Conor Malloy, Attorney and Partner at Chi City Legal, explains.

Chi City Legal relies on Trello for project management, so a lot of their Zaps revolve around creating cards and triggering actions when cards update.

They use Gmail to send the email itself, building a template from case information in Trello and pre-written scripts in Google Sheets. Even if you don't need to auto-generate scripts for emails, you can use this Zap to update clients and coworkers.

We included a few related Zaps, too, so you can customize this workflow to meet your needs.

Automatically Create Proposals, Documents, and Forms

Integrated into the Chi City Legal website is a form for potential clients to fill out. Clients request services with these forms, providing Conor and his partner with specific details of their case, too.

When a new client enters their case information and submits the form, Chi City Legal's Zap takes off. This workflow creates case documentation, schedules a conversation with the help of a friendly AI, and creates invoices in Xero.

With each new Gravity Forms entry, Zapier creates a new card in Trello. That card contains case and client details, which is also sent to a new row in Google Sheets.

Once the client's information is in both systems, the Zap creates a matching person in Xero and builds an invoice. Finally, Zapier sends an email via Gmail, to set up a phone call.

There's a lot to take on with this Zap so we also broke this one up. Pick and choose the pieces that work with your process and try some you hadn't thought about yet:

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By automating some of their most time-consuming tasks, the team at Chi City Legal have been able to take on more clients and give more attention to cases. They're able to keep their costs low without the need for a massive administrative team and do more with less.

All images courtesy of Chi City Legal.

What's your story? Tell us how you use Zapier to do more. You can also read even more customer stories and find new ways to improve your workflow and productivity.

source https://zapier.com/blog/automate-projects-invoices/

How to Find the Perfect Job with Google Search Operators

LinkedIn and Glassdoor are great places to search for jobs—if the companies you’re interested in are actively posting positions there. But what about companies that use lesser-known job boards or only post openings on their websites?

It seemed at first like Google for Jobs—Google’s new job search engine—was going to be the ideal solution to this problem. Google for Jobs is designed to provide a central source for jobs posted in different places across the web by displaying job results at the top of the results page for related keywords. But even it doesn’t show everything.

To get a job into the results, companies either have to post to specific job boards or mark up jobs on their websites with structured data. Companies that don’t post to integrated job boards—or that lack the technical expertise required to mark up pages with structured data—do not appear in the results.

There’s only one way to find jobs posted anywhere online, and it’s to conduct a Google search. But if you just search for a job title, you’ll spend more time sifting through results than you’d spend checking every job board that exists.

Instead, learn how to use Google search operators to find exactly what you’re looking for—the job opening that are right for you.

What Are Google Search Operators?

A normal Google search usually looks something like this:

When you submit that query, Google understands you’re looking for results that use the words writing and jobs. It also considers other factors—location, historical search behavior, and what other people are usually looking for when they search for the same term—and uses all of that data to produce relevant results.

It’s a sophisticated and wonderful system, but it’s not perfect. It can’t be perfect because the search writing jobs could be shorthand for many different types of requests:

• Show me results for all writing jobs.
• Show me results for local writing jobs.
• Show me job boards where I can find listings for writing jobs.
• Show me results that explain how I can become a professional writer.

Because Google can’t know exactly which request you’re making, it shows a blend of results that it believes satisfies each of those requests.

To narrow down the results to exactly what you’re looking for, provide more specific guidance: either add more words to the search or use search operators—commands you can type into Google’s search box to provide more specific guidance on the types of results you’re looking for.

Which Google Search Operators Are Helpful When Searching for Jobs?

While Google recognizes many different search operators, not all are applicable to searching for a job. For a job search, there are nine search operators you may want to use:

• Surround terms with quotation marks to force an exact match. When searching for the term writing jobs, Google looks for results with the words writing and jobs. To find results that use the exact phrase writing jobs—both words used together and in that order—surround the term with quotation marks.

• Use OR to search for either one thing or another thing. Say you wanted to find jobs for either a marketing writer or business writer. Use the OR operator to tell Google to that you want to see results for either of those terms.

• Use a minus sign to exclude results that contain specific words. Say the last search produced a lot of results for technical writer jobs. Add a minus sign to the search to tell Google not to populate results that contain the word technical.

• Use parenthesis to group terms. Some companies say writer, some say copywriter, and some say blogger. Tell Google to look for any of the three by grouping them into parenthesis. The example below tells Google to look for the terms marketing writer, marketing blogger, and/or marketing copywriter.

• Use the site: operator to find results only on a specific website. This is useful when searching for jobs on sites with hundreds or thousands of job postings. If you prefer Google’s search capabilities to those on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Upwork, or any other major job board, you can use Google’s search engine to look at posts on those specific sites with the site: operator.

• Use the intitle: operator to only show results with search terms used in the page title. For most job posts, the page title is going to be the title of the specific job. Narrow results by using the intitle: operator to limit the search to pages that only use search terms in the title—not in the body text. Also, note that the intitle: operator only applies to the first word that appears after it. To look for multiple terms, include multiple intitle: operators.

• Use the allintitle: operator to look for multiple terms in a page title. Instead of prefacing every word with the intitle: operator, use the allintitle: operator to tell Google to look for multiple words in the title. Keep in mind, however, that the allintitle: operator will pull everything that appears behind it, so it can skew results when combining multiple search operators in a single query.

• Use the intext: operator to look for a single word in the body text of a post. Lots of job posts include a responsibilities or requirements header. Narrow your search with an intext: operator to only show results that include one of those words in the body of the content. Follow the search marketing writer with intext:requirements to see only results that include the terms marketing and writer anywhere and requirements somewhere in the body text.

• Use the allintext: operator to look for multiple terms in a page’s body text. Similar to allintitle:, allintext: tells Google to only show results with body text that includes all of the search terms listed. To find results for marketing writer with job requirements in the body text, follow the search marketing writer with allintext:job requirements.

Keep in mind that the formatting of each site operator is very important. Google only understands the OR command when both letters are capitalized. It only recognizes the site: command if there’s no space between the command and what follows it.

How to Use and Combine Search Operators to Find Your Dream Job

Each site operator is helpful on its own, but the most powerful way to use them is to combine them in a single search.

Start with a general search—whatever you would normally use to search for jobs on Google. The results you get will guide which operators you need to add to provide Google with more specific guidelines. As an example, let’s search for the term business writer:

After conducting the very first search, use the Tools dropdown to narrow results down to those that were published recently. Click Tools, select the arrow next to Any time and choose the most appropriate timeframe:

Past week or Past month are good options if you’re either using this search for the first time ever or using it for the first time in a while. Past 24 hours is good if you’ve been searching every day.

After narrowing the results to display only those published in the last week, the top result is from Upwork:

Upwork jobs are typically freelance or contract jobs, but let’s say we’re looking for full-time positions. We can add an exclude (-) and a site: operator to tell Google not to show search results from Upwork:

Now we no longer see Upwork as the top result, but the first thing Google is displaying is a news carousel. Google is apparently not 100 percent certain that we’re looking for jobs. We can narrow the results further using an intitle: operator and forcing an exact match with quotation marks:

Now the results that display are exactly what we’re looking for. Additionally, we went from an estimated 243 million results from our first search to only three pages of results in our last.

However, our final search was fairly restrictive, so we may want to add a little more flexibility back to the query to broaden the search and see more results.

Forcing an exact match for business writer is a fairly strict requirement. Instead, we can use parenthesis to group some related terms and broaden the search to openings that don’t use that exact phrase:

This tells Google to display results that have business in the title and either writer or blogger also in the title.

With this search, we’re back up to hundreds of results, but most aren’t jobs. We need to add the word job to the search to indicate that we specifically want to see results that have the word job somewhere on the page:

This search produces plenty of results, and most are for jobs a business writer might be interested in considering.

There are hundreds of ways to combine search operators to get really refined results and discover positions posted anywhere online, so play around with different combinations until you find the one that works best for you.

One final note: most people don’t search this way, so Google may suspect you’re a robot while you’re experimenting with operators. If it does, complete the CAPTCHA exercise to prove you’re human, and proceed with your search.

A Few Final Tricks for Edge Cases

While the other search operators can be used for anyone performing any job search, these final three operators really only work for very specific scenarios.

• If browsing the entirety of the web is just too overwhelming but you still want to save time searching for jobs, use the following search to get results from specific job boards—but without having to visit each one separately:

This search tells Google to pull results from only LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Do the same thing with as many sites as you’re interested in checking by adding additional OR and site: operators for each additional job board you want to check.

• If you want to look at the career pages of specific companies instead of searching the entire web—but you aren’t sure what companies you’re interested in—use the related: operator to look for companies similar to one you already like.

If you’re interested in working for Zapier, for example—but Zapier doesn’t have any relevant open positions—this search produces homepage results for companies that are similar to Zapier.

• If you’re only looking for education or government jobs, use the site: operator to limit results to .edu or .gov domains.

This search would only produce results from sites with .edu TLDs, simplifying the process of finding jobs posted on school and university websites.

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Once you find a combination of search operators that displays the best results, save the exact search term used, and repeat your search every day/week.

Remember to narrow results by date to limit them to things that were published since the last time you searched, and you’ll get results for brand new jobs that are very relevant your goals and interests every time you search.

Keep Reading:
- Search Smarter: 30+ Google Search Tricks You Might Not Already Know
- How to Land Your Dream Job with One Spreadsheet
- How to Find and Get Hired for a Remote Job
- Growth Hacking Your Job Search: 5 Steps to Get Hired by the Company You Want

source https://zapier.com/blog/google-search-operators-job-hunt/

Steal This Workflow: How a Whitewater Rafting Business Automatically Processes Forms

Running the family business comes with its own unique stresses and expectations. There's the brand—established before you were born—and, tied into that, a standard that customers expect. Plus, the day-to-day operations and maintenance required of any company.

Add whitewater, rafts, camping, and adventures and you get Kern River Outfitters. Founded in 1978 by Bob Volpert, Kern River Outfitters provides guided rafting tours in Idaho, Oregon, and the Kern River in California. Bob's three sons, Matt, Will, and Skip now own the rafting business, each managing a different river in each state.

Taking adventurers out on the Kern River and running the business is Matt Volpert. "Being an adventure activity operator means we generate thousands of online waivers," he explains. "These aren't straightforward name, signature and date forms either. They include allergies, emergency contact info, and more, so it's quite a bit of data."

Matt had himself a "Eureka!" moment while talking marketing, trends, and efficiency with a friend and fellow business owner who mentioned app automation tool Zapier. Matt soon learned that instead of spending hour upon hour processing thousands of waivers, Zapier could do it all for him instantly and automatically.

Instantly Create and Add Forms to a CRM

Kern River Outfitters runs guided trips all along the Kern River in southern California. This particular river has a bit of everything to offer, too: easier, Class II rapids on up to wild Class Vs. You can spend as little as two hours on the river or two days adventuring in the wild with Kern River Outfitters.

With such varied trips—and so many natural variables—waivers are a necessity. But that doesn't mean they're fun.

"[Processing waivers] was just brutal. Processing took hours and even worse, it was monotonous," Matt says. "So what we had was an important job that not only took hours but was boring as well."

When Kern River Outfitters received a waiver, Matt would have to enter the data into customer relationship manager (CRM), Streak. With an adventuring season lasting from April or May through the entire summer, the number of waivers the company processed was in the thousands.

Now, Matt uses a Zap—a bridge between two or more apps—to connect Formsite to their CRM. When a customer fills out a waiver through Formsite, Zapier automatically takes their information and creates a new box in Streak. Boxes in Streak contain customer data and, in this case, that information could be about an allergy or emergency contact information.

This Zap gives Matt's river guides easy access to anything they need to look out for, like a peanut allergy. So while your business may not need waivers, if you collect customer information, this Zap will instantly add all that data to your CRM.

Build Your Newsletter List with MailChimp

It's not just waivers Zapier helps Kern River Outfitters with: Matt also builds his newsletter lists with automated workflows. Any visitor to their website can opt in to join the newsletter by filling out a quick form from GetSiteControl. When the future-adventurer enters their email, Zapier gets to work!

For each new GetSiteControl entry, Zapier adds the customer's email address and name to a MailChimp list. No copy and paste needed—it's all done instantly.

To go one step further, Matt built a second Zap. This one takes new MailChimp subscribers and creates a box for them in Streak. With this box, Matt can track this customer's journey from newsletter sign-up on through to a booked adventure.

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If you spend your days helping big groups navigate whitewater rapids and go camping, managing waivers takes time away from the outdoors. By bringing Zapier into Kern River Outfitters' regular workflows, Matt and his river guides spend less time fighting a torrent of paperwork and more time battling actual torrents.

All images courtesy of Kern River Outfitters.

What's your story? Tell us how you use Zapier to do more. You can also read even more customer stories and find new ways to improve your workflow and productivity.

source https://zapier.com/blog/instantly-add-forms-crm/

Steal This Workflow: Bambu by Sprout Social Efficiently Curates Content for Enterprise Clients

When you work with enterprise clients, expectations tend to rise. From support and service to the client relationship itself, the experience must be seamless.

Sprout Social, the social media management, analytics and advocacy solutions provider, knows this well. One of their solutions, Bambu, is a platform that simplifies employee advocacy—the act of a company's staff promoting the organization—on social media. To that end, Bambu enables companies to curate approved content and provide suggested social messages so their employees can easily read and share company and industry news.

Advocacy at this level can bring your company stellar recruits, increase brand awareness, and promote your products and services. To help manage growing demand and support clients with targeted content curation, the Bambu services team looked to automate content curation, alerts, and filtering relevant content. For all this, they turned to app automation tool Zapier.

"Zapier helps Bambu customers, by way of our services team, be more productive in the area of content curation."Stephan Hovnanian, Content Solutions Architect, Bambu by Sprout Social

Automatically Curate Content from Multiple Sources

"We use Zapier to quickly and automatically feed content into Bambu," says Stephan Hovnanian, Content Solutions Architect at Bambu by Sprout Social. "We source that content from a diverse pool of websites and social platforms, all tailored for the customer and their industry."

This Zap, our term for automated workflows, connects Feedly to Bambu, Digest by Zapier, and Email by Zapier. Digest by Zapier rounds up content, notifications, etc., and sends it off in one go to summarize the content the services team has curated.

When Bambu's services team adds a relevant article in Feedly, Zapier creates a new story from that article within the Sources tab in Bambu so that it can be reviewed and curated for the client’s team.

Simultaneously, Digest by Zapier adds these articles to a scheduled digest. Finally, when the scheduled time arrives, Email by Zapier sends the digest out to the client’s program administrator as a summary of content available for their review.

With this workflow, Bambu by Sprout Social gave time back to their services team. No more manually triggered emails or building a digest piece by piece. In order to scale their offerings for enterprise clients, the team embraced the old adage: work smarter, not harder.

We broke this content curation workflow into a few different Zaps, the better to customize for your own process. Pick and choose the parts you need or give the whole a thing a try:

Cut Through the Noise with Automatic Filters

Multiple clients means multiple feeds. Multiple feeds means a lot of content. Not all of the content related to a client or their industry is ripe for employee advocacy, though. To avoid having an employee—or several—sort through each piece, the Bambu services team uses Filter by Zapier.

"You can imagine how noisy these feeds get," Stephan says. "Zapier's filtering capabilities help us ensure only specific and relevant types of content are fed into Bambu for employees to share."

Stephan and his colleagues on the Bambu services team cut through the noise with a Zap aimed at finding specific keywords in content. By filtering based on keyword, the services team can automatically deliver relevant content to their clients.

The Zap starts with RSS by Zapier. When a new piece hits an RSS feed, Zapier filters the piece, looking for a specific keyword. If the content contains the keyword, Zapier creates a Story for it within the Sources tab in Bambu.

Track Errors in Slack

Try as you might to avoid them, errors pop up even in the most efficient workflows. Maybe a connection reset. An app might experience an outage. Either way, with Zapier playing a crucial role in the Bambu team's curation workflows, should something go awry, their services team is notified immediately in Slack.

"Zapier's namesake app has proven to be quite useful to track errors with customer Zaps," Stephan says. "We combine it with Slack to help us stay on top of critical errors with customer Zaps."

Any time Zapier returns an error in a Zap, the Sprout Social team receives a message in Slack. This message tells the team which Zap errored and when, so they can determine whether or not customer outreach is necessary to troubleshoot.

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Where Bambu creates a simple path to employee advocacy, Zapier cuts through the weeds of complicated workflows. With content curation simplified, the Bambu services team can focus on developing relationships with their clients and ensuring their employee advocacy programs are engaging, strategic and successful.

All images courtesy of Sprout Social.

What's your story? Tell us how you use Zapier to do more. You can also read even more customer stories and find new ways to improve your workflow and productivity.

source https://zapier.com/blog/automatically-curate-content/

Best of 2017: 30 Web Apps and Software Trends That Ruled the Workplace

Sometimes new isn't new, it's just a better version of the old thing. Spreadsheets, for instance, are ancient—the first software people often bought for their first PC over three decades ago. And yet, they're still one of today's most important software.

The grid and functions are much the same. Everything else is new.

2017's most popular software proved that to be true across the industry. Among the best new apps and fastest growing software were echoes of the past, the forms and spreadsheets and emails we've used for decades. And yet, there's something new behind each one—tweaks that will change the way you work next year.

Here are the apps you should be using in 2018 and the trends they highlight in the software industry as 2017 comes to a close.

Finding the Most Popular New Business Software

Every business today relies on software to operate smoothly. Increasingly, these tools have moved to the web, allowing everyone to work from anywhere. But manually moving information between these apps is still a pain.

That's where Zapier comes in. We connect over 900 web apps so you can automate tasks and create workflows between your favorite tools. Instead of copying and pasting data, you can automatically send information from one business productivity tool to another.

That gives us a front row seat to the tools today's most innovative businesses use to run their businesses. Last year, we dug through our data and found the Fastest Growing Apps of 2016—the popular new apps and the dependable existing software that grew the fastest in the workplace last year.

We went through our popular apps again this year, and found the software you should consider using, broken down into: the Fastest Growing Apps, the Top New Apps, and our Top 10 apps in 2017.

Our Fastest Growing Apps in 2017 included a number of the most popular apps from last year, including Facebook Lead Ads, Google Forms, Excel, ClickFunnels, and Kajabi. Here's the full list:

1. Facebook Lead Ads
2. Zoom
3. Google Forms
4. Excel
5. Drip
6. Big Cartel
7. Airtable
8. Kajabi
9. Webflow
10. ClickFunnels

Then, from brand new apps to new tools from established brands—and older apps who have recently added an API, our most popular new apps are the tools you should consider using in the new year:

1. ManyChat
2. LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
3. Dubsado
4. Zenkit
5. Mailshake
6. Paperform
7. Bonjoro
8. Facebook Offline Conversions
9. Hootsuite
10. Twist

2017 Software Trends

At first glance, software doesn't look much different at the end of 2017 than it did at the start of year. Dig deeper, though, and behind the smaller changes and tweaks you'll find larger trends in the industry.

Social media is the new way to gather data. If you advertise online, odds are you used a new app this year without thinking about it. Facebook Lead Ads and Facebook Offline Conversions—along with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms—let you gather data right from your ads. Instead of an annoying banner ad, you can offer a discount to followers and get their contact info in the process. Or build a chatbot with Manychat, and get contact info whenever anyone asks your company a question. In 2018, smart ads that instantly gather data for your business will be the way you'll want to advertise so you can contact people who see your ad.

You'll still send email in 2018—perhaps more than ever—but they won't be the same messages as before. This year's most popular apps included tools like Drip and Kajabi to send info to your leads with automated emails, Mailshake to contact new people with emails that get replies, Bonjoro to send videos instead of text emails, and ClickFunnels to build a landing page and send emails all from one app. Traditional emails don't cut it anymore. The emails that work today are customized for each recipient without requiring you to hand-write each one.

The best software works together. Some of 2017's most popular apps—Excel, Hootsuite, Google Forms, and Zoom—aren't exactly new ideas. What is new is that they have an API, an application programming interface that lets them work with other apps. Google Forms doesn't just save data to your spreadsheet now; it can send data to any other app you want. Excel isn't just on your computer—it's in the cloud, gathering data and putting it to work while you sleep. Hootsuite for years has been a great way to see all of your social networks together—now with its publishing API, you can automatically publish updates on all your networks, too. Odds are, most of the software you rely on today has an API, so it can connect to all of your other apps—Expect to increasingly rely on such integrations from new apps and updated legacy apps alike to get work done faster in 2018.

Here are more of this year's software trends—and what you'll need to put them to work for your business next year:

Everyone Needs Leads

If there's one trend that ties this year's most popular apps together, it's that gathering leads and figuring out which of your ads are actually working is suddenly easy. Run a Facebook Lead Ad or LinkedIn Lead Gen Form campaign, and when someone clicks your ad, they can automatically share their name, email, and more with your company—contact info they've already added to their social media profile. Or, give your customers a personal touch with a ManyChat Facebook Messenger bot that can chat with your customers and ask for their email—or a Mailshake outreach email that's more likely to turn a cold lead into an interested potential customer. You'll get more data, no traditional forms required.

Need more info or want something that fits into your own website? Google Forms and Paperform forms both give you new ways to quickly build forms, while Webflow and ClickFunnels help you build new landing pages to promote your products with a form for more info to gather leads. Or, build a form that saves leads to your CRM automatically with Dubsado.

All that's left is to follow up with automated emails from Drip or a Bonjoro video email that's bound to grab people's attention. Use that to direct them to your Big Cartel store or Kajabi course or brick-and-mortar store—with Facebook Offline Conversions to track sales and the ads that led to them, no matter where your customers make the purchase.

It's a sales loop that's easier than ever to close with apps and integrations.

Social Media Got a Job

With a $4.7 billion profit last quarter and record-high stock prices, Facebook is the network few can afford to quit using—your business included.

It still starts with engagement, sharing new content with followers so they remember your brand. Hootsuite's new API and integrations can help. After years of being a popular way to manage multiple social networks in one place, Hootsuite can now tap into your other favorite apps to automatically share your blog posts and favorite articles or re-share your posts across all your social networks.

Then, you can market to your followers and turn that attention into sales. After being last year's top new app, Facebook Lead Ads's phenomenal growth put it as Zapier's fastest growing app of 2017. It—along with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms—offers a new take on ads, with customer data that lets you follow up with everyone who taps your ad.

Tie it all together with Facebook's newest tool, Facebook Offline Conversions. Share your customers—from your Point of Sales software in your real store or your eCommerce app in an online store—with Facebook, and it'll help you see how your ads and marketing turned into customers.

Spreadsheets Are Still the Killer App

Spreadsheets are malleable, flexible, customizable tools that manage our accounting, organize our contact lists, and tell us if we're hitting our goals. And they've kept up with the times. After decades of being tied to desktop computers, Microsoft Excel finally gained an API last year—bringing even more workflows to the cloud this year. Instead of copying data into your spreadsheet manually, your form and survey results can get added to Excel as soon as they come in—getting work done while you sleep.

Need more flexibility than a spreadsheet? Airtable—another popular new app that returns this year as a fastest growing app—offers a new take on the database to visually link data while still crunching numbers with spreadsheet-like functions.

And when you need to gather data for your work, Google Forms is a great way to grab it. Use it in a team that uses G Suite, and it'll save each person's contact details along with their form details automatically. It's yet another way to gather more data without having to ask for it.

Email's Not Dead

Right alongside spreadsheets in tech's hall of fame sits email, the communications tool that refuses to die. We might be chatting with our teams more than ever, but we still send an awful lot of email. Increasingly, it's the tool we use to stay in touch with customers and reach out to new people.

Have new people to email? Mailshake gives you templates to make your first email give the right impression. Pitch your product, then follow up later with automated emails if they're interested. Or use Drip—a new part of the Leadpages family of apps—to send personalized emails that get customers to come back to your store.

Or send an enhanced email instead of a regular text one. Bonjoro replaces the time-honed text in your messages with a quick video—something more personal that's all-but guaranteed to grab people's attention. It's the closest we've gotten to Snapchat for Business yet.

Hello, New Phone

Video calls suddenly became commonplace. One day we were doing well if we got through a Skype conversation without a dropped call; the next, everyone's FaceTiming their way through grocery store aisles as if it's easier to video chat rather than call.

Zoom brought that to the workplace. We’ve had team video chat for years, marred by stutters and constant updates and buzzing fans. Zoom simplified it, making team video calls as simple as any other call.

Or you might not even need video calls. Team chat has taken the workplace by storm over the past few years, led by industry standbys like HipChat and newer entrants like Slack. The team behind Todoist found them too noisy, with constant ongoing conversations and notifications. So they built Twist, a new team chat tool focused on discussion threads. You start a new discussion, and when it’s done, you’re done.

You Still Need a Website

Social media may be the best way to reach new people, but the web’s still here to stay—and your brand needs its own presence on it. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is the way you build them. Instead of hand-coding a site or slicing a PSD design into image assets, Webflow gives you a Photoshop-style designer in your browser where you can build any site you can imagine. It was one of the most popular apps on Product Hunt when it launched 3 years ago, and this year its new built-in form builder and integrations made it one of our most popular new apps.

Selling stuff on your site? Big Cartel's eCommerce platform focused on smaller, artisanal brands has been building a following since 2005 with their steady release of new features—enough to land them on our fastest growing list this year. It's a simple way to run a full store online with the design you want. Or, for a newer way to sell products, ClickFunnels proved popular this year for easy-to-build sites that get people to sign up for more info about your product or buy it all from one page.

They're all the same basic websites we've been using for years, with tweaks that make them far easier for you to launch.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed…

Sometimes that new approach is all that you need—something that shines through in a number of our most popular apps. Take Paperform, our 5th most popular new app this year. It takes two old things—a long-form document and a form—and merges them together into a new way to gather data online. Your signup form is not just text fields, it's a guide to your event that also helps people sign up.

Zenkit does something similar for projects. It combines a to-do list, Kanban board, spreadsheet, calendar, and mind map, and lets you visualize tasks the way that works best for you. 5 apps for the price of one.

Teaching an online course? How about combining a landing page builder to advertise your class, an eCommerce store to sell it, a streaming video solution to share your lessons, and community tools to chat with your students? That's what Kajabi offers for an all-in-one educational tool.

Dubsado does the same for freelancers and small businesses. It's a form builder to gather leads, a proposal and invoice tool, a project management tool, and more—everything you need to do client work.

If all the good ideas are already taken, these apps prove there's still room to make them better.

The Top 10 Apps in 2017

Then there are the kings of the hill, the titans of industry, the software that everyone knows of. Perhaps they're not as new and exciting, but the business apps that anyone could name off the top of their head are crucially important—they are what continue to help make the world go 'round.

In today's SaaS powered world, these are the giants we rely on:

1. G Suite: Among the over 900 apps that work with Zapier, Google's apps consistently are among the most popular. G Suite's apps are the office tools teams around the world rely on to get work done from anywhere. It's not just that they're online—it's that they're better because they're online. You can get new data in Google Sheets and have files saved in Google Drive automatically with Google Forms, while your team collaborate across time zones with Google Calendar's scheduling tools and Google Docs' co-editing features, with Gmail tying it all together. It's hard to imagine the world of web apps without them. Learn how Google's cloud partners are using G Suite and the Google Cloud.
2. Facebook Business: It might be the site where we waste more time than any other, but Facebook is increasingly a work tool, too. Facebook Pages are the first web presence for many new brands. Facebook Lead Ads and even Instagram are increasingly the best places to advertise your brand and drive awareness inside the world's most popular social networks.
3. MailChimp: The monkey won. MailChimp's smart email features has kept it one of the most popular ways to send email newsletters, drip messages, and even transactional emails. With its new landing page tool, it's a one-stop-shop to gather leads and share more info about your brand.
4. Trello: Toyota invented Kanban, but Trello put it on the map. Its simple Kanban boards changed the way we thought about organizing tasks and made project management fun again. And its new Power-ups make your Kanban cards even more powerful while still remaining simple.
5. Typeform: Turns out forms don't have to be overwhelming. Typeform took away everything other than the question at hand, letting you see one question at a time before jumping into the next. If only our exams in school could have felt this peaceful. Check out Typeform's interview with Zapier CEO Wade Foster.
6. Twitter: 140 characters were enough to start a revolution, to put each of our passing thoughts into a firehose of real-time data. It's still the quickest way to find details about ongoing news and events, and is still one of concisest places on the internet even after doubling its message character limit.
7. Slack: Slack revolutionized the way teams talk, and convinced the world we needed chat apps for every team we're in. Today Slack's more than just a place to talk—it's a business hub where you make decisions and automate work with bots and use far too many emoji.
8. Asana: To-do lists are simple. Team projects are anything but. Asana took the most important part of team projects with the simplest parts of to-do lists for a better way to manage your work.
9. Evernote: Remember everything with your "second brain" sounds a lofty calling, but it's what Evernote promises to do. It's just a notebook app—but somehow, after you file away years of receipts and web clippings and random ideas into it, suddenly it does seem a bit like a the memory extension you've always wished for.
10. Dropbox: The original folder that magically syncs everything in it, Dropbox made sharing files between devices and teams so simple you never have to think about it. It changed the way we think about files. Now it's hard to imagine a world where you can't get your most important files from anywhere and build file workflows with Dropbox automations.

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Fastest Growing App Details

Ready to start using some of this year's most popular software in your team? Here are more details about each of our 10 fastest growing apps in 2017, and how you can put them to work for your business:

1. Facebook Lead Ads

Our most popular new app of 2016 is back at it again this year as Zapier's fastest-growing app of 2017: Facebook Lead Ads. And for good reason. Online ads are typically forgettable at best—and wildly annoying at worst. Facebook Lead Ads are still ads, but with one small tweak to make them better for everyone: Offers.

You build an ad around an offer, perhaps of a discount or free sample. You show it to a targeted audience of people who are already inclined to like your product. And when someone clicks the ad to get your offer, they also give you their contact info automatically without having to fill in a form, giving you the chance to follow up and close the deal. Suddenly you'll know exactly which half of your ad budget is performing.

2. Zoom

Video calls are nothing new. Good video calls, though—that's still the holy grail for many teams. Zoom seems to have cracked the nut. It's the group video call tool we rely on at Zapier—and we're not alone. Zapier users are increasingly switching to Zoom for their calls, making it our second fastest-growing app this year.

And the app only keeps getting better. It's reliable and stable for most video calls, with simple scheduling and recording tools to get the most out of your calls. If the future of calls is in virtual reality worlds (as Facebook's Oculus team thinks), Zoom is ready for that too with its new augmented reality support to put the presenter in a virtual world. And if you need transcripts, you soon won't have to rely only on recordings—Zoom's working on an AI-powered tool to transcribe meeting recordings (in beta).

→ Learn more on the Zoom blog

3. Google Forms

Sometimes the best products come from existing ones. Google Forms started out as a feature in Google Sheets to gather data for spreadsheets. Google spun it out as its own app, gave it the newest design of all G Suite's apps, and suddenly it was the best way to build forms for free—and our second most popular new app last year.

It kept that momentum up this year with more features to make it an even better standalone forms app. Google Forms can now validate form responses, upload files directly to Google Drive, and turn your form into a self-grading quiz. And with Google Forms add-ons, you can organize responses, make PDF documents from form results, limit responses, and more—all in a form builder that comes free with every G Suite account.

4. Microsoft Excel Online

We've been crunching numbers and finding trends in Excel for decades—so it's about time Excel started doing the work for us. With last year's launch of Microsoft Excel Online's API, your favorite spreadsheet can now keep crunching numbers while you sleep.

Sync your spreadsheet with Office 365's OneDrive or make a new spreadsheet online, then connect it with other apps and your spreadsheet can gather data and kick off automated workflows on its own. It's the best upgrade Office has had in years.

4. Drip

You can't sit with every customer and guide them through using your product—but Drip gives you the next best thing. Its automated email sequences are easy to set up and give you an simple way to teach people about your product, build an email-powered course, or encourage trial users to make a purchase.

This year, it joined the Leadpages family of apps to give you a one-stop-shop for marketing your products. Build a landing page in Leadpages, add the contacts who fill out your form to Drip, then sit back and relax. You'll automatically get new customers who know how to use your products, without having to hold anyone's hand.

→ Learn more on the Drip blog

6. Big Cartel

Sometimes slow and steady wins the race. Big Cartel has been building eCommerce software for over a decade, focused on smaller, indie shops that need a simpler way to sell stuff online. But simple doesn't mean simplistic. It takes the complexity away while still helping businesses create customized online stores and sell their products.

And it keeps getting better. This year, the Big Cartel team redesigned their store admin to make it easier to run your store, revamped their mobile app, and made it easier to sell stuff in-person right from your phone. You can list your products, rely on integrations to share your products online and manage your orders, and still sell stuff in your brick-and-mortar store all from the same app.

7. Airtable

Databases power our lives—they're what make most of the software we rely on, from calendar apps to project management tools, run. And yet, to many people, they're geeky, complicated tools best left for developers.

Then there's Airtable, the new database app that's made us love databases all over again. It's as simple to use as a spreadsheet, with tools to link data that help you build far more powerful workflows than you ever could with spreadsheet functions. It was last year's fastest growing app—and this year, it's still growing fast enough to make our top 10. If you haven't used it already, the new Airtable Universe has dozens of ideas to help you start organizing your work and life in the easiest-to-use database yet.

→ Learn more on the Airtable blog

8. Kajabi

You've got ideas and experience, something you could teach others. You don't have a classroom or time to teach a course or students interested in learning. So Kajabi does for education what eCommerce apps did for stores. It was our 8th most popular new app last year—and this year kept its momentum to land in our fastest growing list. And little wonder when you see how easy it makes building courses.

Just record videos and audio with your lessons, write down study notes, and add them to Kajabi to build an online course in an afternoon. Then, with Kajabi's new pipelines tool, you can build a landing page to market your class, let people sign up and pay for your class, then teach your entire course online with automated emails to remind students to keep at it.

9. Webflow

Ever wished you could design websites the same way you lay out presentations in PowerPoint or design graphics in Photoshop—while still getting clean HTML and CSS code? Webflow made that a reality with its online web designer. It's one of the easiest ways to get the website design you want without having write a line of code.

Webflow isn't just for basic landing pages and blogs. With this year's new Interactions tool, you can make animated websites in pure CSS, with simple tools to help you design anything you want. Once your site's designed, filling it out is easier now, too, with Webflow's CSV import to bring products, blog posts, and more into your site. And if you don't have time to design everything, there's a new Experts page to find someone that can help you build a site in Webflow, too—with the same simple site editor so you can tweak your site anytime you want.

→ Learn more on the Webflow blog

10. ClickFunnels

Want a simpler website, one to promote a single product, capture leads, and get customers all from one page? That's what ClickFunnels offers—a single page online to run your online business. It's built around funnels, forms that gather leads, send them automated messages about your product, and then get them to come back and make a purchase.

You can add as detailed of funnels as you want. Running a webinar? Make a new ClickFunnels page to promote your event, sign up attendees, and stream your presentation all from the same app. Just need leads for your business? Make a site and a form to gather those leads all in one place. It's one of the quickest ways to go from new idea to paying customers.

→ Learn more on the ClickFunnels blog

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Top New Apps in 2017

The best thing about new apps isn't just that they're new—it's that they typically help you do something new. They offer something radically different that you couldn't get before or improve what came before to help you accomplish more. It's the latter category where many of this year's best apps landed. From forms and ads to social and chat, they remixed great ideas into something even better.

These are the new apps with APIs that launched on Zapier over the past year and were most popular in 2017:

1. ManyChat

Check any brand's Facebook Page, and under nearly every post will be questions about pricing, features, and a half-dozen other things people are curious about. You don't have time to answer every question, but ManyChat—this year's fastest growing new app on Zapier—does.

Use it to build Facebook Messenger bots that automatically answer your customers' most common questions. Then follow up with scheduled replies that offer discounts or share tips about your product and close the sale.

2. LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

Facebook's vast audience makes it a great place to advertise your products, but for B2B sales and professional tools, the LinkedIn might prove a more focused audience. Its new LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms were popular this year thanks to the wide range of data you can gather with your ad forms.

Make an ad in LinkedIn as normal, and this time, add on a form that asks for your lead's email, name, company, position, and more—all of which can be pre-filled from their LinkedIn profile. Then, whenever someone clicks on your ad, you'll get all of that info that your Zapier automations can add to marketing tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Pardot, and more to followup and close the sale.

3. Dubsado

You build forms, put them on your website to get prospective leads, reach out with email and surveys to turn them into customers, send proposals for the work they want you to do, break that down into tasks for your team, then bill them with an invoice for the tasks you did and the time it took. That could easily require a half dozen apps—or you could do it all with Dubsado, the most popular new project manager on Zapier this year.

Dubsado's designed for handling everything your client focused businesses does. Need to gather signatures, share your appointment calendar so things don't get double-booked, accept payments, and see your sales? You'll find all of that along with the other core project management features to manage your full business from one place.

4. Zenkit

When ideas strike, sometimes it's easiest to write them down in a list. Perhaps you'll want to sketch the connection between ideas in a mind map as your project takes shape. Spreadsheet tables are an easy way to add more details to your task than opening each task and editing it individually, and a calendar's better for scheduling. Once you're actually working, a Kanban board can be a great way to track how close each task is to being finished.

Your projects don't need a half-dozen different apps as you take your ideas to completion. Zenkit can do it all from one place. Instead of building a better to-do list, Kanban board, or calendar, Zenkit built a great tool for them all so you can plan, tweak, and organize tasks the way that works best for what you're doing right then. It's the project management app that works the way you want to, every time.

→ Learn more on the Zenkit blog

5. Mailshake

Can't think of what to say when emailing someone new? Join the club. It's far to easy to waste time thinking of the perfect thing to say—so let Mailshake think of it for you. It comes with a wide range of outreach email templates that you can customize for your audience and personalize automatically with names, links, company info, and more.

Then, whenever you get a new lead, use Mailshake automations to add those new contacts, form entries, spreadsheet rows, and more to Mailshake to start the conversation without you having to think about it. It'll even automatically followup later with personalized emails. You'll only have to think once about the best way to reach out—Mailshake will take care of the rest.

6. Paperform

You don't need a form. You need to tell people about your event and let them sign up for it. You need to ask customers what problem they're having and help them fix it. You need to showcase a product and sell it.

Paperform's a new take on forms and landing pages that can do it all. Instead of needing to build a site that explains your product or event and add a form to gather signups or orders, just build a Paperform form with the fields you need. You can then also include any text and media you need to tell your story, sell your ideas, and convince people to actually fill out the form. It's a new way to make forms that takes one of the most challenging steps out of the equation.

→ Learn more on the Paperform blog

7. Bonjoro

Whenever people buy your product or sign up for your newsletter, odds are you send them a thank you email that gets promptly deleted. Bonjoro lets you go beyond with a unique video for every new customer for a modern take on the plain text email message.

Use integrations to add your new customers to Bonjoro, and you'll get a queue of new emails you need to send. Then grab your phone, hit record, and start talking. Thank the person for signing up, share tips about using your product, and give them the personal touch that you could typically only get in a local small store. It's one of the most fun new things that's landed in our inboxes.

8. Facebook Offline Conversions

Facebook's rich user data makes it a great place to advertise your products to the people who are most likely to buy. Or so you think—but did the people who saw your ad actually end up buying your product? Facebook's new Offline Conversions tool is a popular new way to find out—and it's powered by integrations to help you learn about your customers automatically.

With Facebook Offline Events, you can add your customers from your real-world store or an eCommerce site where you can't track conversions automatically with Facebook. Facebook will then be able to tell you if someone saw your ad online and then made a purchase, so you can see the value of your ad and how to improve it to increase sales. And, you can make sure you quit showing your ad to people who've already bought your product, so you're less likely to annoy customers.

9. Hootsuite

There are far too many social networks to keep up with them all—but your brand can hardly afford to skip any of them. Hootsuite's long been a popular way to see content from over 35 social networks in one place to make sure you don't miss out on anything people say about your company. And with its new publishing focused API, you can automatically publish content on all of those networks.

Connect your blog, RSS feed, campaign spreadsheet, eCommerce app, or any other software to Hootsuite with its new integrations. Then just publish new content and ship new products as normal, and your integrations can take care of the rest, spreading the word on all of your social networks.

→ Learn more about Hootsuite integrations

10. Twist

Team chat's great until it's not. It's an amazing way for everyone in the company to talk about ideas, no matter where they are—and yet it can also be the most distracting app in the workplace, the place where ideas get half-discussed then burred under the other conversations. The Todoist team thought chat should be better at helping you make decisions and get work done, so they built Twist.

It's a new take on team chat that's focused just on threads. Have a new idea? Start a new thread, discuss it, and turn what you decided into tasks to complete. Then get back to work—and start a new thread when you need something new. It'll keep you more focused, and make team chat a place to actually turn ideas into decisions.

→ Learn more from the Twist blog

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All the best things have already been invented—or so it seems. Electric cars? They're still vehicles with 4 wheels that get you from A to B. Smartphones? Phones with bigger screens—or computers with smaller screens. Web apps? Simplified software in a browser without an install disk. We're just reinventing the wheel a thousand times over.

Perhaps. Sometimes, though, it's the paring and polishing that makes a good thing great.

Telephones were invented in 1876, for instance, but it took decades of tweaks and improvements to make it a reliable, global service. 14 decades of innovation later, and today we're surprised if our international video conference calls have even a second of delay.

Software restarted the cycle. We're still filling out forms and crunching data in spreadsheets, emailing clients and filling up virtual shopping carts just like we did in the `90’s—but the software we're doing it with has been reinvented. And that—the new takes on original software ideas—is what's proved most popular this year. It's what brought us the apps we'll use to be most productive in 2018.

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Share these apps and trends with your team with a PDF copy of Zapier's 30 Web Apps and Software Trends That Ruled the Workplace report:

source https://zapier.com/blog/fastest-growing-apps/