6 ifttt recipes that can make you a better entrepreneur

Hello guys, this is my first post here on Rodinhoods and before I head into the actual post I would like to tell a few things. I have been lurking around this forum for a few days now and I have tried to absorb as much knowledge as I can from this amazing forum. 

There are some rather interesting posts here which made my day, especially this post.  There are so many things that I have learnt from my industry which I want to share with you people and make your life a tad bit easier. Let me introduce myself to you guys first. 

Well, I am Sanjay Shenoy , based out of Bangalore and I just started my own digital marketing agency called Clickmeister but I have been freelancing from the past 4 and a half years and my head is filled with ideas which I will be executing in the near future. 

Since being in the digital marketing sphere, a lot of my time is spent in reading. I read a lot of stuff, like a lot! A good 3-4 hours of my day is spent reading and the rest of the day I spend addressing clients and implementing the ideas that I gathered from reading. One suggestion I would like to give to every entrepreneur is, try to read as much as possible. It will help you give some perspective about a lot of things, including your business of course. 

So I would like to start off my journey here on Rodinhoods by sharing something with you that can help you immensely, especially in saving time and organizing things without much manual intervention. This can be applied in any business since it is so flexible ( and pretty darn cool ) and best of all whatever I am going to share with you can be implemented free of cost! 

WARNING : This post might be a little overwhelming in the beginning, but it will make sense later. I promise. 

IFTTT. ( Wait wut? ) 

IFTTT is an amazing tool that helps you automate a lot of things on the web and make your life a lot easier ( so that you can focus on getting that
million dollar deal ) . 

Apart from being a weird looking word, IFTTT stands for If This Then That. To make the tools ( or rather the service ) work for you you basically need 4 elements : 

1. Channel : Basically any service that IFTTT supports ( Here is the list ) . It can be anything like Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox etc. Let’s take Twitter for an example.
2. Trigger : Anything that happens on the channel is a trigger. If we take Twitter for example, I can set the trigger to be #therodinhoods.
3. Action : Something that you want to happen or will happen on another channel . For example, if anyone tweets with the hashtag #therodinhoods then I can make IFTTT post the tweet on my Facebook page, automatically. 
4. Ingredients : The data that makes up the trigger. In this example that ingredient would be the twitter hashtag.

Now when you put all this together you get an IFTTT recipe. So to recap the entire recipe we just made, whenever someone tweets with the hashtag #therodinhoods ( If this )  IFTTT will automatically post it on Facebook page ( Then That ).

Confused?Don’t give up yet, you are an entrepreneur! If you are still confused I will put some ideas here which you can use through IFTTT. 

1.Use IFTTT to stay updated with the Rodinhoods!

The moment I visited this forum I knew this would be awesome, so I set up an IFTTT recipe for Rodinhoods! What it does is whenever some one posts a new thread in the discussions, I will be notified via email. ( I told you I read a lot ) So when this happens I quickly glance through the thread see if it interests me and interact if necessary.Keeps me abreast with all the things happening here on Rodinhood You can also use this recipe and you can find it here: https://ifttt.com/recipes/100676

( You can practically use it for any site and it can be quite powerful if you use it the right way, just tweak around a little bit. If you need to use it on any other site apart from this site then you need to get the RSS feed of that page and replace it with the one I have given in the recipe above )

2. For all you people who are selling online. 

I have sold things online and organizing and keeping a tab on things can be a little time consuming which is why I use this recipe. What it does is whenever you get an email from your payment processor or ecommerce platform with words “ Order” or “Receipt” in it, it will automatically add a row in a pre specified spreadsheet on Google drive with all the order details! Now, I have a list of all the orders I have had so far and I didnt have to manually enter things, which has saved me a lot of time. You can ofcourse modify the recipe to however you want it to be. 

3. When you get a new follower on Twitter, send him a welcome message. 

Unless you are under a rock, you should be using social media to leverage upon your targeted audience. This audience you get is priceless because there is a good chance they can be your potential customers so it is important to treat them nicely. You can set up IFTTT to send a custom message every time you get a new follower on Twitter. There are tons of recipes on the IFTTT website itself which you can modify and use for your own use . Here is a link to the nest recipes which uses hootsuite. https://ifttt.com/recipes/search?q=hootsuite 

( Hootsuite is a social media management platform ) 

4.Manage your sales staff or even yourself!

This is something I use personally to keep a track of my client meetings. What this recipe does is, every time you check in with Foursquare ( its a free app ) it will automatically add the details of the checkin to my Google Drive, including Google maps location ( talk about awesomeness! )Here is the recipe : https://ifttt.com/recipes/58835 You can make this twice as cooler and more usefully by using it with Google calendar also. Whenever you check in, it will automatically add an event in your calendar, so that you know when you have met whom and you have it in a nice spreadsheet ( Bliss! ) https://ifttt.com/recipes/96757

5.Remind yourself on a particular day every month/week 

I know there are a lot of apps that act as reminders but when the reminder is in your email you tend not to forget about it. This is especially useful when you have a huge list of clients whom you should be collecting payments from or a huge list of services that you want to pay for every month. What this recipe does is, basically on a given day say 26th of every month , it will send you a reminder email automatically. You can create different recipes for different reminders and you can group all these reminders using filters on gmail . 

6.Convert starred items on Google reader to pdf and save it on dropbox. 

This is one of my favorite recipes. But unfortunately google reader is closing down soon so you can try an alternative reader ( Feedly is a great one ) and use the same recipe. Basically what this recipe does is whenever you star an item then it will convert the article/post into PDF ( via pdf my URL ) and then save it on your dropbox. This helps me organize amazing articles and blog posts across the internet to save it into PDF and on my computer/phone via dropbox. ( Try this recipe with this post if you liked it 🙂 ) Here is the recipe : https://ifttt.com/recipes/81742

The best part about IFTTT is that there are boat loads of other applications than what is mentioned here and you can use them to best fit you both in your professional life and personal life and save time. Also, one thing you have to remember is that you can create a chain of all these services so basically it can be if this then that then that then that and so on. The possibilities are limitless! 

Still confused? Shoot me an email sanjay[at]clickmeister.com or follow me on twitter @shenoy_sanjay.

If you liked this post I am pretty sure you will love my other post, please check it out : 

11 ways email hacks that can increase your productivity dramatically.