The Key Automations That Keep My Creator Business Running While I Sleep

[00:01] making money while they sleep, I'm more interested in figuring out how to keep my entire business running while I sleep. Right now, we have three key automations that help my creator business run behind the scenes. I'm

[00:14] talking in terms of output, creating and posting consistently, input, turning social media traffic into revenue, and collaborations and partnerships. So, in

[00:26] this video, you're going to learn the email automation that continues to make my money while I sleep, the automation we use that makes posting across multiple platforms easier than ever, and how to use Claude to streamline your

[00:41] incoming collaboration requests. Plus, at the end of this video, I want to share with you a bonus automation. This one only takes 5 minutes to set up, and use so that you never have to run out of content ideas ever again. The best part

[00:54] about this video is that I am joined today by Joe Zeppelin, a fellow YouTuber who loves to help creators and businesses use emerging technologies to grow online. And he'll be talking about one of these workflows since it's

[01:07] something that we both use. Joe is such a great guy. He's like the classic corporate guy turned YouTuber. So, we have a lot in common in terms of like our background in becoming YouTubers, and I genuinely think his content can

[01:19] help so many people. As always, timestamps are below. Use them if you need them, and let's jump in. Starting with our first automation, the comment to customer funnel. Now, this first automation completely changed the way

[01:32] that my business runs, and it's what I like to call the comment to customer funnel. Now, I know you've probably heard me talk about auto DMs before, you know, comment to DM automations, what we see online in short-form content when

[01:44] and I'll send you a blah blah blah blah blah." And yes, that is part of what this funnel is, but this is also focusing on what happens after somebody

[01:56] enters that automation, because that's where the real magic happens. Now, let me break this down for you and show you exactly what we do. So, for example, I recently had this video on Instagram go viral, and most people will go, "Yay,

[02:09] viral video, more eyeballs, more followers, woo!" But for me, this viral video actually means hundreds of people being funneled directly onto my email list, where they're given even more free value, and eventually upsold to my

[02:24] products, which means more revenue for my business. So, at the end of this viral video, I tell them to comment hooks one, and I'll send them my free guide with over 75 hook prompts or ideas. So, somebody comments on that

[02:37] Instagram, and the first automation that they get is the automation I have set up with ManyChat. Basically, ManyChat will send them a DM with the link where they can download my 75 hooks. To get this free resource, somebody has to enter in

[02:51] their email address in exchange for the freebie. Once their email address is received, another automation will begin. My email host platform, Kajabi, will deliver the guide to that person's inbox automatically. But that's not where we

[03:06] stop, because this is where my email list will do more work for us. I am telling you right now, email lists are not dead. Email lists are not dead. I truly, truly thought, anytime somebody was like, "Start an email list, start an

[03:20] me. I'm a content creator, I don't need that." You need it. Highly, 10 out of 10 student of mine who was able to use their email list to leave their 9-5, but

[03:32] real example from my business is we had an email sequence set up where we made an email sequence set up where we made $5,000 in 8 days, where only 200 people had gone through this email sequence. We needed 200 people to opt into this free

[03:48] resource, and within 8 days of having those emails going out, we made $5,000. didn't have to do anything. You just got them funneled into your email list. Now, works, and then we'll talk about my students' examples. So, depending on the

[04:03] free resource that somebody opts in for my business, the person will then get tagged and then entered into a full email sequence. Let me define two terms there. An email sequence is a series of emails that are automatically scheduled

[04:18] to go out one after another, each one with a different time delay. And then the tag tells us which email sequence should this person be put into, because in my business, we have multiple email sequences. In this case, the people

[04:32] entering our funnel, they are interested in the Hook Prompts. So, that tells our system, "Okay, this person's likely interested in growing organically using short-form video. So, let's put them in an email sequence that's relevant to

[04:46] email sequence where it's like, 'This is how to grow on YouTube,' or like, 'This is how to make your UGC content better.' You know, like we want to put them in a relevant email sequence. Then, if you're using an email sequence strategically,

[04:59] you're going to use those emails to introduce the person to some other resources, products, or even offers that you own that might help them and make passive income with those emails going out. Here's a screenshot of what some of

[05:12] kind of crazy, and you don't have to start there. You could literally set all this up, everything I'm talking about, all within just Stan Store. So, you automation, where the first email that you send out is an introduction to you.

[05:28] Maybe the second email is educating them on how to grow with short-form, and then the third email is the pitch, and then the offer to the upsell. I kind of call this strategy my $29 product framework.

[05:41] Basically, if you have a free resource, a $29 digital product, and maybe a high-ticket offer of like coaching or course. You can have an automation set up so that instead of just making $29 per customer, you could eventually turn

[05:54] that $29 into $11,000. Now, I know I'm kind of like zipping right through this and kind of talking high-level here, but if all of this in, like setting up funnels for your business, I do have a full like slower

[06:09] step-by-step tutorial here on my channel. So, if you're like, "Oh my gosh, funnels. Wow, sounds complicated, but I'm interested. Tell me more." Just somebody that strongly believes in having an email list and how important

[06:23] it is for creators. Not only that, but setting up email funnels along with your email list since it's a great way to build passive income or like one of my students, leave her 9-5. Like I said, I had a student who her main goal was to

[06:36] hit 10,000 followers on Instagram. And on our first call, I was like, "Perfect. Let's do it. First step, start an email list. Create your freebie and put it in your bio." And she was like, "Um why? I want to grow on Instagram, not grow an

[06:49] me." So, she listened to me. She just took that weekend, set everything up, easy peasy. Then that Monday, we started working on growing her Instagram. Over Instagram. She grew to like 30,000

[07:02] followers. And over time, she was like, "You know what? I think I want to offer coaching. I want to offer coaching to my people." And I was like, "Okay, tell your email list that." So, she sent out an email to her email list and in one

[07:16] email, she sold out her coaching, which was the equivalent of replacing her 9-5 her corporate job and she's been a full-time content creator ever since. That was maybe 3, 4 years ago. Let's see. She actually texts me every year,

[07:32] "Wow, that was 5 years ago." She texts me every year on November 12th saying, "Happy 5-year, 4-year anniversary of like her going full-time as a content creator and like deciding to go all in, and she always text me every year

[07:45] saying, "Thank you." So, I get texts every year from her. And it's been 5 that's really cool. A lot of people overcomplicate email lists, and I know I'm probably made it sound complicated in my explanation, but really it could

[07:58] could be set up in just one weekend. It's that simple. Again, if you wanted to do that, just watch my other YouTube videos, free resources to help you get all of that set up. Now, let's get into our second automation using a tool that

[08:12] my team and I use every single week, and I want to have the master of this tool actually talk to you about it himself. So, let's jump over to you, Joe. >> Awesome, Milly. Thanks for that, and you're exactly right. ManyChat is a

[08:25] great example of why we love these systems. You put in effort one time, and then they continue to work for you, whether you're sleeping, filming, even grabbing a coffee. I personally felt the same frustration when trying to grow my

[08:37] online following by posting more consistently on social media, which is the reason I want to share what I call the content calendar autopilot. Now, the goal is simple. We want to get your content in front of the largest amount

[08:51] of people as possible, not only to grow your own social media following, but so that other automations, like Milly's ManyChat automation, can reach the most number of people. But, here's the problem. Most creators struggle to post

[09:05] consistently on social media, not because they don't want their content to be on all these platforms, but because it's incredibly time-consuming. We've all tried it. You make a really nice video, you open up Instagram, you post

[09:17] it as a reel. Then you go to TikTok, upload the same video. Then YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest. It feels like it never ends. I used to wake up every Monday morning simply to post my content on social media. And what was worse is I

[09:30] was writing unique captions and trying to use the best hashtags. I spent more time distributing my content than I did creating the content. And the creation is the fun part. It's the part we should be doing, which is why I automated the

[09:44] entire creation and distribution of my content calendar with Metricool. Plus, they have some really nice AI features. Now, Metricool is a social media management tool that allows you to publish across multiple platforms from

[09:57] one location. So, rather than posting your reel on Instagram, for instance, you'd post your reel inside of Metricool and automatically have it set up to go out on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn. There's so many different options. Plus,

[10:10] they have a free version that allows you to publish 20 different times a month across your content calendar. Now, the true way to make this go from a content calendar to a full publishing system automation is scheduling content in

[10:24] advance. You see, to truly make this hands-free, we don't want to manually be posting every single month. We want to log into Metricool one time a month and schedule our content out for the entire content calendar. So, you can see here,

[10:37] I manage my own content through Metricool, but we also manage the Here are all their scheduled posts. Or, this nice restaurant that's down the set this up for your own business, linked in the description, we have a

[10:50] detailed step-by-step tutorial of how to use Metricool. It'll walk through how to connect your social media profiles, schedule your first post, and create an entire content calendar. Now, in terms of features, Metricool does have a bunch

[11:03] of different tools like this one that shows when the bulk of your audience is online, but the feature that you want to use specifically for automation is their AI assistant. So, I mentioned writing multiple captions per platform. This

[11:15] tool here will automatically rewrite my caption to be best for Instagram, for instance. Now, I have a post that's more likely to perform on that platform. They even have this tool here which will show you the best hashtags to use based on

[11:28] your caption. Now, my biggest takeaway from using these automations is actually making sure that the automations you build work well together. Milli has this incredible ManyChat automation. When someone comments hooks one, they get

[11:41] added to our email newsletter. So, how can we use Metricool to incentivize them to comment that word? Metricool has a feature called first comment. And the way first comment works is whenever your post is published, it's automatically

[11:55] going to add a comment from you. Not only does this increase engagement on your post, but you can incentivize the user to comment that specific keyword, which in turn will add them to your newsletter. What used to take me a

[12:07] me 1 hour every month, and that's the type of automation that compounds because users who post consistently on social media are the ones who grow the fastest. >> I completely agree with Joe. Everything

[12:20] team and I have been using Metricool for years. It's what we use to just stay consistent across all social media channels for the last couple of years. Like, I would say 90% of all the short-form content that you see us

[12:33] posting on Instagram, TikTok, shorts, Facebook, LinkedIn, everywhere, that is scheduled out using ManyChat. And I say 90% because the other 10% are like collab videos, and we manually post those to make sure everything is checked

[12:47] off correctly. So, all of our organic content is scheduled in ManyChat. I without it. By the way, if you've learned one new thing so far, make sure to give this video a thumbs up since it tells YouTube that other creators like

[13:00] valuable. And if you learn two new things by the end of this video, make sure to hit that subscribe button not only here, but also on Joe's channel as well because it's an easy and free way to support your favorite YouTubers.

[13:13] Getting into our third automation before I tell you our bonus automation, that is the partnership pipeline. This automation is a recent development I've been learning how Claude can help automate different parts of my business.

[13:29] And this automation is actually similar to a Claude hack that I shared in this automations from that video was talking about email triage and like this email triage system that I had where Claude goes through my personal inbox every

[13:43] day, categorizes the email, drafts responses for me, and it just makes then once I saw how much time it was saving for me, I started looking into other areas of my business where we could use a similar system. One way that

[13:57] we have decided to use this is with our brand collaboration requests because honestly at this point with our business, I think we get a couple dozen

[14:09] of requests every day and a lot of the emails that land in my inbox aren't usually aligned with my audience or my values or the type of partnerships we're looking for and sorting through those messages takes a lot of time. So before

[14:24] this automation was set up, I would have people on my team manually reviewing any sort of collaboration opportunities, filtering through those opportunities, drafting responses, replying, and we do reply, I would say to like 90% of the

[14:39] requests that come in, even if it's a no or a pass, we try to reply to everyone simply because you never know the person on the other end and if they have other opportunities in another area that might be a better fit. So we try to reply to

[14:52] everyone and this was taking hours. We recently brought on a brand partnerships I was like, "Hey, if you could just do this like maybe 10-30 minutes a day." And he was like, "Molly, this is a lot more than 10-30 minutes a day." So we're

[15:07] setting up Claude co-work to review all incoming collaboration requests, identify the opportunities that appear to be the best fit, and draft responses to all emails for him. Then all he has to do is review the drafts, make any

[15:24] edits that he wants, and sends them off. The cool thing is because of the prompt that we have set up with Claude co-work, Claude will prioritize the emails for Christian and be like, "Hey, these ones are actual potential opportunities.

[15:38] Let's get the ball rolling there. The rest are probably no's." And then Claude will use our templates because we have templates to how to reply to all these things. We'll use our templates to get the drafts started for Christian to save

[15:50] him so much time when replying to these brands. To set this up, you simply just need to make sure Gmail is one of your connectors in your Claude account. And we do pay for Claude Pro, so I believe that's $20 a month. And in my head, I

[16:05] justify this because I'm like, the cost it would take to have an actual VA per month doing this versus having Claude get started on doing these, I feel like it's a win-win to just pay $20 a month to have like a VA. Then we'll go to

[16:20] Claude co-work. We'll create a new task under scheduled. And then we'll make sure to automate this so that this is happening every single day. Not only is this a big deal because it helps saves us time, but with the time that is now

[16:35] saved where maybe Christian would have been replying to emails for an hour, that hour can be an extra hour with editing the videos or scripting our collaborations or working more with brands that we're actually working with

[16:50] of replying no to a bunch of partnerships that wouldn't lead to anything anyway. The month of May, I actually had an AI theme for my entire team, and this is just one of the automations that we have discovered for

[17:05] my business. So basically, we called May m a i May m a i, and then my team, we roles and figured out what could be delegated and what could be automations

[17:18] and figured out what sort of tools and automations could be set up for each they could focus most of their energy on tasks that actually need their attention. So, if you're interested in hearing about any of the other AI tools

[17:32] automations that my team and I discovered when doing our May month, just let me know in the comments and maybe I'll be able to make another AI you're interested in. Now, the final automation, the bonus one that I wanted

[17:45] to share with you is how I have been able to have basically a never-ending content bank. Because I feel like one of the hardest parts of staying consistent is coming up with content ideas. And not just coming up with content ideas, but

[17:58] ideas where you're confident your audience would actually be interested in that thing. Or ideas you're like, "Oh, I know my audience would love this video." So, this automation uses a newer ManyChat feature called the new follower

[18:13] to DM automation. And it's essentially an automation where ManyChat, they will send a DM to somebody after they follow you on Instagram. So, the moment somebody presses follow, you just set a little time delay and then ManyChat will

[18:25] powerful is because when somebody presses that follow button, that is the moment they are the most engaged with you. They're the most interested in your content. They're the most curious about what you teach. And so, they're that

[18:38] what you teach. And so, they're that much more likely to respond to a DM that you send them. So, what my team and I do is with this DM that we send, we actually ask up front what the biggest things they are struggling with right

[18:52] now being a content creator. And we have them fill out a simple form where they optional, and then they tell us what they're struggling with. Their response gets put into a spreadsheet where now I have a list of over a thousand content

[19:07] ideas directly from my audience. I can export that spreadsheet and upload it to Claude and ask Claude to analyze the responses from my audience to tell me what is the biggest pain point that my audience is struggling with. Give me

[19:22] like the top three to five common pain points and turn those pain points into content ideas or viral videos that I could use and create for future videos. So, instead of guessing about what your audience wants to learn, they will

[19:36] actually tell you. I've honestly seen such a huge increase in my viewership of actually listening to what my audience wants instead of just guessing or doing

[19:49] these automations that we talked about in the video, let me know which one you are more likely to implement. And if you have any follow-up questions about any, comments. I want to say a huge thank you to Joe for joining me in this video.

[20:03] Y'all keep an eye out for a video that's going live on his channel this next upcoming Sunday, I believe. We're doing another collab video together that will be he'll be posting over on his channel. So, be sure you're subscribed to him and

[20:17] much for watching and I will see you in the next one. Follow your joy. Bye.