You may have heard of “The Cloud”. It’s a term that basically just means the Internet.
I am a big fan of cloud services. It’s magic to me, the way that the photos that I take with my cell phone appear on my PC when I get home, without having to connect any cables, and to have my work from my desktop PC instantly available to me on my laptop.
Your email, for example, is a cloud service.
Your email is stored on an email server, and delivered to your device(s) over the Internet. If your PC dies, or you lose your laptop, your email goes on accumulating on the server, and you can download those emails when you get back on-line.
I’ve written in this blog space many times about cloud services for task management (How to Stay on Target with Your Goals), project management (How to Stay on Top of Your Project Management), and customer/client management (7 Tips to Manage Client Info). But what if you are using multiple cloud services? Are you getting tired of entering information in multiple places?
Wouldn’t it be nice if those cloud services could work together?
Some do – Google Apps, for example – where your email, calendar, contacts, and documents can all talk to each other. For your other cloud services – your project management, your CRM, and/or your email marketing program, you can use a service called Zapier.
Go ahead and create a Zapier account for free and play around with it. Search for the cloud services that you use and see what they support for triggers and for actions.
Here’s an example: Creating a new Google contact can be a trigger for Zapier to automatically create a contact in my CRM application & in my email marketing application, and also create a new note in Evernote
Zapier is free for 5 “zaps” (cloud service connections) that run every five hours. For more frequent syncing, Zapier has paid plans.
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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”
