Building a team is a great way to level up your business, but it’s not always in the budget. Luckily, you can leverage other tools and services, both free and paid, to free up time for you to spend on the work you enjoy.

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Outsourcing Tasks without Hiring Anyone

There, I said it. You don’t need a team to grow your business. I mean, hiring a team is always a great idea — it’s the dream to have people you trust running your business the way you’d like it to run while you spend time creating content (or any other fun stuff you like to do!).

Believe me, from my design business to my own food blog, it couldn’t happen without the help of my team! But it took me a long time to get there, to tell you the truth.

Adding on the cost of hiring, training and maintaining a team member, even just a contractor or virtual assistant, takes up time and money. And I know that’s not always in the cards for everyone all the time.

Today I’m sharing tips for investing in your business without hiring another human being. These are digital tools, automations and services that can help you take the weight off of you and the team you have. Some are free and some are paid, so of course it will depend on your budget too, but many of them cost less than an hourly VA per month.

Of course, I will always be on Team Hire-A-Team, but until you’re ready for that investment, let these digital tools and automations help you out with your workload.

Read more: How to Decide On Big Investments for Your Blog

How to Know When To Get Help

If you feel too stressed, it’s time! If you’re going away for a while, it’s time! If you anticipate a busy season soon, it’s time! But if you’re still not sure what you can pass off to someone else (or something else, in this case), here’s what you should do:

Start by reviewing your own time and, if you have one, your team’s time. Do some time tracking — and get really specific — to see what you could take off your plate.

For example, don’t just write “1 hour – worked on photos.” Break that up into smaller tasks like “30 minutes – editing photos; 15 minutes – renaming and uploading; 15 minutes – alt text.”

Time tracking will help you determine how you are spending your time and what you could let go of. Let’s say you do 20 minutes of writing alt text per week, and decide to use an AI alt text plugin (more on this in a moment). You’d probably still spend 5 minutes editing them, but that’s still 1 hour back in your business every month. I don’t know about you, but I could do A LOT with an extra hour!

AI Tools

Everyone has mixed feelings about AI and this technology is still evolving every day. While there are certainly things you probably shouldn’t do with it (like farm out hundreds of blog posts per week or generate tons of images), there’s no doubt it can do a lot to help you.

Here are some things you could use AI chat bots for that aren’t content creation:

• recipe ideas
• scaling recipes for different serving sizes
• content planning
• marketing plans
• funnel design
• writing email newsletters and social captions
• generating meta descriptions
• outlines for what to include in your post
• suggestions for substitutions
• writing alt text

You can even use AI tools for planning your schedule. Motion is a neat tool we’ve played around with. You load all your tasks and appointments into it, and it uses AI to generate a schedule of what you should prioritize and when.

Automations

Another way to get some help in your business? Automations. Any task you can automate can help it go by faster. Even though you may still have to manually apply the automations

• Blocks: Using reusable blocks in your posts is a great way to save yourself some time on repetitive pieces of content.
• Blog post template: You can even build a block with your entire blog post outline that contains your headings, spaces for images and reusable blocks, which would save you a ton of time clicking around. All you have to do then is load your content in!
• SEO: Use a tool like Ahrefs or SemRush that can spit out a spreadsheet of keyword research, find broken links, track post performance and do SEO audits.
• Photo presets: If you are spending hours editing photos, you have got to try some presets. In Lightroom and Photoshop, you can build your own presets with your favorite settings, then apply them to your photos in one fell swoop.
• Social media scheduling: Use an all-in-one scheduler like SmarterQueue, Tailwind, Buffer or Later to automate the sharing of social posts.
• Email forever series: Can’t get an email out every week? Create a forever series that will send one out every week instead. You can always send new posts separately!

Digital services

My final suggestion is to make use of some digital services to help you with some of your food blogger tasks. While these might be more unusual ways to outsource and some do require a human touch, but can still take something over from you without you hiring anyone part-time.

• On your shoot days, get lunch delivered so you don’t have to take a long break (and you’ll still remember to eat).
• Order groceries for recipe testing and photoshoots from a grocery delivery service like Shipt or Instacart. It’s okay to ask them to write in the note: “I’m a food photographer and this is for a photoshoot. Please try to find unbruised apples.”
• This isn’t necessarily a business tool, but it can make your life a little easier: Hand off meal planning to a meal kit service like Hello Fresh or Blue Apron. They’ll send you the groceries and the recipes to make with little effort on your part. You can get breakfast and lunch this way too!
• Use dictation to write posts. The talk-to-text smart phone feature does more than just write texts to your mom. Dictate a blog post or social captions while you’re on a walk or in the car — you can multitask now and edit it later!
• Hire a laundry service. Instead of spending time washing and ironing your food photography linens and props, use a laundry or dry-cleaning pickup service. Many local services offer pickup and delivery options that can save you a lot of time.
• Many online shops offer subcriptions. Set up the things you need periodically — like spray cleaner, paper towels or printer paper — on a schedule so you don’t have to think about it.

I’d love to hear how you leverage tools and automate things to save time in your business and every day life! Especially if they are things you’d spend money on anyway or could hire a human for.

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