Tips and Tricks Archives - Monkeypod Marketing

One Small Change That Makes Your Automations Easier to Build and Harder to Break

When I first started setting up automations for myself or clients, I did what most DIYers do: I connected tools like Zapier, Make, or Google Analytics to my own email account. Or sometimes the client’s, especially if they were the business owner or the person with all the logins.

And hey, it worked.
Until it didn’t.

Eventually, something would break—quietly. Like, a task wouldn’t fire, or a webhook would throw an error. Maybe someone’s account would be deactivated, or a setting would change—and no one would know why until we traced it all the way back to who set it up.

The Shift: Use a Dedicated Service Account

One small (but mighty) change you can make is to create a dedicated system user account—something like workflows@yourdomain.com.

This account lives in your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 environment and exists solely to run your automations.

It’s not a flashy trick. But it’s one of those decisions that immediately makes everything easier—and much more stable.

Security Without the Side Effects

Using a person’s account might give your automation more access than it needs.

For example, say the business owner has SSO access to tools like QuickBooks or Stripe. If you use their account to authorize something, you could accidentally open a back door to platforms that were never supposed to be part of the build.

A dedicated service account:

Only has the access you give it—nothing more
Doesn’t live on someone’s phone or personal laptop
Isn’t getting phished or tricked while browsing the web

It’s a cleaner, safer way to give your tools the keys to the parts of the house they actually need.

Stability That Doesn’t Depend on People

People leave. Passwords expire. 2FA tokens get reset.

And when your automation relies on someone’s real account, you’re betting your stability on their availability (and memory).

With a workflows account:

You’re not left guessing why a zap stopped firing after someone quit
You don’t lose access when someone’s account is deactivated
Alerts and error messages go to an inbox you can monitor, instead of vanishing into someone’s cluttered Gmail tab

It’s about continuity—making sure your systems don’t go down just because someone went on vacation (or hit “Forgot Password” one too many times).

Cleaner, Easier Building

It also makes the build process smoother.

With a clean, neutral service account:

You can create dedicated calendars, folders, and tokens without personal clutter
You’re not worried about messing with someone’s real data while testing
Multiple builders can share access without needing to reset someone’s password

And if a tool needs to send emails or system alerts, they’ll land in a shared inbox, not one person’s digital black hole.

One Last Thing: Not Everything Needs This

This isn’t a blanket rule. Some connections will still come from a personal account—especially when someone’s integrating their own calendar, inbox, or scheduling tool.

The goal isn’t to replace those.
It’s to add a dedicated teammate—one whose entire job is to run workflows, send alerts, and keep things humming along.

Want Help Building Smarter Systems?

Check out The Fundamentals of Business Automation for a step-by-step foundation, or hop into the Monkeypod Membership to talk shop with other automation-minded humans.

Wise Words: Automation

We interviewed eight business owners who use automation in their own businesses, and with their clients. This course is a compilation of the lessons we wish we’d learned earlier.

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Automated Content Sharing Recipe

Small Business, Tips and Tricks

Ever feel like you’re creating strong content, but it’s not getting the attention it deserves? Yeah—same.

I think this dynamic affects most everyone who produces content – we know what we’re putting out is valuable, but for any number of reasons it might not be reaching the people it can really serve.

One of the ways we try to squeeze a little extra mileage out of the stuff we publish is by making sure it actually gets posted to all of our social channels. In this video, I’ll break down the exact automation recipe we use to share new Monkeypod content—mostly YouTube videos and blog posts (like this one)—out to our different social channels.

It’s a simple formula that runs through Zapier, but it helps us stay visible, consistent, and efficient.

This simple setup helps us get more eyes on the content we’re already creating—without adding a bunch of extra work to the pile.

While I demonstrated it using Zapier (because that’s what we use), you could totally build a similar system with other automation platforms like Pabbly, Make, n8n, or whatever tool fits your stack.

The real takeaway here is that a little bit of automation can go a long way in making sure your content actually gets the attention it deserves.

And as an added benefit, it helps keep your social channels from going stale if you aren’t regularly publishing new material. Happy sharing.

Looking for Ideas?

This was a fairly unique automation use case – but these types of scenarios are all over the place. If you aren’t sure where automation would fit – we’ve built a course specifically designed to help you identify those opportunities.

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Productivity Hacks (for my ADHD brain)

Small Business, Tips and Tricks

Staying organized is tough enough for most of us, and when your brain doesn’t play by the rules that adds a whole new layer.

Our beloved Monkeypod Community Manager, Jade, has ADHD – and over the years she’s built a system of tools, habits, and little brain hacks to help her stay on top of things. And in this video, she’s pulling back the curtain to share what works for her.

If you feel like you’re constantly juggling a hundred things (and maybe dropping a few along the way), this one’s for you. Check out Jade’s setup and see if any of her tools strategies can help you hack your brain too.

The thing about productivity is that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach—what works for one person might not work for another.

But the key is finding tools and systems that complement your brain, not fight against it. Hopefully, some of Jade’s tricks gave you a few ideas to test out in your own world.

And, if you’re planning a project from scratch – here’s a framework tool that can help you avoid friction as you bring a project to life.

Want a demo of this framework in action? Check it out here.

If you’ve got your own favorite hacks (or tools you like) for staying organized, drop ‘em in the comments—we’re always down to learn something new.

Notebook LM: Why it’s changing the game (and how to use it)

Tips and Tricks, Tools

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been on a webinar or watched a recording and thought, “Wow, there’s some gold in here… but do I really have the time to sift through it all?”

Well, say hello to Notebook LM, a google tool designed to turn endless content and concise resources. I recently sat down to test it out, and honestly, it feels a little like magic.

For anyone who creates (or consumes) content Notebook LM offers a way to maximize your effort. It’s about squeezing every last drop of value out of the content you’ve already invested in.

What kind of sources can Notebook LM accept?

You can upload txt docs, MP3 files, markup, PDFs, or link to google docs, youtube videos, or even paste content in directly.

It will transform what you upload into an range of assets: concise notes, detailed summaries, FAQ questions, study guide resources, or even an audio podcast overview.

For the purposes of this demo, we used the transcript of the Creating Offers that convert webinar – here’s the full replay of that event.

And here’s the demo of Notebook LM turning the transcript into a handful of other resources:

Notebook LM has the potential to be a real game-changer for content creators. In just a few minutes, it can ingest a ton of information and digest it, helping transform that content into a range of resources serving multiple purposes.

What kind of resources will Notebook LM produce?

Briefing Doc: Highlight key points or takeaways for quick consumption—ideal for team recaps or decision-making.
Timeline: Organize the input into clear sections or themes to support deeper dives into specific areas.
FAQ Questions and Answers: Find and structure answers to common questions based on the content.
Study Guide: Take the content you input, and generate a collection of questions to help make sure the most important lessons are retained.
Podcast: Yes, an actual audio podcast with two AI generated speakers discussing the subject matter you supplied.

Here’s an example of what that podcast can look like – this is based off of the demo we did with the webinar on crafting offers.

Creating Irresistable Offers

by Notebook LM

(If the podcast doesn’t feel organic enough, you could also use it as a starting prompt for a summary you record yourself.)

Are there any drawbacks?

Okay, so Notebook LM doesn’t create polished emails, blog posts, or social media content for you—but it does give you the groundwork to build those assets quickly and effectively. I can see countless ways for this tool to make our lives easier.

If you’re just looking to digest information quickly, boom. This can help.

But if you’re producing long form content and really want to make the most out of your efforts, yes, it can help with that too.

Either way, Notebook LM might just be the tool that changes the game in 2025.

If you’re using this already, or plan to, please drop your ideas in the comments below. We’d love to hear the variety of ways this is solving problems for small businesses.

Email Engagement Tracking [inside Keap]

Keap, Marketing, Tips and Tricks, Tools

You’ve likely heard about the way Google, Yahoo, and Outlook are evolving, but one aspect if that is the rising importance of engagement.

It’s no longer enough to get email permission once – we need to be maintaining our list, and actively removing the contacts who stop engaging.

If you depend on email as part of your business strategy, either to produce sales, serve your customers, or for any other business function; then this is a critical habit to adopt – and soon.

So, how do we report on engagement?

Inside of Keap there is a report you can use to manually search for contacts who have (or haven’t) engaged in various time frames.

In Keap Ultimate, formerly Max Classic, the report is called the Email Status Search.

In Keap Pro and Max it’s called the Email Engagement Tracker.

But in both versions it has a set of useful filters you can use to assess your database.

So that sneaky little report might just give you all the information you need.

But running it manually can be a little labor intensive…

Can I automate this?

So thankfully, the answer is yes.

PlusThis has a feature called Email Engagement Triggers that allows you to process the contacts in your database on a recurring schedule, and automatically update their tags to reflect their most recent engagement.

Now, one thing to note is that this checks contacts individually – so it does count as a tool run per contact. If you have unlimited tool runs, no problem. But if you don’t then you might want to look at restricting the audience it runs against using the selector option.

Or, you could also use the HTTP post option and run it against contacts as they hit key steps in your automations.

Moving on – a common question I’ve been getting is “How does this differ from Keap’s native tools…”

Is this better than Keap’s native engagement tracking?

Good question. The PlusThis feature is different from the native tools in a few key ways.

First – it’s much more granular. Keap lets you automate when someone’s email status changes, or change their status when their engagement slips (unengaged marketable, and unengaged nonmarketable).

PlusThis lets you tag contacts when their engagement hits key threshholds. So, if they don’t engage for 31 days, it tags them, then again at 61, or 91, etc.

But, the other way this differs is that it runs on a schedule you can choose, and then it resets the tags. So, if someone re-engages, it’ll automatically remove the unengaged tags as it re-evaluates your database.

Alright – there you have it.

At the very least you can start analyzing your database to segment based off of engagement with the native reports, or if you’re already a PlusThis user you can quickly set up the Email Engagement Triggers and you’ll immediately have new information you can use to improve targeting and segmentation.

Or, if you’re not yet a PlusThis user – check out the plans and start a free trial here.

Where do I learn more?

The Keap Academy platform offers a course covering ways to Supercharge Your Automations using PlusThis, featuring real world examples and use cases from Keap Partners and PlusThis users.

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Connecting WebinarJam and Keap (in 2023)

Keap, Tips and Tricks, Tools

When WebinarJam first came out I was using it for a handful of projects, and wrote this blog post covering the process for configuring your webinar and integrating with Keap (which was called Infusionsoft at the time).

But then I moved onto Demio for my webinars, and eventually onto Zoom (here’s a guide for connecting Zoom and Keap) – and the information in my blog post got a little stale. I was no longer using WebinarJam, so I couldn’t keep the post updated.

Fast forward to today – thanks to Nathan Householder from SuccessEngine, we’ve got a brand new update for how you can automatically register your Keap contacts into your webinars hosted with WebinarJam.

There are a few reasons you might want this – but the main one is that if you already have someone’s info, then requiring them to enter it again into another system is never ideal.

In this video Nathan will walk you through the steps to follow to create an HTTP post that automatically registers contacts for your WebinarJam webinars:

So, that covers it – this process might a little technical but if you follow the steps in the video it should give you a reliable way to improve your customer’s experience when registering for your webinars.

Huge appreciation to Nathan Householder, from SuccessEngine, who found my old blog post, realized it was outdated, and took the time to record this video so that I could publish an updated method for Keap users that depend on WebinarJam.