Now I want to talk about a very powerful tool that I use everyday for email and it's called a text expander. And how a text expander works is you type either just a few keystrokes, or a hotkey sequence, and it will automatically insert replies into your email. This is fantastic for common support replies. I've used it in my companies for when I'm doing support. Frequently Asked Questions, URLs, you might want to share with people on a regular basis, sales letters and proposals, any sort of email templates, mailing addresses, the possibilities are nearly endless. And this one tool saves me hours every day.
It's huge. So here's an example of a text expander. This one's called phrase Express. We'll talk a bit more about some alternatives in a moment and you'll see Just over on this side, they have folders and then underneath that they've got all of those snippets you can put in. So on the snippet, what you can do is you'll see that you can put in whatever you want. In this case, it's a signature line, and then it's got a description, and then you can choose a hotkey, or you can choose auto text, I tend to use auto texts because I'll remember that more than I might remember all the different hotkeys but for one you use a lot.
A hotkey makes sense. And you can have an unlimited number of these. It's fantastic. You can, you can have them for anything, you can think of any kind of text, you might want to put in the in a block format, anything you write over and over, put it into into your text expander instead. So for Windows and Android, you can use phrase Express for Mac, you can use something actually called text expander I believe phrase Express as a free version. I think the Mac text expander is a nominal price, but still well.
Worth doing when you can save this much time for these things. So here's a few examples. If I want to send someone to my coaching program, I would type you coach, and it would automatically send them to that coaching program, I can type in a series of keystrokes In my case, I use colon pound, and it will put the currency symbol in it. I do the same thing for year old because a lot of my clients are around the world. So I'm regularly doing proposals and invoices in other currencies. And I can never remember the keyboard shortcuts for these.
I can type in something like Li short for LinkedIn, Li thinks, which would be thanks for connecting on LinkedIn and it would drop in this whole block of text, just POW it's there in a second. And I don't have to type any of that. And of course I go through and edit these from time to time to make my letters better and better. But you can see how much time this is going to save you. So I highly recommend you looking at text expanders, it takes it getting used to, but if you really cultivate that awareness of, Oh, am I ever gonna have to write this again? Is should this be a frequently asked question, should it be on the website?
Is this something I'm ever going to have to insert anywhere again, then a text expander is what you really want to consider in that case. Okay, let's move on to the next lesson.