My friend, Mike Kim, & I sat down and had a great chat about TextExpander in this episode, “Productivity Tip #2 – TextExpander: An Interview With Mike Kim”.
Click the video below to listen to it (Audio only).
Transcript of Productivity Tip #2 – TextExpander: An Interview With Mike Kim
Mike Kim: All right, welcome to episode 96 of The Brand New Podcast. Today I've invited my friend Anil from leadershipfocushq.com to come back and share with us a tip. If you missed last week's tip he was talking about an app called RoboForm, I love it. Saving me tons of time. I actually do what Anil tells me to do because he knows a thing or two about all this productivity stuff, he's just killer at it. So before we get into the interview with Val, let's talk to Anil.
All right we are back with the productivity tip of the week. I'm welcoming Anil back to the show, Anil, hope you're doing well. What have you got for us today?
Anil Agrawal: Well, I got another great app, which is called TextExpander.
Mike Kim: Hmm. Okay. What's this do?
Anil Agrawal: TextExpander expands texts.
Mike Kim: They named it well.
Anil Agrawal: Right, it's so clever name. So it's a text expansion app and there are others in the market, but this one is super cool, super easy and is for Mac and iOS devices.
Mike Kim: Okay, Mac only. Okay. So I feel good. I've got a Mac.
Anil Agrawal: Yeah, they got the beta version for Windows, so that's coming up slowly, but right now, it really perfectly works on Mac and iOS devices.
Mike Kim: Okay, cool. So what's this thing do? Like what kind of text does it expand for me?
Anil Agrawal: So you create your own, what's called snippets, of text, that you would like to use over and over again. So the idea is that anything that you're typing more than once or twice, even if you're doing it only once per day, for the next day, I would rather not type, let's say, my email address. So many times on social media for example or someone wants my email address, I need to type it in my email itself, on the body of the email, I can create abbreviations that I can easily remember.
Mike Kim: Oh, okay. And then it pre-fills it out?
Anil Agrawal: Yes. And so once I create those abbreviations, what they call it snippets, with an abbreviation. So it could be, let's say my Gmail address. If it's my Gmail address I can create a snippet with my Gmail email address and the abbreviation I could say ggmail. So you don't want to have an abbreviation that is a common word. So you can start the common word for example, with an x, or a repeat of the first letter. So it's easy to remember.
Mike Kim: Oh, okay, okay. I follow. Because my phone sort of does that, right? You know how like certain apps on Twitter when you maybe want to tweet somebody, and you put in like the first letter of their name and it kind of brings up the options and you just click that person, right?
Anil Agrawal: Right. So those are called suggestive texts.
Mike Kim: Right, okay. So it's sort of the same thing. Can you use this with longer text? Or is it limited in characters or words?
Anil Agrawal: You can create like a whole letter, like a sales copy. Or your bio. You can even create custom fields within the snippet, that this app allows. I haven't gotten that far yet.
Mike Kim: Okay.
Anil Agrawal: But …
Mike Kim: Oh, okay. All right. One of the things that I have to fish for all the time is my bio. People are always asking me for my bio. And I have like three to five different versions of my bio depending on what or who I need to send it to. So can I just store all those?
Anil Agrawal: Yes. Yes, you can. So for example, I have, let's say I have a bio which is in a certain way on Twitter. And then I have a bio or a summary on LinkedIn. And I want to send it to someone. And now either I have to go find it first, or login into LinkedIn or Twitter.
Mike Kim: Right.
Anil Agrawal: Or in my app, and then you kind of touch and select the text and then copy and go over to another place even on your mobile device and then you actually past it. So that's a lot of steps.
Mike Kim: Right.
Anil Agrawal: So it's kind of painful and it takes more time.
Mike Kim: And I never send them the bio because of that.
Anil Agrawal: Right. And then you're like okay, I'll do it later, I'll do it tomorrow. And then it never happens.
Mike Kim: Right.
Anil Agrawal: Right? So this one allows, I have a tbio, for Twitter bio.
Mike Kim: Oh, okay. All right. That makes a lot of sense. So you just trigger it.
Anil Agrawal: It's kind of like really easy.
Mike Kim: Right. Right. Right. Nice. All right. I'm going to try this out. How much is TextExpander?
Anil Agrawal: So TextExpander there used to be only like a one-time type app pricing, but they moved to a subscription-based, which is still, I think it's really a steal at $3.33 per month billed annually.
Mike Kim: Oh, wow, okay.
Anil Agrawal: And if you don't want the annual payment, you want to go month by month, you just want to give it a shot, then you sign up and it's $4.16 per month. That's the latest pricing I just checked this morning.
Mike Kim: These are random price points. So like basically, 40 or 50 bucks a year to never have to like find my bio again?
Anil Agrawal: Exactly. And I got a bonus tip for you. What I did, recently, so if you have a WordPress website and if you use Pretty Link.
Mike Kim: Yeah.
Anil Agrawal: If you use Pretty Link to save whatever links, it could be let's say your affiliate link or something, some product or whatever. So you got all the links, what I did, I felt like I'm tired of going back into Pretty Link, logging into my website, figure out, or maybe you have a spreadsheet, but you still, you may not remember the link and people always ask me, can you send me the link for xyz? You're like, oh, okay, I kind of remember but I'm not hundred percent sure, so I go check. Now what I did, with TextExpander, I thought, oh, I got an idea. I exported all my Pretty Links links and I reformatted, I had to reformat because the way TextExpander import works, and I imported all my Pretty Links and created abbreviation so all my slugs in the Pretty Link, I added a prefix, like x.
Mike Kim: Okay, okay, that makes sense to me. Yeah.
Anil Agrawal: So once I import, I just did that like a few days ago, for the first time ever and it works like a champ.
Mike Kim: So you can like tack all your, basically create a text expander thing, a snippet, for your affiliate links.
Anil Agrawal: Yeah, so your snippet is actually the link.
Mike Kim: Oh, yes, okay.
Anil Agrawal: That you've created and your abbreviation is like, let's say I have one for Robo Form.
Mike Kim: Right.
Anil Agrawal: And all I need to type, anybody wants a link, my affiliate link for RoboForm, all I need to type in on my device, any device, Mac, iOS, the iPhone and I type xroboform. Boom.
Mike Kim: Oh, that's brilliant. I know some of you guys listening in are like what are Mike and Anil talking about right now, but I promise you, this will make a lot of, you know what I'll do, I'll put some screenshots in the show notes for today, but oh, that's awesome. Because affiliate links are so ugly, right?
Anil Agrawal: Yes.
Mike Kim: And then when I have to Pretty Link them, or Bitly them, or whatever, basically if you don't know what Pretty Link is, it makes the link pretty, right?
Anil Agrawal: Yes.
Mike Kim: We have this ugly link, like with all these numbers and it's really long, especially for affiliate commissions, and Pretty Link makes it look nicer, but know, like what I would do is I would always go back into my affiliate center or dig up the email where my affiliate-
Anil Agrawal: Ah, yeah.
Mike Kim: -like the original link was and then. Okay, I'm getting this app asap.
Anil Agrawal: It's so much, it saves you with so much of pain.
Mike Kim: Yeah.
Anil Agrawal: And time, both.
Mike Kim: Awesome. Okay, so about 40 bucks a year whether you pay monthly, $3.33 cents a month per year up front, per month, for the year if you pay up front, or $4.16 a month.
Anil Agrawal: Yeah, 40 bucks or so.
Mike Kim: Yeah. That's nothing. All right. This is awesome. Okay, I'm going to try this out. And I'm going to let you guys know how this works for me because this sounds amazing. Anil, thank you so much for TextExpander, and TextExpander, thank you for making the name of your product so easy to remember.
Anil Agrawal: Sure, yeah, you're welcome.
Mike Kim: Right? Yeah, all right. Thanks. Okay, we'll see you back on the next productivity tip corner. All right, great tip there, from Anil. Hey, man, check out TextExpander. I love the joking around, this is good fun, right? Sometimes technology helps, sometimes it'll get you in trouble. Just got to be savvy, all right. Okay, so good stuff there.