Ever tried IFTTT?

The acronym stands for “if this, then that”.  It’s a site that will let you set up all sorts of preconditions that have results for your online world.  There are literally THOUSANDS of IFTTT recipes. Things like:

• if you post an Instagram picture, then IFTTT saves it to GDrive
• if you get an email with the word “audition” in the subject, then IFTTT sends it to OneNote
• If the temperature drops below 20-degrees, then IFTTT sends you a text

It can get a little far-fetched sometimes, and you have to ask yourself if you really want that much automation and clutter in your life.

IFTTT is free, whereas Zapier is not.  But they do about the same thing.  Zapier is a little more high-class (’cause they got the bucks to do it), and there are perhaps more integrations with existing programs.

But *I* like Zapier for their blog articles.  I get them by subscription, and often they have profoundly helpful ideas. Like this one:

30+ Google Search Tricks You Might Not Already Know

It’s jam-packed with an incredible array of what are called “search operators” that help you refine your Google search.  Learn the tricks on this page, and you’ll be a master.

On the other hand: a more recent Zapier article could potentially bear more fruit for voice actors in job-search mode:

How to Find the Perfect Job with Google Search Operators

This site whittles down the other tips page to some really simple-to-understand lingo that you can quickly put into action.

Let’s say I wanted to search for audio production studios on LinkedIn.

The search operators might look like this:

“audio production studios” site:linkedin.com

But let’s add yet another level of complexity, by excluding the word “media” and adding voiceover in a search on Linkedin

That search would look like this:

audio+production+studios OR voiceover site:linkedin.com -media

Now, let’s forget LinkedIn, and just do a general search on the internet for voiceover job, but leave out voices.com, voicerealm.com, upwork.com and fiverr.com, and voicebunny.com

That would look like this:

voiceover + job -upwork.com -voices.com -fiverr.com -thevoicerealm.com -voicebunny.com

See?  You start playing around with these terms, and the results can be pretty amazing as you drill down into exactly what you want, and what you don’t want.

Let us know in the comments below if you have a favorite Google search trick that’s worked for you.

CourVO