That time of year is here again, as the day’s get shorter and the nights get longer, the shops start to fill up with Christmas decorations and the inevitable colds and viruses start doing their rounds as winter approaches.

Don’t you just love the smell of the smoked filled evenings as everyone starts to burn the leaves mounting up in their back garden as the end of another month approaches and a new one begins. So November is here and although I have managed to go the whole year without catching a cold or coming down ill, it was inevitable that I couldn’t go on forever as some super human who was only made to work.

Yes incase you haven’t guessed already, I am ill! Please send your sympathy messages at the end . However, the real reason for me informing you that I am ill is that I want to talk to you about the importance of automating your online business. You see when I awoke yesterday with an extremely high temperature, swollen glands and a general feeling of Armageddon (yes us men really do suffer when we get ill, at one point I motioned to my fiance to ring an ambulance when I sneezed more than three times in a row)  I realised just how lucky I was that the most part of my online business actually runs on auto-pilot which meant that I could actually stay in bed and recover instead of dragging myself to work like many of us do.

This is also made me realise how many advantages their are to running an online business as opposed to an offline business. For example, if i was running a retail shop I am sure I would not have had the advantage of making it run on auto-pilot and taking the day off when I was sick. I surely would of had to drag myself into work to open up and take care of orders and admin etc etc.

Whereas with an online business it is now possible to use technology to make almost every aspect of your business run on auto-pilot.

So how can you automate your online business?

Now I haven’t as yet managed to automate my entire business and nor would I want to as I enjoy being involved in many aspects of the business especially where decision making is involved. But I have managed to automate many tedious parts of the business that would use up my precious time and do not require my direct involvement. So if you would like to automate your online business, here are just a few ways you can make it happen:

• Use auto-responders to build opt-in forms on all of your web pages, collecting targeted leads and building a list of customers you can sell to again and again.
• Use auto-responders to send sequenced messages to your subscribers. Spend a day writing messages then choose the interval in which your messages are to be sent then you can sit back and allow it to do it’s job
• Use automated shopping carts like Clickbank and Paydotcom to automatically take payments for your products. You will notice that on all of my sales pages I use a shopping cart to take the customer through the payment procedure and collect payment and dispatch the item automatically whilst I am off doing other things, (this is the beauty of selling digital items).
• Use software such as tweet dynamite to automate your twitter marketing. You can use this to add targeted followers and send automated tweets with your marketing messages.
• Use blog auto-publishing software. Most WordPress blogs already have this feature installed. You can use it to write a series of posts for you blog then set the schedule time for your post to be published.
• Use a detailed F & Q pages to answer the most frequently asked questions all on one page. This can save huge amounts of time from answering the same email questions over and over again.
• Use software to set up an customer support desk with auto-responder messages answering the most common queries.

These are just a few of the methods I have used to automate my business and give myself more time for more important tasks.

And remember if there is something you find you cant automate then you can always outsource it. You have to make sure that you spend your time on on the tasks that are most relevant to your skills and offload everything else. This is the only way you can allow your business to grow

Here is a list of useful outsourcing companies that I have personally used and recommend (they range from the expensive to the very reasonable, just have a look around):

Elance.com
Primeoutsourcing.com
Onlinejobs.ph

Is it now time for me to go back to bed and start recovering, thank goodness for automation  

Until next time,

Steve.

To Receive Your 6 Day Product Creation Crash Course, Sign Up In The Boxes and I Will Email Your Course Straight Out To You!
Share on Facebook