When you first start your online business, you can do it all yourself. But as your business grows, so do all the little things you have to do. Automation helps small entrepreneurs set some of these tasks on autopilot, which frees you up to focus on more important things and allows your business to scale.
You can’t automate everything. That would be wonderful! But there are some aspects of your business that need the human touch.
Automation helps you by taking care of mundane tasks. You still have to do the thinking, strategizing and relationship building. Here is a sampling of some of the things you can automate.
Automated Back linking
For your website’s search engine optimization, you need plenty of links coming in. Going out and getting these links is a time consuming task that’s not always the most exciting. Luckily, there are automation tools that help you find back linking opportunities. These are services and software programs that use keywords chosen by you to bring you lists of sites to link to.
This helps to make it faster and easier, but you still need to choose the sites yourself. If you put it on total autopilot, you may link to sites Google doesn’t like such as link farms and this will get you penalized. Review each site and decide if it’s right for you.
Social Media Automation
Many aspects of social media can be automated. The best automation tool here is a social media dashboard. This is a program that puts all of your social media profiles – Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. – in one place. You open the dashboard and you can see all activity, make posts, accept friend requests, comment, and do practically everything else you need to do.
Automated feeds can be used for sharing content. You can set up a feed so that when you blog, it’s posted automatically to your Facebook profile or announced with a link on your Twitter feed.
Just make sure that whenever a real human response is needed, you’re there to provide it. Don’t ‘set it and forget it’ with social media because it’s all about relationship building.
Putting Your Bookkeeping on Autopilot
As your business grows, it’s almost essential that you automate at least some of your bookkeeping. Your finances will get out of control quickly. For many small businesses, the first employee they hire is a CPA to handle it for them. But there are programs like QuickBooks and FreshBooks that help a great deal in managing your finances for you.
Your bank and online payment processors such as PayPal offer a wide range of online automation tools to help you financial transactions as well.
What You Shouldn’t Automate
One area you should never automate is content creation. It’s simply too important. Your content needs to be unique and human-generated. Search engines hate spun or copied content. If you don’t want to create your content yourself, make a small investment and hire a writer to do it for you.
Tony Phelps
