Why would you want to automate your business? Well simple, that would mean your business can run without you taking care of it… Just monitoring it’s progress and make some adjustments and small tweaks here and there!

Talk about a good way to “run” a business!
First off you have to have a clear idea of the results you would like to get with that business! Is it just to earn a couple hundred dollars per month, or you’d like a full-time income?

Either way, automating your business will surely make your life easier!
So how can you automate your business?

One thing you have to know about automation, is that you CAN’T let your busiiness run without having a look at it from time to time! You certainly don’t want to end up paying more for your advertising that you should, or find out there’s something wrong with this or that when it’s too late, so you have to monitor your business. Don’t spend 12 hours a day monitoring it.. or else you might just not automate it at all! You want more spare time, and don’t want to spend all your free time monitoring your business, don’t you?

Take blogs for exemple…wordpress installed, it’s way easier to update than the old “html static website”.. so of course you save time but it’s still “partial-automation”! Hey you gotta write the posts! Unless you hire somone to write them, but i believe outsourcing is not really a good idea. You probably want more “personalized” work with that! But still you save time, so it’s good!

Affiliate programs are a good example of automation. Say you write an ebook (sell it for something like say $34.00 thru clickbank), then write tens/hundreds of follow-up newsletter e-mails that will be sent out to your newsletters subscribers.. in fact you do all the grunt work first! But after that, affiliates will promote your stuff, you pay them a commission, and there you go, you then have to monitor and tweak your “system”!

Imagine a big telecom company like Cingular or Rogers, where the president or CEO answers all the calls! That’s not likely to happen! That’s why they have customer service reps to answer the phone calls and deal with the customers, and pay them a salary.

Of course automation will not apply to every single business there is, say you’re a musician (like myself) :)
You have to compose, go to the studio, record, and then you’re not done, gotta do the shows. But reason why musicians don’t care about automation is that it’s their passion, and they like what they do! (oh yeah!!) Creativity, expression.. in fact every “art form” like, music, sculpture, painting, can’t really rely on automation, cause without the painting, there is no business! But what comes after can be automated, the sales process, marketing, advertising! All that can be automated!

But if you are in the affiliate marketing world, in sales, or in anything related to marketing, advertising and selling a product, you can easily automate your business!

Adwords, pay-per-click, link exchanges, seo, hire profesionals to market your stuff and advertise it. Those are some options that can help you automate your business, there’s a lot more options than that, but you get the idea. Of course automation can cost money, unless you’re willing to do all the work yourself, but then you can’t really call that automation! :)

If you want your business to run 24/7/365, have more free time, earn potentially more revenue, then automation is the way to go! Even if your business is the traditional “shop” or “store”, you can automate it, by hiring employees, and/or set up ads on the net that will attract customers when you sleep! Sounds good huh?

I’d be interested in knowing what other people think about that, what can you do to automate your business, share your experiences and ways of doing things! Any ideas?
Thanx!