Why Automate Your Online Business?
Many entrepreneurs have different opinions whether you should automate your online business. On the one hand it works great, but on the other, it can get in the way of engagement.
However, if you want to build your passive income stream you’re going to need to implement automation. If you do it right, all you have to do is get people on your list, assuming they were well targeted, and then you can start earning.
First, let’s define passive revenue. This is income that you earn today (and tomorrow) through the efforts you put in yesterday and today. No one denies that earning passive income is work up front and not at all passive. But, if you build your systems correctly, you’ll be able to take breaks and do less work while your income continues to rise on autopilot.
8 Ways To Automate Your Online Business
1. Your Blog
If you’re feeling like a robot slave to your blog, there is good news. There are plenty of blogging activities that you can set to automate your online business so you can focus on more important parts of running your business.
Schedule posts to go live on your blog in advance. If you can work your business a quarter ahead, you’ll find that you will make a lot more money due to being prepared. Use your blog as your “home base” or the hub of your online empire. That’s where your educational information and sales pages exist, and where people sign up for your email list.
The majority of blogs these days are run on the Word Press platform. Even if yours is not, odds are it has the ability to schedule publishing your posts ahead of time. Once you have written a number of posts, you can easily use technology to schedule automated delivery at some date in the future. This saves you the time required to log into your blog and manually post content.
FREE Checklist: Business Systems & Automation
2. Autoresponders
You’ll also need an autoresponder. These are great email marketing automation tools that almost anyone can figure out how to use to build passive income. Set up an automated series for every single product or service, whether paid or free, that will automatically go to the people who sign up to your email list.
Email automation is really convenient. It allows you to do a lot of your email marketing hands-off. You don’t have to manually do everything. You can schedule autoresponder emails to go out and set up a sales funnel that works for you day and night.
3. Publish an eBook
When you write your own eBook, it’s a great way to do work up front and then use it to get more customers and clients by telling people about it. When you publish an eBook, people respect you more as an expert because they imagine it takes a lot of work to put that information together – in other words, you must be an expert.
Writing an eBook is not as difficult as you may think. It takes nothing but time to write an eBook. Simply write every time you have 10 or 15 minutes of free time. Plenty of successful authors, of both eBooks and physical books, do it this way.
4. Teach What You Know
This might not seem that passive either but if you set up a course on software that all works automatically to collect payment, send autoresponder messages, and so forth, it becomes passive the minute it’s published. Try using software like Teachable.com to deliver lessons hands off.
5. Sign Up As An Affiliate
An affiliate earns a percentage of sales that are made through their link. Even though you have your own products, find good quality affiliate products to promote to your audience too. Add it to your autoresponder. Choose to work with companies that provide life-long cookies to help build your passive income.
6. Automate Social MediaÂ
As an online entrepreneur, you’ll know the importance of blogging regularly. But often you find that you’re either not dedicating enough time to promoting your blog posts across your social media channels, or you just forget entirely. When you think about the amount of time you spend on social media trying to attract attention to your blog,  social media blogging tools can be invaluable. Software like Missinglettr creates strategic, automated social media campaigns that drive traffic for an entire year. Leaving you to focus on what’s really important.
7 .Use Akismet For Comment Moderation
Reading, approving and replying to your comments takes time. This is one of the tasks many bloggers know is necessary, but can quickly become bothersome and frustrating. Use the WordPress plug-in Akismet to do much of the work for you. There are filters and settings you put in place to take care of the majority of comment approvals for you.
8. Stop Doing Everything Yourself
Whilst it’s not strictly automation, you can hire a virtual assistant in the Philippines for $200 to $300 a month. Those are full-time figures. On a part-time rate, you could spend sign $50 to $100 each month and have a virtual assistant handle much of your time-consuming, recurring blog tasks. Sites like Guru, Toptal and Upwork are home to talented virtual assistants that you can put to work on your online to free up your valuable time.
Free Checklist: A Guide To Automate Your Online Business
If you think about how you can automate elements of your online business, from sales to product delivery, it becomes clear that if you set things up right from the start, you’ll be able to build income for the future that you worked on today. That’s one the true benefits of automation of processes: set it up, forget it, and take home the money.
To learn more on how to automate your business processes download my free checklist, A Guide To Business Systems And Automation.
