This article is part of the Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business series. All week you will find articles that demystify what’s involved and what the secrets are to success.

Running an online business potentially gives you access to a global market, but odds are your company is quite small. In fact you and possibly a partner may very well be the entire business, and you might not even be full-time! How on earth do you process sales, provide support, do the accounting, order inventory, keep track of key metrics, and perform all manner of other administrative tasks while still having the time to focus on growing your new business?

Automate as much of the work as you can.

You are the most valuable resource your business has because ultimately you have the potential for coming up with $10 000/hr ideas. You should be spending as much of your time on growing your business and coming up with such ideas as possible and not allowing administrative tasks to become all that you do. Still someone has to do the every day mundane work, and whenever possible that should be a software program.

Let’s take a look at just some of tremendously time-consuming tasks that you can automate with a little bit of creative coding. If you don’t know how to write code, hold on to your pants because you can still take advantage of this wonderful time-saving concept.

Automation Idea #1: Delivery of a Digital Product

Whenever someone buys a copy of CustomBar, my shareware program, I get a nice e-mail telling me that this has occured. Long before my eyes ever see that e-mail, the customer already also has an e-mail containing a unique registration code and login information for downloading the product, along with a nice purchase receipt. I have devoted absolutely no time to processing this sale as my order script has already taken care of everything. It took about a week to write and test, but it has sinced saved me countless amounts of time. The customer is also happy because delivery of the product is instant.

This can be done for other digital products like ebooks, videos, photography and more. Payment processing services often provide tools to help you automate order fullfillment along with sample scripts, so you might not need coding abilities at all to pull off this fantastic time-saver.

Automation Idea #2: Do It Yourself Customer Tools

It’s highly unlikely that your customers have no connection to your business after the sale is complete. There is usually at least a registration code or a file download, and in the case of services a customer may have a whole slew of things they want done after the fact. Do you really need to be manually resetting a forgotten password every single time someone loses it? What about registration codes? Updates to billing information? Even the purchase of additional services?

Providing an online method for customers to service their own needs can be a huge time saver or possibly a necessity. This is often accomplished by supplying the customer with a login to a secure “account management” area on your product or service website where online tools make service changes fast and easy. You can also use such an area to automatically provide invoices and suggest complementary products. My hosting customers can manage almost any aspect of their account themselves through a control panel software that only costs me about $250 a year. With the time I save I can make many times that.

Automation Idea #3: Reminders

Hopefully you already have a calendar managment system that can remind you of important appointments and tasks that are due. This is already a form of automation, particularly if the calendar reminds you automatically rather than requiring you to look at it. But your reminders don’t necessarily need to apply to you, they can apply to your customers or suppliers as well!

If you have ever registered a domain name and have it come up with renewal, you have probably received multiple automatic e-mail reminders telling you of this matter. Could you imagine someone checking a list of registered domains every single day and sending out reminder e-mails? This would be ridiculously expensive, error-prone, and unmaintainable. Any renewable service has the potential to employ automatically renewing accounts, automatic customer renewal reminders, or if a personal touch is required then it can simply remind you to make the call. In the first two cases your system is automatically generating more money for you, without active interference on your part. How easy is that?

Automation Idea #32442433

Virtually anything repetitive can be completely or partially automated, so there’s no way to include all possible ideas. Use the three above as a starting point to brainstorming areas of your business that could be improved. Good candidates for automation are administrative tasks that either take up too much time, cause you much frustration and annoyance, or that you tend to procrastinate on (especially when it results in impatient customers).

What if I’m a consultant or provider of custom services?

It’s often easier to come up with automation scenarios for a product than a custom service. In cases where you are selling the talents of yourself or a group of people to perform skilled work you can’t just run a software wizard to do your job. You can however still employ automation to both speed up your work and increase quality. In my website development business I have code that allows me to get the website skeleton up and running quickly. I also have automated tools to help with quality checks on the finished products and an increasingly sophisticated automatic website upgrade capability.

Even if you have trouble automating your core work you can still get administrative tasks out of the way. These are particularly a major setback for contractors who are getting paid hourly, and thus only making money when they are out there doing actual work for clients. For example you can automate your invoicing process, and have your software keep track of which customers need to pay (and of course remind them of this fact).

Your fancy programming is great for you, but what if I’m not a coder?

Fair question, but you aren’t exactly without options. From least to most expensive, you have the option to:

• Learn a language yourself. PHP is great for any online-based automation.
• Download a ready-made script or program that does what you need. This is often free.
• Partner with someone who does know how to code.
• Contract out coders when you need something written.

Note how only the last option necessarily requires spending money upfront.

I can’t emphasize how important automation has been to my own business ventures. Having to take 10 minutes to send out an order manually may not seem like a lot, but every 10 minute task adds up until that’s all that you are doing. Inevitably some tasks get passed up or mistakes made, leading to frustrated customers and your own stress levels going through the roof. Getting rid of these problems and freeing yourself for more productive tasks is a major breakthrough to success.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 6:51 am and is filed under Business, Websites, e-Commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.