Busi­ness Au­toma­tion: 9 Time Savers For Every­day Tasks

When life gives you lemons, make lemon­ade. Or, to re­move the blame from life, when you screw up, write a blog post about it.

In this post you’ll dis­cover 9 ways to au­to­mate tasks, and the best tools to use.

My goal for RalfSkirr.com is to pub­lish a new post each day. Yet, in the last 7 days I’ve pub­lished only 2 posts.

My mis­take.

I was trav­el­ling and up­front I made the smart plan to post from air­port lounges and hotels.

With Wi-Fi every­where, what could go wrong?

Well …

• de­layed flight arrivals,
• 2-min­utes load time per page ,
• an un­co­op­er­a­tive notebook,
• Justin Bieber ,
• and Bangkok’s night life

… killed my plan.

It could have been so easy: write a few posts be­fore trav­el­ling, and load them into Word­Press us­ing the fea­ture for au­to­matic, sched­uled publishing.

Les­son learned, again: It’s smart to use au­toma­tion in your business.

With au­toma­tion your busi­ness keeps work­ing when you are not. Plus, you can save lots of time.

This week’s blog­ging fail gave me the idea to make a list for you how I’m cur­rently us­ing au­toma­tion in my busi­ness. And which tools I’m using.

The choice of au­toma­tion tools I’m pre­sent­ing be­low is the re­sult of 10 years of test­ing. I rarely stick with the first tool for a job. I screen the avail­able tools and give them a test drive.

Word­Press, for ex­am­ple, is my 3^rd blog­ging plat­form af­ter us­ing Serendip­ity and Dru­pal. And af­ter test­ing Mambo, Joomla and Typo3.

1. Use Word­Press au­to­matic scheduling.

Write your posts a few days ahead and use the au­to­matic sched­ul­ing of Word­Press for smooth, con­sis­tent blog­ging. I usu­ally do this with the posts at InternetBusinessMastermind.

The screen shot shows where to en­ter the pub­lish­ing date for a sched­uled pub­lish­ing of your fu­ture posts.

I’m also us­ing the Ed­i­to­r­ial Cal­en­dar plu­gin. It doesn’t au­to­mate any­thing it­self, but it helps you sched­ule your posts with drag and drop and gives a great overview over your sched­uled posts.

The real thing of­fers more screen space than the screen shot be­low. I squeezed that screen shot so the full view would fit into this post.

2. Man­age mul­ti­ple Word­Press sites au­tomag­i­cally with InfiniteWP.

http://infinitewp.com

Word­Press re­quires a lot of main­te­nance work.

• Up­dat­ing Word­Press, themes, and plugins
• Delet­ing spam comments
• Clean­ing the database
• Se­cu­rity backups

I’m us­ing In­finiteWP for those tasks, ex­cept for back­ups (see be­low). It takes a few clicks and in­finiteWP will au­to­mat­i­cally lo­gin to all your Word­Press in­stal­la­tions and per­form the main­te­nance tasks.

I rec­om­mend this only for you if you man­age mul­ti­ple Word­Press sites. If you have only 1 or 2, man­ual main­te­nance will be just fine.

Man­ageWP is also an ex­cel­lent tool and bet­ter known, but In­finiteWP does the same things at a sig­nif­i­cantly lower price. I save $ 480 each year since I switched from Man­ageWP to InfiniteWP.

3. Use Back­up­Buddy for Word­Press backups

http://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy

Back­up­Buddy is the Mer­cedes among Word­Press backup so­lu­tions. I’ve tested many.

Au­to­matic back­ups re­quire cer­tain fea­tures to be avail­able on the web server. Less pro­fes­sional backup so­lu­tions of­ten work only with a few per­fect web servers. Backup buddy has never failed me, no mat­ter how weird the client’s web server was configured.

You can sched­ule au­to­matic up­dates, store them lo­cally or send to re­mote lo­ca­tions (im­por­tant!). You have tons of op­tions, for ex­am­ple you can ex­clude di­rec­to­ries. Or you can au­to­mat­i­cally re­move old backups.

It also comes with an easy to use pro­gram to re­store a site from your backup within a few minutes.

Bonus: Use Back­up­Buddy for in­stalling new sites in minutes.

This is handy for peo­ple who fre­quently cre­ate new sites, for ex­am­ple for web agencies.

I’ve cre­ated a backup of a fully con­fig­ured Word­Press site, in­clud­ing pre­mium plu­g­ins and set­tings. Us­ing the re­store tool I can quickly in­stall this com­plete Word­Press to a new domain.

For each new site this saves me be­tween 90 min­utes and 2 hours of work.

4. For other back­ups use GoodSync, es­pe­cially for your lo­cal computer.

http://www.goodsync.com/

Back­ups are im­por­tant! GoodSync al­lows to make back­ups or synch files be­tween dif­fer­ent stor­age locations.

First use would be to back up your daily work files on your lo­cal com­puter. But GoodSync al­lows back­ups and synchs be­tween an as­ton­ish­ing range of locations.

• GoodSync backs up files to portable dri­ves, mo­bile de­vices and to FTP, S3, GDocs, Sky­Drive, DAV or an­other computer.
• GoodSync syncs files be­tween your com­puter, mo­bile de­vices, FTP, SFTP, Ama­zon S3, Google Drive, Sky­Drive, Web­DAV, Azure.

Of course you can make man­ual back­ups, but since this ar­ti­cle is about au­toma­tion – yes, you can sched­ule au­to­matic back­ups and synchs.

5. Lo­gin au­to­mat­i­cally to any site with RoboForm

http://www.roboform.com/

When I founded my busi­ness in 2001 I man­aged lo­gins with Ex­cel files.

Ugly, and lots of man­ual work!

Now I’ve au­to­mated the process us­ing RoboForm.

Ex­am­ple: Let’s say you’re log­ging in to a new Word­Press site for the first time. When you sub­mit the lo­gin form, Robo­Form will au­to­mat­i­cally store the lo­gin info.

Lo­gins are then avail­able in your browser toolbar:

It takes only one click to:

• Open the lo­gin page in your browser.
• Fill out the lo­gin info.
• Sub­mit the form.

RoboForm’s main fea­tures are:

• Auto Lo­gins to Accounts.
• Fills Check­out Forms for you.
• Stores mul­ti­ple ad­dresses to use with 1 click. (See my 3 ad­dresses in Ger­many, Thai­land, and US in the screenshot.)
• Stores book­marks. (I’m not us­ing that.)
• Stores any other in­for­ma­tion that you wish to have in a safe, en­crypted place. (I store li­cense num­bers for soft­ware and my ftp logins.)

6. Use an au­tore­spon­der for email mar­ket­ing. I use arpReach.

http://arpReach.com

Au­tore­spon­ders man­age a va­ri­ety of tasks.

• You can au­to­mat­i­cally or man­u­ally build a list of email ad­dresses and man­u­ally send emails to the com­plete list or a se­lec­tion of that list.
• You can au­to­mate the send­ing of emails. For ex­am­ple you can sub­scribe a lead to your au­tore­spon­der and then au­to­mat­i­cally send pre­vi­ously saved mar­ket­ing emails every 7 days.
• You could even use it to sched­ule in­di­vid­ual emails to in­di­vid­ual clients. But that is some­thing that’s prob­a­bly not used much, al­though I see some use cases for it.

I use arpReach, and have been us­ing the arpReach’s pre­de­ces­sor Au­toRe­sponse Plus for about 8 years. I’ve tested sev­eral others.

My main rea­sons for arpReach:

• It’s up to date, pro­fes­sional, and un­der con­tin­u­ous de­vel­op­ment. Un­like some oth­ers who are rest­ing on their laurels!
• It’s a one-time pur­chase and as such it’s much, much cheaper than au­tore­spon­ders with monthly sub­scrip­tions like awe­ber. (the same way In­finiteWP men­tioned above is cheaper than a Man­ageWP subscription)
• It has sev­eral ad­vanced fea­tures. For ex­am­ple you can add tags to your con­tacts and have your au­tore­spon­der per­form au­to­matic ac­tions on con­tacts with a spe­cific tag.

Among self-hosted au­tore­spon­ders arpReach is my favorite.

7. An easy to use sales sys­tem: DLGuard.

http://www.dlguard.com

I au­to­mate pay­ment and dig­i­tal prod­uct de­liv­ery with DLGuard.

If you’re sell­ing dig­i­tal prod­ucts (ebooks, on­line courses, mem­ber­ship sites, video and mp3 down­loads) you need a soft­ware to:

• De­liver the prod­uct to your customer 
• Pro­tect your down­load­able files from thieves

You don’t want to do those things manually.

• Cus­tomers ex­pect im­me­di­ate prod­uct de­liv­ery the mo­ment they com­plete payment.
• Han­dling pur­chases man­u­ally is a lot of work.

There are lit­er­ally hun­dreds of so­lu­tions avail­able which will do this, some great, some not so great.

When I started sell­ing dig­i­tal prod­ucts I used the most so­phis­ti­cated sys­tem that was avail­able. It had all the bells and whis­tles one could dream of. But it also had a learn­ing curve that seemed harder than get­ting a PhD.

Af­ter some years I switched to DL­Guard. Short for Down­load Guard.

Its set of fea­tures is lim­ited, but it has every­thing you re­ally need to sell dig­i­tal prod­ucts.

Some­times less is more, and for me it was a huge sim­pli­fi­ca­tion to switch from the mon­ster sales sys­tem to one that does what’s needed: Col­lect the money and de­liver the product.

8. Au­to­mate we­bi­nars for lead gen­er­a­tion and sales with Ever­green Busi­ness System

http://EvergreenBusinessSystem.com

Speak­ing of sales, the biggest cur­rent trend are we­bi­nars. You can use them to get leads and to gen­er­ate sales .

Of­ten we­bi­nars are held live for the au­di­ence of a spe­cific af­fil­i­ate partner.

• Hold­ing the same we­bi­nar again and again is very time consuming.
• How about record­ing it once and then re­play­ing the record­ing for all fu­ture we­bi­nar dates?

I’ve just bought a sys­tem that will au­to­mate the com­plete process from man­ag­ing sub­scrip­tions, to play­ing the we­bi­nar again and again for months or years to come.

The screen shot shows a sub­scrip­tion form where the po­ten­tial cus­tomer can chose a we­bi­nar date. The soft­ware will then sub­scribe him, send him email re­minders, and play the we­bi­nar at the sched­uled date.

I’ve not used it yet on a live site, but I cre­ated and tested one project. Ever­green Busi­ness Sys­tem works flaw­lessly and is one of the most stun­ning mar­ket­ing so­lu­tions I’ve ever tested.

The fea­ture list is end­less, and well thought out.

If you’re do­ing we­bi­nars for mar­ket­ing and sales, take a look.

9. Au­to­mate post­ing of so­cial me­dia up­dates with Sprout­So­cial and Triberr.

Some peo­ple de­test au­toma­tion of so­cial me­dia, but I find it crucial.

For your pro­file to suc­ceed you need to post lots of use­ful con­tent, so you need tools to cre­ate these posts fast, and to sched­ule the posts through­out the day.

Take a look at my Twit­ter ac­count https://twitter.com/RalfSkirr to see the re­sults - lots of Tweets at dif­fer­ent times.

My fa­vorite tool for find­ing and post­ing con­tent is SproutSocial.

https://sproutsocial.com

SproutSocial’s fea­tures are su­pe­rior to the more pop­u­lar Hoot­Suite. Un­for­tu­nately it’s also more ex­pen­sive. They don’t even dare to dis­close their cur­rent prices on the page falsely called pric­ing. Poor choice.

What­ever, SproutSocial’s ease of use is fantastic.

• You can eas­ily view, fil­ter, and share streams with up­dates from your so­cial me­dia contacts. 
• Sprout­So­cial also sports a su­per smart view and shar­ing of your fa­vorite RSS feeds. This is where you find lots of share-wor­thy new content.

The screen­shot shows the feed from one of my Twit­ter lists. You can switch lists or even pro­files quickly with with the menus on the right.

My lat­est sur­prise dis­cov­ery: Triberr

http://triberr.com

I only started us­ing Triberr this month, but I’m blown away by the re­sults. This plat­form is widely underestimated.

Find me here:

http://triberr.com/ralfskirr

I’m not go­ing into all ben­e­fits of Triberr, that’s be­yond the topic of this post.

Re­gard­ing au­to­mated so­cial me­dia shar­ing on Triberr this is important:

You can build a stream that will show you new blog posts from ‘tribes’ you’ve joined. A tribe is a group of bloggers.

• Once you’ve joined a few tribes your stream will show you dozens of new posts each day. You can semi-au­­to­­mat­i­­cally share to mul­ti­ple so­cial net­works with 1 click. Of course not all posts are share-wor­thy. But I find enough to fill my Twit­ter stream with great links.
• You can also share man­u­ally one by one for full con­trol over your shares.
• You can col­lect lots of up­dates by click­ing each of them once, and Triberr will sched­ule them au­to­mat­i­cally for dis­trib­uted post­ing. For ex­am­ple 1 post every 90 minutes.
• You can even de­cide to share your fa­vorite blog­gers fully au­to­matic. This makes sense for those blog­gers where you’re cer­tain they post only great content.

For ex­am­ple I’m auto-shar­ing every­thing Mark W. Schae­fer posts through Triberr. I know it’s good!

Here’s a screen­shot of Triber­r’s stream with blog posts you can share.

I’ve kept the best for last:

Triberr is free! 

You should def­i­nitely give it a try. Here’s my link again: ;-)

http://triberr.com/ralfskirr

So far my 9 tips to au­to­mate or speed up tasks in your business.

What are you us­ing to au­to­mate busi­ness tasks?

Share with us in the com­ments and make this post more useful.