Which part of your business have you automated?

captainT

captainT

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Feb 6, 2015
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Hello guys,

I read here and there on buso, that members have automated some parts of their business on buso. I was wondering which one.7

What have you automated in your online business and how?

Muchas gracias!
 
I constantly work at automation. Sometimes it's for my sites, and other times for other ecom sites. The most common thing I do in this area is to automate inventory parsing processes: either automate the download of a csv and parse it for quantities (and put into a database) or in other cases actually scrape a merchant site for new products, and insert those into my site's DB.
 
I have almost completely automated the SEO and Social Media parts to my businesses by outsourcing to reputable persons, many of which are active here it seems. I had to learn a great deal before I was comfortable doing that, but I now have a person for each task I need to accomplish online.

Content writing
Linkbuilding
Social Media
Graphic Design
Web Design
Ect.
 
I'd also be really interested in finding out more about how people are using automation here at BuSo.

My plan is once I have processes in place to attempt to automate them.
 
Automation is my main weakness. I really need to get deeper involved, as many tasks I have (at the moment) take too much time, and often get draining.

When I look back at the things I did automate, they produceD great results.. :smile:
 
If you guys haven't used it yet Zapier.com automates a shit ton for me. Not as much marketing processes but everything else.

IFTTT I use for more marketing processes. Which is another solid one to check out.
 
I have a few different parts of what I do. I own a few physical product brands, software, and content sites. I have different parts of each automated, however the main things that I focus on are preventing contractor churn and marketing and growth direction.

Outsourced for software
  • Development & bug fixing (I prefer to keep a few developers rather than rehire per bug fix. It's never fun working on patched up code rather than true fixes and coding standards).
  • Customer support - I use Zendesk and have 2 tiers of support. If it is past tier 2, the support person sets a trigger which notifies me by email. This is a key strategy to minimize the chance of burning out with software and SaaS in my opinion. Not enough people respect how taxing support is.

Outsourced for physical products
  • Customer review requests
  • Social media marketing
  • Ad campaign management
  • Branding design
  • Fulfillment and shipping (we primarily use FBA)

Outsourced for content based sites
  • Content creation
  • Keyword research
  • Search engine optimization
  • Email triggered message series

I tend to be more hands on in early stages and automated once the project is up and running decently.
 
My approach is to just keep track of everything that I do on a daily basis. Write down the steps to things you do every day. Once you start seeing patterns emerge, automate it if possible. To me, automation is a gradual, organic process. It's unique to everyone. Having a programming background helps as well.

I used to get sucked into the trap of over optimizing my workflow though. I would spend 5 hours trying to program a bot to do something I would only do once or twice a week. It became a twisted sort of procrastination for me. Feeling like I was doing work, but in reality I was just wasting time. Try to automate things that will give you a return on the time invested.

Long story short, find patterns in your daily grind, and automate things you do everyday. Don't waste too much time worrying about what to automate, just track your workflow, and optimize as you go.
 
I've been able to automate scraping and filtering expired domains, from lists of xxx,xxx domains to xx. I used to have my assistant do this but it was taking a lot of time, so I had him work with a developer to write everything. Now it can run every day and we can cherry pick the best domains, instead of settling on the days we did decide to run through the entire process.
 
Automation is a big part of my business. SEO and Social. Always got GSA running on a VPS. Gscraper and Scrapebox running..
 
Automated scrapes of r trade directories on a monthly basis, then cleaning the list. When one of the major theme selling sites brings out a new theme in the niches I follow, a VA notes it and building an example site which we then email to the list with a 'special deal' for a new site.
 
Antares said:
My approach is to just keep track of everything that I do on a daily basis. Write down the steps to things you do every day. Once you start seeing patterns emerge, automate it if possible. To me, automation is a gradual, organic process. It's unique to everyone. Having a programming background helps as well.
Click to expand...

I think this is the best way to start planning how you can automate a process. Patterns and routine are key!
 
Aside from SEO, web development and content writing, back-office processes and administrative work are easy to outsource.
 
I'm learning programming and have automated almost everything what I need. But for things which go public I prefer the manual way.
 
I use a tool called clarify-it which is basically screen capture software that makes it easy to create processes and step by step guides for tasks you are doing - highly recommended.

I used that to create 'how to's' to add content to websites which I own, and now I have a full-time VA adding content for me which is a huge win!

Next for me is to automate:

> Link building and outreach for guest posting (will be hard for me as its what I do best however without outsourcing this Ill never grow)

> Instagram and pinterest marketing

> creation of digital products which I can then use in sales funnels


Sometimes its hard to take time here and there off to work on your processes and systems, but I honestly believe that lack of systems is the number one thing holding entrepreneurs back!
 
Noobie here.

I focus on automating stuff that makes things easier for me and my customers but without presenting clients with robots instead of people. So for example I have automated onboarding so that when clients sign up to my (current) service they are automatically set up with the right content and settings for their niche.
 
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