How do you automate your business?

It's simple. Hire people to do what you don't want to do. Saves you time so you can focus on more important stuff.

I use Fiverr for little quick jobs and odesk for long term Vas and assistants

Hope that helps
Dennis
the marketing menace

Depends on what your business model is. I typically build valuable relationships with people that specialize in a certain area and hire them to do my work.

For example:
I don't like finding possible pages for backlinking ... its long and tedious so I pay someone else to find the pages, BUT I MAKE THE POST (after all its my website and im the knowledgeable one about my product or my goal)

I see from your signature that you're selling info about outsourcing, so hopefully you know a bit about it already....

I use Fiverr to deal with boring tasks - you have to weigh up how much you value your own time as to whether it's worth hiring someone to do a certain job,

cheers,

Jon.

For me, I automate my business by using software tools for keyword research, content generation, content spinning/checking, building sites and driving traffic.

For keyword research, I used Brad Callen's Niche Finder.



For content generation, I used Paul Ponna's Commission Activator - one of the 2 Commission Autopilot tools.



For content spinning/checking, I used Llama Spin and Content Mania -
2 of Incansoft tools.





For building sites, I used Chris Reeves' Money Site Maker - which used to be one of the special offers here - and XSitePro by Paul Smithson.





For driving free traffic, I used Ewen Chia's The Online
Guru's traffic software.





This is my complete all-in-one automated system that I use. Not just affiliate marketing but my own products as well.

If you know what I mean.

If you mean business as part of the business like design or content creation, then you can outsource it on lot of websites.

But if you want to outsource your business as a whole, you cant hire a 3rd country dude to do that. You need a high paid US/UK/etc person/s to do that. Overall - its your business.

JPSween88 hit the nail on the head. It really depends on your business model, your resources, and what you want automated.

Some of the more obvious automation tools are things like autoresponders so you can automate most of your e-mail, RSS, etc. campaigns.

There are thousands of automation tools out there. There are shopping carts, total e-commerce and/or marketing systems, software (desktop and web-based), etc. There are also plenty of e-commerce and/or affiliate platforms out there like Clickbank, 2Checkout, Paydotcom, JVZoo, WarriorPro (Plus), DigiBilly, etc.

I use both software and automation tools as well as VAs to automate my business.

The challenges I've come across is sometimes synchronizing everything so that when my VAs take over a certain task, it's seamless. Also interviewing, hiring, and testing VAs can be a bit time-consuming in the beginning.

I've also learned that it's very important to document all your processes and procedures. This is critical, especially if something were to happen to you (like become disabled or sick) someone can go through your written processes and be able to take over certain tasks.

The important thing is to have random quality audits on your VA staff to ensure that the quality of work is being performed.

RoD

I think a lot of people have different ideas of exactly what level of automation they're looking for.

For me, a truly automated business means something that is COMPLETELY hands off and takes zero percent of my time to manage. A site that had user-submitted or auto-generated content, and got revenue from ads, CPA's, etc. would be an example of this. These tend to be fairly low income, maybe a couple hundred bucks a month, but since they take up zero time you can repeat the process if you know what you're doing.

Problem is, Google has teams of elite assassins out there trying to find and kill these sites, so it's short-term at best. If you aren't offering something of value, you're merely capitalizing on random search traffic without giving them a reason to come back.

I had a site like this once... I download a list of popular long-tail search queries and put them in a database, then created pages that were completely automated and optimized for those queries. They were "questions" - all started with how, why, etc. And the "answers" were ads. By optimizing the site for those keywords, I was displaying text ads as answers - ads I got paid per click on.

This site did an average of $800 - $1,000 a month for about a year, then went to almost zero one day overnight. But it was a scraper site, plain and simple, and I have yet to be able to duplicate the model - low quality sites = low quality visitors.

I automate various tasks and processes with scripts. For example, I bulk upload photos to my server via ftp and then...

- I can run a script to submit the photos to one or more of my stock photo agencies.
- I can run a script to resize, watermark, and save to various places.
- I can run a script to import the images as Wordpress posts, using the image meta data to create the post content (title, tags, description, etc)

I have various other scripts to take care of other tasks and processes as needed.

ubot is my friend
also I have folks in the phillipines and other countries programming ubot and running it

I use virtual machines so anyone I hire can work on the same virtual machines, that way we avoid IP address issues with google

I can suggest three things for you to do before considering an action that will involve a third party in your business. First, build your own mailing list with automatic offers. For you to capture contact information, it’s best to have a more attractive offer. Instead of “Sign up for our free”, you can try saying “Free Membership: Lose 10lbs in One Week”. Second, update your site regularly with important and interesting topics that will interest people. Third, you can accept payments online by using a system that will connect to your own account. These three tips should help you automate your online business, if not, and then you can hire a virtual team to perform the tasks for you.

Sometimes hiring people is more hassle than it's worth unless it's a long-term hire or the person specializes in the specific task you need done.

It depends on your business model. I do most things myself, but do outsource now and then. I used to outsource quite a bit more, but ROI was questionable. I go in cycles. I now prefer hiring individual services that do specific tasks.

You can hire services, VAs, in-house ... whatever you want. For some tasks, there's software ... but sometimes, like outsourcing, software is more hassle than it's worth.

Outsource traffic generation
Outsource content writing
Hire an accountant

As others have already pointed out, you simply need to hire people to do tasks which you used to do and that suck up all of your time. Then you can focus most of your efforts on building a highly profitable business and keep on scaling it up.

I handle the finer things and automate the little tasks to
VA's on Odesk.com and sometimes higher people on Fiverr to complete
minor tasks as well. Still though that 4 hour work week is not a
reality for me yet. I overwork myself sometimes

try to create a system
likea step by step bussiness
that works and give it to outsourcers
so they to the hard work and you get the money
try to dont give to much information to them
so they dont copy your system