How to Get Your Business to Work for You Instead
How to Get Your
Business to Work for You Instead
All businesses are
different and not all businesses can be 100% automated, but in many cases there
are opportunities within your business, big and small, where you can take
yourself out of the equation and put something else in it’s place to keep it
running, sometimes even more efficiently than before.
Some of these strategies
may not apply depending on the type of business that you have or want to
create, but implementing just one of these strategies can help free
yourself from your business a little and give you some extra time to do what
you’d rather be doing, or focus on the parts of your business that need you
more.
The Human Touch?
The first step is to
understand where the human touch is currently (or would be) required in your
business. In other words, what parts of your business would fail or stop
working if a human was not present anymore?
There are a couple of ways
to figure this out:
1. You can create a flow chart
of exactly how your business works and see exactly what parts require a person
to function.
2. For those with an existing
business, you can keep a list of all of the actions that you and those who work
for you do. Take a week and write down everything that you do in your business.
After you know exactly
where in your business a human is used, you can see if any of those parts of
your business can be handled by something or someone else instead.
Automated Delivery
For a lot of businesses, a
human touch is used during the delivery of a specific product or service. Many
times, however, the delivery process can be automated.
For GreenExamAcademy.com, I
made the conscious decision to go digital and sell an eBook instead of a
physical book because this would allow me to more easily automate the delivery
of that information to my customers.
See flowchart below:
I
use E-Junkie.com, which is just one of the
several delivery and payment processor options available to digital content
providers. Here are some others:
In addition to self-hosted
automation and delivery options, there’s also specific marketplaces where you
can not only take advantage of their automated delivery processes, but you’ll
have access to potentially millions of people on those platforms as well.
The Kindle Marketplace for
eBooks and Apple’s App Store for iPhone and iPad applications are specific
examples that come to mind.
With
digital products like eBooks, courses and software, automation is almost a
given, but
what about physical products?
With physical products,
delivery isn’t as easy as a download or access to a password-protected area,
but for some businesses it can still be automated.
Fulfillment
centers – third-party businesses that will pack and ship your physical product
to your customers for you – can easily take a huge load off of your back and
make life a lot easier. You will typically have to pay for the service, but it
can be well worth the price, especially if you understand how much your time is
worth and how much time it takes to pack and ship the products you sell
yourself.
I’ve
recently been working with a fulfillment center for the physical items sold in
the Crooked
Arrows store,
and not having to worry about packing and shipping to each individual customer
is awesome.
I don’t know too much about
fulfillment options since the Crooked Arrows store is my only experience
selling a physical product, so if there are any readers out there who sell
physical products, please feel free to chime in about how you handle and automate
fulfillment.
I
do know, however, that Amazon.com offers an optional
fulfillment service for
those who offer physical products in their business.
If you have a service, as
opposed to a product, then automating your “deliverable” will be much more
difficult, which is why it’s smart to see where else in your business you can
possibly automate things.
Outsourcing
Sometimes,
specific parts of your business must include a human touch and there’s no way
around it. But, a question you can ask yourself is: does that specific part of
your business require your human touch?
Many times, it does not,
and you can easily find someone to handle those tasks for you.
From web development to
customer service, a lot of people can benefit from handing off specific parts
of their business to those who could potentially do it much faster and better
than they could.
As
I write this post, for example, I have a developer who is working to create a
better Create a Clickable Map (a free tool that I
had developed to help people create a clickable U.S. map for their website).
The new developer is adding the ability to save your map so you can come back
and edit it later, and it’ll be HTML5 compatible so it can be viewed on any
device. That’s definitely something I could not do on my own, or even learn how
to do in a short period of time.
Just
last month, one of my virtual assistants compiled a list of 2,500+ security
guard training companies around the U.S. which I’ll be using in a zip code
search function on my new security
guard training niche site. That research took hours of work and it’s work I didn’t
have to do myself.
I know a lot of people who
use hired help to automate things like publishing a podcast episode. They hand
over a recorded mp3 file to their editor and they take care of the rest,
including publishing it online.
There are endless
possibilities, but you have to be willing to hand over some of the work in your
business to others. I can say from experience that it’s not always easy to “let
go” and hand over some of that control, but for me it’s been well worth it.
For
more information about finding and using virtual assistants, check out my podcast
interview with outsourcing expert, Chris Ducker.
An FAQ
Even for the most automated
types of businesses, questions from customers can easily take up a lot of your
time. For GreenExamAcademy.com, the business was 100% automated except for the
emails I would get from people about the products that I sold.
I soon found out that one
of the easiest but most powerful ways to automate your business while actually
providing more value to your customers is to create a helpful FAQ (frequently
asked questions) page that answers the most common questions people have about
your business and your products.
Customers get their
questions answered sooner, and your time isn’t needed to answer those
questions.
It’s a beautiful thing.
By adding an FAQ page (in
this case, it was a PDF file) along with the digital delivery of my eBook at
GreenExamAcademy.com, I cut down the number of emails from customers by 75%.
Autoresponder
I’ve
talked about the power of email lists very recently in a two-part podcast series all about email
marketing, but I want to reiterate the power of using your autoresponder in
your email campaign.
With a little bit of effort
now, you can deliver pre-written emails that get sent out sequentially to new
subscribers and automate a lot of the relationship-building and promotional
processes within your business.
There
are many ways to structure and craft your autoresponder emails. Click here for some specific examples that you can model
after.
Affiliate
Marketing
It might seem kind weird to
see affiliate marketing here on this list, but since it has become the #1 way
that I generate an income online, I have to mention it because it’s definitely
very hands-off and automated.
Even on
GreenExamAcademy.com, I promote practice exams administered by a third-party
company and the process is as simple as driving people through a specific link.
The delivery and customer service related to that product is handled by the
product owner, instead of myself, and I get a check each month for the sales
I’ve generated.
That said, it’s not
completely hands-off for affiliates because successful affiliate marketers do a
lot more than just put a special link on a website. A lot of research has to be
done to make sure the product is just right for your specific audience (i.e.
it’s something that’s actually going to help them achieve the goals that you
want them to achieve), and I always recommend that you should “unbox the
product” for your audience before promoting it as an affiliate, making your
customers feel more confortable with what they are about to purchase and
exactly what they’re going to get.
For
more affiliate marketing strategies, please check out my Blog World Expo
presentation, Affiliate
Marketing the Smart Way.
Publish More
Content
And lastly, something we
can all do, is publish more content.
Huh?
Publishing
content is not passive (unless someone else is doing it for you), but the truth
is that if you’re blogging, podcasting, creating videos or producing and
publishing any other kind of content, you are creating passive opportunities.
The content you publish
today can be read by someone tomorrow, next year, or even five years from now.
It becomes a seed that you plant now that can bare fruit for you later, and the
more seeds you plant and the more you put yourself out there, the more fruit
you will yield.
New content becomes an
opportunity for people to find you through search engines, through sharing and
word of mouth and it can become a vehicle for more income if that content sold
a product, or has a pay-per-click advertisement on it, or an affiliate link.
Even if it doesn’t, it’s an opportunity for people to find you and be
introduced to your brand and become familiar with what you have to offer,
without you having to actively reach out to those people in a real-time
fashion.
Automating
your business doesn’t mean you’re going create something that you can 100% walk
away from forever. Any smart business owner knows that he or
she will have to adapt to changing markets and at least monitor the business,
but you can take yourself out of the equation, or at least some of it, so you
don’t have to be present in order for a transaction to take place and
you can spend your time doing things that are more important to you, or focus
on the areas of your business that you’d prefer to focus on.
Is there anything else
you’d like to add? Are you automating your business in a way that you’d like to
share?
Please leave a comment
below. Cheers, and all the best!
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