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Now this one is just a killer and really a silent killer because you don’t really know how badly it affects you.  It is like a cancer deep in your marketing bones slowly eating away the marrow of your profits.   

So what things do people fail to automate?  

When I first released this series called Top Mistakes of Internet Marketers I did it as a free ecourse and promised my site visitors that I would send them a lesson a day for eight days, then that I would add four more lessons.  I kept my word and it was easy to do.  Why?  Because I wrote all the follow up one time, put the system in place and my visitors very action of requesting it caused the promise I made to be fulfilled.  

Now if my visitors had asked for this series and after two days had yet to get my first lesson, how would they have felt about me?  

A lot of marketers try to save a few dollars by doing email news letters with their email program and just send out what they want when ever the whim passes.  With automation I have people on day one, day three, day five, etc all at the same time and I do nothing daily to make sure the emails get sent.  In short no matter how busy I am my technology keeps my promises for me.  

Sure it took me two days to write the course and set up the follow up system but I did in ONE TIME and now it will continue to serve me and my visitors for many years.  In fact here I am reusing it for content on one of my blogs, think about that.

Again at only 20 dollars a month I can not recommend a better tool for this then Aweber.  If you still don’t have a follow up system I recommend you go get an Aweber system now.  

Most sites have a contact us section where a user can submit a question or concern.  When your visitors do this they want to know it worked.  Simply by creating a thank you page you can let them know this.  You should also set up an auto response that gets emailed to them telling them your average response time to questions.  

One more and very often overlooked step.  Quite often web masters take a lot of time to write very good FAQs or help sections.  Simply noting the link to that section on the thank your page and acknowledgment email will often get the user an answer and they may have already bought by the time you get to responding to them.  Never assume the visitor found your FAQ or Support Center, always point them to it even as you promise to get a human response to them.  

Now I don’t mean that you should just feed other peoples content into your blog, there is a place for doing so but generally it is way over done.  I am talking about your personal posting.  Most people go to their blog, log in, compose the post and then submit it.  

Did you know you don’t have to do this?  Most blog software (including the very popular blogger) have a feature where you can write an email, send it to a secret address you set up and poof in seconds it is added to your blog.  You can even format text and create links with your email program and they will show on your blog.  

I actually have a few Blogs; sometimes one post is a good fit for three or four of them.  So all I do is open my email program, open my address book, select the Blogs I want to post to, make my post, click send and done.  Four Blogs updated in seconds.  

Think about this!  You take the time to write two or three great news letters a month and they are about your subject matter, key word rich and may get some decent rankings if they were online and not just in an email.  

What most people do is send their newsletter in their follow up system then duplicate the content and put it online on a section of their website.  Actually most people want to do that but don’t get around to it and many times if you view their past newsletters online the most recent one is over a year old!  

Now would it not be great if you could set up a blogger blog, email your newsletter to that blog (as described above) and your blog would then send your newsletter to your email list for you?   

So just by composing one email with out even going to your blog or to your follow up system you could put your content online and sent it to your list in seconds.  If it were this easy don’t you think you might be better about sending your newsletters and getting that content online?  

Well it is easy, again we are back to Aweber but if you have Aweber you can simply set up a blogger blog just for your news letters or announcement list, tell Aweber what the rss feed of your blog is (don’t worry if you don’t know what rss is you don’t really need to right now and the video at Aweber shows you exactly what to do, it takes only seconds) and any time you make a post, Aweber will send it to your list or lists for you.  I use this on this very blog right here.  See the opt in list at the top right of this blog, if you just enter your name and email there you will get notified each time I make a post to this blog. 

I know you are probably thinking that sounds way technical and hard to do.  I promise you it is EASY.  If you can send email you can do this.  Best of all Aweber provides you with online movies that show you step by step exactly how to do it.  Are you beginning to see why I am such a huge fan of Aweber?  

The Lesson on Automation  

The reality is that most forms of automation will make your life easier long term.  However, they often take extra time to learn how to us and set them up.  That time is always paid back in greater leverage and higher profit.   

You are never wasting time in setting up automated systems even when it seems like you could be doing something more productive in the short term.  Set up and learn to use all automated process as early in the game is possible, the best time is BEFORE you really need them.  Then remember to keep looking for ways to automate your processes in any way that you can.

 ~ Jack Spirko

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