You’ve probably seen the social media posts and YouTube videos: jet-setting digital entrepreneurs who travel the world on passive income. These online business owners claim that their business is on autopilot, making the income they need to visit a new country every week, while they’re lounging on the beach with a cocktail.
Although these may be extreme examples, it is undoubtedly true that many processes can be automated or at least streamlined, particularly in an online business.
Doing so will take various tasks off your to-do list, freeing you up to focus on other things. Whether you choose to spend this time on other aspects of your business or relaxing on the beach, is up to you!
1. Automate Your Email Marketing
Email marketing is a valuable tool for many kinds of businesses. It helps to build strong customer relationships, it can drive new leads, and it will encourage repeat business. However, to be effective, email marketing needs to be consistent.
Sporadically shooting emails out when you have time isn’t going to have an impact. Luckily, this process can be automated by creating and scheduling email campaigns in advance in a tool like MailChimp.
2. Use a Scheduling Tool for Social Media
Social media is incredibly important for promoting your business and attracting new customers, but it can also be time-consuming.
You can, however, largely automate this process by using a social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite or CoSchedule. These platforms allow you to draft and schedule your posts months in advance, and you can usually copy posts across multiple platforms, making things even more efficient.
Many of these tools also have excellent analysis and reports functions, helping you to lift your social media game at the same time.
3. Outsource Your Accounting
Outsourcing is perhaps the ultimate way to automate any process because it removes it completely off your plate. If you are looking to outsource parts of your business, accounting is an excellent place to start.
This is a critically important area of your business and something that can have extreme consequences if you fall behind or make a mistake. It is also a specialized field that you may not have the skills to do yourself.
Outsourcing your accounting will mean that not only is this a whole section of your business you don’t need to worry about, but you can rest easy knowing this critical function is being taken care off by an expert.
4. Use a Website Builder
In order for your website to be effective, you need to make sure it stays current and up to date. Website builders are incredibly useful for not just creating your website, but for automating processes once the website is built, making sure you improve your website’s performance.
Continually updating and changing your site can be time-consuming, especially if it involves coding.
However, if you build your site on a simple platform like Wix or Weebly, updating it periodically is quick and easy. You can minimize the need to do this by limiting the information on your site to generally fixed information, and avoiding posting news or coming events directly to your website, as these will need to be constantly updated. Instead, think about having a social media feed on the front page of your site which is automatically updated.
5. Run Automated Survey Responses
Surveys are great ways to build customer engagement and loyalty: people love telling you what they think, and by asking your customers for feedback you are showing them that you value their opinions.
However, they are most effective if you don’t just send out surveys for customers to complete, but reply to the responses too. Additionally, you don’t want this to be an empty process: your customers will likely have great suggestions you should take on board!
Luckily, the development of AI technology means that you can now use AI bots to not only reply to survey respondents but even distribute their suggestions to your team so they can be actioned.
6. Integrate Your Apps
Like many online business owners, you’re probably using a wide range of tools and apps, from mail and calendar apps to project management and time tracking platforms.
Although these tools are designed to make things more efficient, working with so many can become cumbersome and inefficient. Streamline your tools by using an app like Zapier to coordinate them, meaning that when you enter data into one, it is populated into the others.
7. Automate Customer Reminders
The wealth of tools and technology available today means we can now automate many processes which were once entirely manual.
One of these areas is customer service: you can set up your systems so that customers receive automatic messages and emails, for example when they sign up for a service, or when they have not bought a new product for a while.
This, of course, will not completely replace the need for personal interaction with your customers, but it will streamline a lot of processes, and probably increase overall engagement.
David Trounce
Latest posts by David Trounce (see all)
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Nice and informative. Thank you for the information. I have to say, outsourcing our accounting was what turned our business into a well-oiled machine. We didn’t even make the jump to an accountant — we just started using a software. It’s been very helpful.
Some really interesting insights in this piece and something that we will be taking on board at our company. I think that this area has gone completely disregarded as something beneficial but changes will be made to address it.
Point 4 is something that we are already using, our website is run on Wix and they have a really good CRM-type system where I can schedule calls and appointments.
Thank you for this.. really helpful for someone like me who is starting her own business and would love to have a great online presence to gain more customers.
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Interesting blog & informative too. Autopiloting online business can really help in increasing productivity & by scheduling for later lessen your worry. Thanks for sharing.
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Hi,
This is good ways to put your online business and great efforts seen here, Thanks a lot fro sharing with us .
Great post. Nowadays social media automation is very important and useful, And in email and website building, in fact landing pages and sale funnel love automatio, but to my view it make things easier and faster.
Very interesting article. Autopilot for business is like a compulsion in the current situation of the market. Craving stability is one of the most important factors & giving an autopilot to the business facilitates stability.
This has been a very informative read and certainly a different look on the subject. The email marketing has made me re-think our whole strategy and I have already switched over to using mailchimp.
good ideas to make your business automative online. Schedule post and automotive email marketing are my favourite tricks. Create social media profile and apply the post scheduling plugins, like on FB pages, twitter and other social platforms.
Thanks for the information.
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I think this is a very good article. The one I resonate with the most is setting up the automated newsletter funnel for subscribers although this will take a long time to setup as you have to maintain quality control at all times.
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Excellent article David! Especially the social medial automation tip. There are too many channel out there, and you hopefully have too many posts to share them all manually. So automation is a must and sooner one learn is- the better.
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Hey David Trounce,
Great post. Thanks for being so generous and sharing information regarding online business. I have to agree with you on email marketing and its importance on Online business. Thanks for also mentioning about automate customer reminders.
Keep up the good work.
This is great advice! It’s great to know we can coast while we allocate our energy elsewhere. Email marketing and automated customer reminders are absolutely imperative!! Thanks for this great article!
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I am trying to put my blogging business on autopilot? any help?
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Hi Yogesh,
Even though you can automate some aspects of any business, you still have to invest your own time regularly to succeed.
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Hi
Great article. It was helpful to think about how a site builder will update regularly rather than the input of having to do those tings one self.
Hoping than everyone who reads this will have greater ease in running there business. I’m am certainly open to it in mine!!
Thanks again
Paul
All you have arrange perfectly. Videos are more effective than I expected. Altogether drive me up I hope.
Hi David,
I am running eCommerce online store which is selling home decors, it is really very hard to scale my business,
we have a lot of departments to manage our online store, it is really very hard for me to automate those departments
i am working on automating by the business for a long time but everything went wrong and finally, i end up with your article which really helped me a lot
Thank you.
Hi David,
You solved our problem by sharing all the important resources that we need while doing online stuffs. The most I loved from the above resource is “Integrate your Apps” which is really nice and time saving one.
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David,
Thank you for taking the time to explain about Online Business, I was dealing with a lot of problems in my business your article help me to solve all my problems in my business. I really appreciate your hard work and want you to know it doesn’t go unnoticed. Thank you for being such an inspiration to me.
Another way you can put your business on autopilot is by hiring writers to not only create the content you want to publish but they can also post it. Assuming they have the knowledge or you can teach them how to do it.
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Yeah, automate accounting. If there’s something that I really hate doing in my business that’s definitely accounting.
Great suggestion with integrating your tools (with Zapier) and I believe that your business grows as high as your automation game.
And like with everything, automate but keep the quality, right? 🙂
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Hi David
Great to see you here on Gail’s blog. I guest posted for her as well.
I don’t use Zapier. I think it costs or there was some disadvantage that made me get rid of my account.
You recommended Hootsuite. I’m a huge Buffer fan.
These time-saving tools are important. A time-drain is a problem for entrepreneurs.
Thanks for these suggestions.
Janice
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Thanks for the article David. I’m always looking for ways to automate and improve. I manage an industrial ecommerce store, https://hoistzone.com/ and we have implemented some of the automations you suggested.
For example, I setup Zapier to save some order data to Airtable for some advanced monthly reporting. I did setup automatic reviews to be sent out a few days after orders are received but I also think I should setup some general survey emails in the future.
I find it most difficult to know what content to either email or post about.
Thanks for the helpful article.
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I’d say: create procedures for all the things you do that are repeatable. It’s not a tech kind of automation, but the psychological one: procedures help create habits and habits help us do things much faster.
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Completely love the idea of autopilot, and I will say that it has made a difference for my business. I would recommend Shopify for your storefront, and while you need to keep track of your spending (SAAS subscriptions add up)… rely on software to automate anything you can.
Here’s a list of software I use for my ecommerce store:
Hosting and domain: Shopify
Inventory: Printful
Email: Klaviyo (& Gsuite)
SMS: SMSBump
Accounting and Taxes: bench.co (it’s expensive, but worth it)
Hope these help someone in need!
Hey David,
Thanks for your nice pitch, I have startup company named Lagbe is there any free auto chatbot i can use on my website for response to users query?
Feel free please let me know.
Thank you for sharing this amazing concept. It is very helpful for my business.
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David,
Thanks for the great pitch. I prefer automating blog post publications, social media mentions, etc. But, I always insist others not automate their content marketing especially content creation. Content is the essential key. It should produce by a human for humans. Only the medium should digital and automated. Only then, one can build credibility among the users. Hope I am not wrong.
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Nice blog post… nowadays business is working on autopilot …..Social Media automation is very important.
Thank You.
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We are an online shop (https://joystreet.com.au) – a small business with a small team. Time is of the essence and such automation always help us in providing great customer service. A good platform for building your website and automation of marketing tasks can really change a lot of things and allows business owner to focus on most important aspect – customer.
Excellent article. Not quite, “Automated”, but Google Suite has been an absolutely incredible and indispensable tool to manage all sorts of administrative tasks. Google Sheets in particular allows multiple members of our team to seamlessly and indeed expediently keep everyone on task.
Hey David, Superb Content
By Automating customer reminders, a lot of time can be saved and I can focus on other Important issues.
Thanks.
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That’s a great article, David. Being a business owner, I can totally imagine how tedious it gets to manage everything alone.
I’m personally a huge fan of Zapier and it has made my life a little easier with all the automation. Thank you for sharing the other tricks, will give them a try for sure.
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Great idea about business automation. Most entrepreneurs, after they develop their own business, want it to run as easy as possible with the least amount of effort and cost.
Email marketing is one of my hobbies and I will try to learn Email marketing soon.
One thing I have invested my money and efforts in is editing websites and writing articles. The website which I have created is based on health and fitness topics and I love to write articles.
You would be surprised just how much you can automate with Google Apps Scripts (https://developers.google.com/apps-script). This does require coding experience (JavaScript) or a developer, but once you get the hang of it, you can automate just about anything. It’s basically a DIY Zapier and much more cost-effective (either free, or if you’re already paying for G Suite, then you already have access. Although, since you have total control over the code, you can do things that are too complex for Zapier.
We automate a ton of things – here are some examples of things we’ve automated:
– Automated gift card creation. When someone places an order and selects a gift card, the gift card info gets sent via API into a spreadsheet. Then, when we’re ready to print gift cards, we run another Google Apps Script that takes all unprinted gift cards and uses two Google Doc templates to generate the gift cards for printing plus the envelopes with the address that the gift card will be mailed to (both as a new Google Doc).
– Automated email reports. For another project, we use a Google Spreadsheet with a list of all clients that should receive email reports. We have a Google Apps Script that runs each Monday and pulls all clients, then for each client it hits our API to grab the report data and puts the numbers into an HTML email template. Then, it sends out an email via Gmail to the client including the reporting information, plus the raw data in a CSV attachment (generated in a Google Spreadsheet, again via the Google Apps Script)
– Automated PDF reports. Similar to the last one, we have a Google Slides file that contains a nicely designed template for reporting data (things like traffic, sales, revenue, average order value, conversion rate, etc). We have a Google Spreadsheet where you can input the client’s ID and the date range that you’d like to pull, and then when you run that script, it pulls data from both our reporting API plus Google Analytics and does some calculations, then replaces the variables in the template with real numbers and saves it as a new Google Slides file. Then, we have pretty looking report (think like a QBR type of report) that we can send to a client (or also review on a call) that looks like we spent an hour pulling together…but it only took about 30 seconds!
– Automated Facebook Ad reports. Again, similar to the automated email reports, we have a script that pulls data from the Facebook Ads API (things like impressions, clicks, sales, revenue, etc) and drops it into a spreadsheet, then saves it to Google Drive and emails it out to the client. This is really helpful because (a) you control the email that goes out, so if you’re an agency, the client will get a email from you with your brand rather than it coming from Facebook and (b) Facebook’s own automated email reports are really annoying because they don’t actually include the data in the email, they make you click into their dashboard.
Hope this gives you some ideas! This literally only scratches the surface of what you can automate using Google Apps Script and the Google APIs. You can automate just about your entire business using this if you really put the time into building out the integrations!
he would leave a few things off but actually your list it’s almost all of the main things I would have mentioned in a blog post myself. Of course you probably could have explained a little more but it’s tedious sometimes trying to you squeak out a few hundred more words here and there. Great job.
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Thanks so much for this helpful into! I have done a lot of these things in my business Students of History. It helps make sure that I am focusing my time on creating lesson plans and teaching resources for social studies teachers that are effective for their classrooms.
The time management strategies have been most helpful for me with putting things on autopilot like pinning, tweeting, and sharing links on my Facebook page.
The apps on my phone also make it easy like you mention to do things on the go or if there’s down time waiting for my train or just in a waiting room. Time that was wasted before now is productive!
Using a web builder for my website was a HUGE hack for me. I use to be all about WordPress but knew I didn’t have the bandwidth to keep up with its updates. Moved everything over to Squarespace and haven’t looked back since!
This is a really interesting read – we recognise a lot of small businesses don’t know JUST HOW MANY online platforms that do the work is 4 seconds that take them all weekend!
Zapier is a fun one, the IFTTT of digital agencies.
Keep posts like this one coming, this needs to be seen by more small businesses globally!
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I think that going your business on autopilot can happen after some years of quality work. Nice article and wish you all the best in this new year. Cheers!
Can I get more users for my Accounting software to put campaigns on Auto-Pilot?
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Hello, even with all this tips, you still have to be the main responsible for the business
Social media is incredibly important for promoting your business and attracting new customers, but it can also be time-consuming. this is a very time-consuming process but as you said it is a very effective method and by this, we enhance our business
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I have been able to outsource everything on my website and business besides the writing itself (something I can’t let go of control yet on) and accounting. This year is the first year I am opening a business account for my business though and created an LLC so once I have all the kinks figured out, that is my next step. How do you make sure you don’t overspend on outsourcing everything?
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This is some great information, thank you for the post. I have a blog that I run, but I’m also home with a 2 year old and a four year old. I’m always looking for ways to run my site continuously without having to go down my huge list of to-dos every single day!
I know there is a need for personal interaction too, but this is helpful for the things I can’t do.
My favorite idea was running automated survey responses build customer engagement.
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Hi, David Trounce.
100% agree with the points explained above, particularly the point for a website builder. You elaborated on the technical aspect and significance of the website builder quite well, which will immediately grab the attention of the reader and clear the entire picture in no time. would like to listen more from you
All the very best!
Hi David, I did automate my email this year and use Agorapulse to automate some of my social media. I’d love to know more about the automated surveys. That looks very interesting and valuable. Thanks for sharing these tips as running an online business can easily be a 24/7 job if you don’t work smarter!
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You are right, I always use the Scheduling Tool for Social Media. These tools are very helpful as these tools reduce time.
I totally agree with you, David. Most entrepreneurs after they get their business situated want it to run as easily as possible with the least amount of effort. One thing I invested in last year was Grammarly editing software. It used to take me a long time to edit my blog posts, but with Grammarly, it reduced the time by 3/4.
And as far as email marketing goes, yes, automate that thing. Instead of writing and sending out a newsletter every week or month, I set up automation to send out newsletters on a bi-weekly schedule. It made life easier.
Take Care
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David,
Great stuff about business automation. When it comes to site builders, we talk about its features to enhance our website look and performance. We often forget how easy it is to automate and stay updated. Thanks for your mention of it.
On the other hand, one must have a clear idea about what is to automate and what not to. Humans are always BOSS.
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