When you run an online home business time and money are limited. So you ensure that you can devote as much time as possible to tasks that generate income. The most successful online businesses use automation in some form or another. You just can’t keep up with everything if you try and handle them manually. Here are 5 ways you can automate tasks for your online home business.
1. Blog Post Publishing
To rank well in the search engines and stay relevant you need to post new and high quality content onto your website a regular basis. The best way to do this is to set up a blog. When you have a blog post ready to publish, you don’t want to have to log into your website and carry out this task manually. All of the top blogging platforms, like WordPress, have built-in scheduling capabilities. This means you can write several posts at once, and schedule them for specific publishing dates in the future.
2. List-Building
One of the most important tasks for your online home business is developing a list of email subscribers. Whenever someone visits your website, offer them a free resource or product in return for their email address. Your autoresponder software can then send them your freebie on autopilot. You can literally schedule a year’s worth of email delivery ahead of time. This improves the relationship you have with your audience.
3. Social Media
Social media allows you reach out and connect with your target audience. The online world has become very social and your customers are using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Your online home business needs to be on social media too, but it takes a lot of time to log-in to all the social media sites every day. There are plenty of social media automation tools which can schedule your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram posts.
4. Comment Moderation
Your website content can become a magnet for internet trolls and spam. Akismet software saves you time by filtering incoming comments that are nothing more than click-bait, trash and self-serving backlinks.
5. Website Research
Google Alerts will send you a notification every time a relevant search term or topic appears somewhere on the web. For example, if your online home business is about childcare, you can set up a Google alert for “child car-seat guidelines”. Ensure your search terms are included in quotes or you could be bogged down with the amount of notifications you receive.
