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Are you running your online business efficiently?
Copyright 2005 Richard Grady
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a few ways in which
business owners' waste time online. After the article was
published, I received countless emails from readers all
agreeing that yes, they did waste far too much time in
exactly the ways that I had described! Glad it wasn't just
me then :-)
So this week I am going to continue on a similar vein and
ask you the following question:
'Are you doing everything you can to run your online
business efficiently?'
I have been taking a close look at my own businesses
recently as it has become more and more apparent that, for
someone with a business that is 80% automated, I am working
a heck of a lot of hours! Whilst some of this time is
being spent developing new products and websites, a lot of
it is also spent doing jobs that either don't need doing in
the first place or that can be carried out at a very
reasonable cost by someone else.
So what have I been doing differently? Please read on to
find out and hopefully some of my ideas will save you time
with your own online ventures.....
One of the first problems I wanted to try and tackle was
that of spam and junk email. For over a year now I have
used an excellent piece of software called Mailwasher
http://www.thetraderonline.com/mailwasher.html (free trial
available) to reduce the amount of emails I have to
download and read. Mailwasher is a superb product and it
is great at identifying and deleting junk mail without you
even seeing it. However it isn't perfect and over the past
few months I have noticed more and more junk getting
through. Also, I was away from home for a few days
recently and I couldn't use my own computer to check my
email. This meant accessing my email online without the
benefit of Mailwasher to go in and check it first. Result?
Hundreds and hundreds of spam emails that had to be
deleted before I could even start dealing with the genuine
ones.
This coupled with the fact that on one day alone I took a
count and realised that I am now receiving over 1000 junk
emails a day (!) made me decide to sort this issue out. To
resolve the problem, I am gradually ditching all of my
current email addresses and replacing them with contact
forms on my website pages. Once I have turned off my old
email addresses, the problem should (in theory) improve
drastically overnight. So far I have already cut out about
40% of the junk just by switching off some old email
addresses that I haven't used for months.
Ok, now on with problem two...
I have always liked to do everything in terms of running my
businesses, after all, I know my business better than
anyone and I have found it hard to put my trust in other
people to do a good job. More recently I have pushed
myself hard to get away from this mindset and have started
to pay other people to do some jobs which I could have done
myself but that I didn't really need to. Such things as
writing sales copy, designing graphics or basic amendments
to software scripts etc.
Although I am no programmer, I have spent many a 'happy'
hour trying to work out how to amend a software script to
do exactly what I wanted it to. Often with a bit of
determination I have been successful but it will have taken
me several days! I have recently started to use the
services of programmers on sites such as Scriptlance.com
more and more. Once you have found a good programmer it is
a superb feeling to just fire off an email with details of
what you want doing and leaving all the hard work to
someone else.
I have also outsourced some copywriting and graphic design
work in the past few months - again, nothing I could not
have done myself but it is a much better use of my time to
pay someone else $50 and let them get on with it while I do
something more important.
One of the tasks that I am not comfortable about
outsourcing is my customer service. I like to handle all
incoming emails personally and the main reason for this is
that I genuinely believe that whatever line of business you
are in, no one cares as much about your business as you do.
Customer service is key and something that I want full
control over so that I can ensure that my customers receive
top notch support.
As you might expect, I receive countless emails that are
all basically asking exactly the same question and I found
a superb product a few years ago that allows me to answer
these questions with a full reply with just a few
keystrokes. I have told my readers about Shortkeys (
http://www.shortkeys.com ) in the past but I thought it was
worthy of another mention. I have increased my use of this
software considerably in recent months and it really does
save me hours of time everyday. Best of all, it is
completely free!
Finally, I have been spending a large amount of time
ensuring that every possible aspect of my business that can
be automated, actually is automated. It is all too easy to
get used to doing a particular task manually when there is
absolutely no need for it. There was a boring
administrative task that I completed every single month and
which used to take me about an hour. Ok, so an hour a
month is not so bad but after doing this task manually for
over two years, I figured I would see if I could get
someone to automate it for me. A quick trip to Scriptlance
and 48 hours and $30 later and I have a simple script that
now completes the task for me. $30 has bought me an extra
hour every single month which doesn't sound like much but
over the past two years I have wasted a whole day doing
something that I didn't need to. How many tasks like that
do you do every month? Something to think about....
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Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online
since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published
every two weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts),
visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html
More articles by Richard Grady - http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Richard-Grady-167/
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