Is Automation Actually Possible?

[sheriesmith]

Some confusion going on in my brain... There is so much involved w/each website: posting articles everywhere, posting to your blog every day, driving traffic w/constant twitter tweets, facebook, squidoo, myspace, etc, and that's just ONE site. How can you ever get to the point where you have multiple sites, all functioning properly and productively - even perhaps be...(I'm afraid to even say the word...) AUTOMATED as some marketers claim they can do? Or are those automated sites only traditional websites for a specific product or service whereas blogs are like babies and need constant attention? Maybe any semblance of automation is an unachievable dream? Is it possible to have a combination of the two methods w/out losing your marbles? (lol) Or may there is no such animal as 'automated' in the successful IM world. Your thoughts and experience, please?

[Engage]

Ok, here you go, a real world story.

A friend was kind enough to help me test some mailing software I was coding. He tossed a subscribe form on his site, just to feed some real subscribers in to my system. Whaddya know, a year later and he's got 20,000+ subscribers.

For awhile he sent a weekly newsletter, but his schedule was crowded already, and he wanted to automate.

So he finished up a year's worth of newsletters, and put them all in the autoresponder.

He gets 50-60 new subs a day, and they all receive this autoresponder series. The series contain articles of course, and income generating ads.

He's done. There's nothing left to do, nothing left to write. His list and income will keep growing for years, while he's working elsewhere. This project is fully automated.

Lots and lots of people have done this, it's really nothing new or creative. Yes, definitely possible.

If someone wanted to go this route, it might help reduce that overwhelmed feeling to tackle one project at a time, and take it to the automated stage, before starting another project.

Here's a quick plan if anybody is interested:

1) Do some keyword research, and find a relevant phrase that has some decent traffic, but isn't too competitive.

2) Create a well done one page website, optimized for this term. Put a subscribe form in a prominent place on this page. (My friend says form placement was key for him.)

3) Get 400 billion links to this page, or as many as you can. :-)

4) Create an autoresponder series to send to the subscribers. Include some kind of money maker in the series.

Once your subscribe rate is at a level that is acceptable to you, you're done. All work completed. On to next project.

[angienewton]

Sherie,
Once you have taken one website from start to profit, then you'll have enough time and money to outsource and work on other things. A lot of people are outsourcing all these tasks you mention so that is how they get it done.

There are some automated things out there but I don't use any of that so can't help you there.

[sheriesmith]

Ah...the ever-elusive fully-automated site... Guess what I really mean is a semi-automated site. A site that doesn't need the constant daily nurturing and maintenance of a blog but can sort of keep rocking along on it's own. I definitely need to get some online cash generating from somewhere and quickly. I'll keep plodding along on my blogs trying to get them monetized. In the meantime, if anyone has any experience or suggestions regarding a retail site (or better suggestion), I would love to hear from you.

I'm not interested in storing products or shipping, so I'm thinking something with drop shopping. I've heard you can have a site with Amazon, but I don't know anything about that or how that works. My goal would be to have a couple of retail or affiliate sites to provide some regular base income each month. Then also have my blogs running to supplement the 'bread and butter' sites with some additional revenues.

I will probably have my elderly parents living with me within the next 6-9 months. That means I won't be able to work outside of the house on a fulltime basis any longer. I MUST get some replacement income coming in soon to be in a position to care for them. The real estate appraisal market is not bouncing back soon enough, and I have incurred a good deal of debt being without work now for about 18 months. Don't mean to be a downer, because I'm actually a very positive person. But I am explaining this so you understand why I'm in 'search' mode for something that truly works.

Would so appreciate any feedback,
Sherie Smith

[Engage]

I MUST get some replacement income coming in soon to be in a position to care for them.

Sherri, it sounds like you need an online job, not an online business, at least for now.

You know, by online job I mean working from home for someone else on a dollar per hour, or dollar per action basis.

I'd suggest you might give yourself the task of becoming an expert on online jobs.

Get a job now yourself, and then parlay your expertise in to a business later. I bet a lot of people would like to learn about this, and perhaps you could be the one to teach them?

[sheriesmith]

So appreciate everyone's ideas and thoughts. To give you a bit more info: One of my blogs has been up about seven months now and has a free 5-part ecourse available for download. I already have my big eproduct written and ready to go also. Can't decide whether to put it on Clickbank (already approved) or PayPal.

I thought this niche was a good one after keyword research a year ago. I wondered why only a handfull ever requested the free ecourse. I originally had planned to price my ebook in the $27-$39 range, per recommendations. It's around 100 pages. But since I had less than 10 requests for the free ecourse that I was going to use to build an optin list, I decided to hold up on listing my ebook.

Now I'm wrestling with whether to chop it down to 1/4 of that size and promote it as one of those inexpensive $7-$10 reports. Or remove the free 5-part ecourse and repurpose it as a $7-$10 report. That info alone would run probably 25-30 pages, then holding the bigger product 'in reserve' for the time being.

Interestingly enough, this afternoon I went back and did new keyword research on my niche. (I use that word lightly NOW) Also did the inbound links checking per Lynn's post 'analyzing backlinks'. Boy, was that an eye-opener! Found out I don't have my blog anywhere even resembling being optimized now with good keywords or links. Whammo! That explains a lot, but it's interesting that a niche could change that much in one year's time.

(I'll tell you about Blog #2 another time...)

Sherie Smith

[russell]

I think it really comes down to the planning of your website/business.

You can make it totally automated as in Engage's example. Or if you go another route you can get the thing up and running then outsource it.

Just depends on how you invision it working a year from now, setting the goals, milestones and steps in place to make it happen.