Have you ever had the feeling of having not achieved anything, after switching off your computer system at 7.30pm in the evening after a long 8hrs of sitting in front of your system? You look at your ‘to do’ list with which you started with at 9am in the morning and notice that its still as long as your arm. You answered tons of customer e-mails, fulfilled orders and updated your newsletter subscriber lists, exchanged e-mails with some JV partners, did some link building, sent products to all those that paid, chatted with a few clients online, etc. Yet it feels as if you didn’t really achieve or did anything worthwhile during the day in Nigeria.
The secret to being able to grow your business and still run it at the same time is automation! Automation! Automation! Automating key tasks so they happen without your lifting a finger is the secret. This not only frees you of some key responsibilities and give you time for other aspects of the business but also grows your business too. See there are just so much for you to do to run your online business. And you just cant do it alone.
Getting started
The best way to automate all your daily chores is to use “autoresponders.” Autoresponders are pre-written e-mails that are automatically sent on your behalf. For example, in response to a customer e-mail sent to a particular e-mail address you set up, or as confirmation when an order goes through. You can also use order-o-matic, Order-0-matic is a product delivery and customer management script from Siscomedia Consulting. It’s an innovative new software script that could be installed on websites and perform several hitherto manual tasks that frees up the online marketer. And other web programmes and services you can use.
Here are a few segments of the business you can automate.
Automating your ordering and fulfillment process: Your sales and ordering process is crucial to the success of your business, and its critical that you automate it from the beginning. It’s likely that when you start your business, you find that you want to handle the order yourself. After all its satisfying to see those first few sales come in and deal with your first customers personally but with time as your business grows it tends to wear you out. Your handling thousands ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnd thousands of orders becomes very frustrating, especially as Nigerians.
Handling hundreds and thousands of orders, you wont find the hands on manual approach, e.g. forwarding e-mails with attachments to your customers, so fun again. Just think of how long it takes you to handle one order manually, the internet connection delays, long time it takes to attach documents, or the stress in converting it to PDF and on and on, multiply that by 100 or 1000 orders and by each new product you want to introduce into the market. And think about all the other tasks you need do to still be in business. Put simply, your business wont grow unless you automate your entire ordering process. And this is where autoresponders come in- they can manage all your most time-consuming tasks
In this next part I will teach how ordinary Nigerians can further automate their online business. watch out for it.
