Whenever I talk to an entrepreneur about automation many seem to think big things like push button software that will blast their articles to multiple directories at one go. Hands free shopping cart and digital delivery. Automatic membership site signup and member management and of course auto responders.

These are all good ways to free up repetitive tasks but… I think misses out on the many simpler tasks. I was struggling a little to figure out the mechanics of a web site lately but I kept insisting on one thing which I considered a corner stone. That information should only be entered once or the fewest number of times as possible.

I didn’t want to copy and paste, I didn’t want my assistant to copy and paste if I can help it. To me, that is the very basic building block in automation.

How many things are you copying and pasting every single day?

How often do you or your assistant have to transfer data from one system to another e.g. from email to blog post? I bet if you really tracked it all your copy and paste list would be much, much longer than you ever imagined and this is on a daily basis. I think copying and pasting while fabulous, is a waste of time. Sure, it may be 2 seconds of your time. But if you copy and paste just 10 things a day, that is 20 seconds a day or about 7 minutes a month or 1 hr, 24 minutes a year assuming you only work 5 days a week.

There is no way we only copy/paste 10 things a day. How do I know? Because I have a little program that allows me to retrieve the last 20 things I’ve copied onto my clipboard and guess what? Before I’m even through mid day, I’ve done more than 20 copies.

On top of that, I have a program called Direct Access that helps me launch web sites and types address, repetitive stuff. It has a neat little feature that tracks how much time it saved me. In one year it has saved me 11 hours and 54 minutes. Wow, that’s almost half a day. Little copy and paste tasks are like tiny leaks in your boat. You don’t know it is there or you know it think it’s too tiny to do anything. But slowly and surely, you’ll find your boat is going to fill up with water.

What are you leaking? Are you transferring your customer information manually from your shopping cart into your mailing list? Are you setting up customers manually? When asking people to submit questions to answer on your blog, are you having to copy and paste the question when you are ready to blog? Are you manually branding all of your affiliate reports? Are you giving out logins to your assistants and staff manually each time they ask? Are you re-training staff from scratch every single time? All these tasks of transfering data can and should be ‘automated’.

Photo credit: Matthew Bowden

This article on WSJ.com caught my eye. Generally it talks about how marketers should look into Web 2.0 methods to reach their market. We are not talking about us Internet Marketers who are already savvy with these things. Rather, marketers and companies who generally spend most of their budgets in other media.

I totally agree with the general idea of the article - not saying that the tactics they suggest are new secrets or anything. With the world economy in shambles, I think the Internet particularly what is commonly known as ‘Web 2.0′ will shine as the best ways to spend marketing resources for businesses big and small.

That is partially the reasoning when we created BlogEnergizer - to allow connect marketers and bloggers. But that’s another story. Anyway, something within the article caught my eye. That is…

…a growing number of marketers are using Web 2.0 tools to collaborate with consumers on product development, service enhancement and promotion. But most companies still don’t appear to be well versed in this area.

I hope all the Internet Marketing/Social media experts or hopefuls are paying attention to that one. They even coined a name for those who are Tech, Marketing & Social Network savvy who could help these businesses… Marketing Tehnopologist. Uhm, I think they need a more sexy Web 2.0 name.

photo credit: luc legay

You know how some people post their email like this email AT gmail.com or emailATgmaildotcom all over the web? Frankly my dear, I’m afraid that won’t help very much. It is just as easy to write a robot to find strings of text that match an email address as it is to program it to match and pick up strings of text with the ATgmaildotcom.

If you really must broadcast your email address, use an image. There are many email badge or image generators online. Or better yet, use reCaptcha MailHide.

photo credit: Mzelle Biscotte

From the very beginning of my ‘Tech Based Marketing’ career, I’ve always known that applications (software) can be used as a marketing tool. Never has it been so clear than these days with the number of free web tools, widgets, plugins, themes and just about any tool that your target audience is attracted to.

A few months ago, I released the List Post Authors plugin for WordPress to do just that. Results? I’ll admit it has been rather slow. But am I striking it off my list. Absolutely not. I probably just chose a good plugin that filled a need requested by many but not it seems not as big as my research told me. This will not be the last plugin I will release and you know what? Whatever traffic it brings me, be it a trickle or a flood, it’s traffic I wouldn’t have received if I had not built it. So, I’m still ahead of the game.

There are tons of free software that are released especially those that revolve around Twitter that get good traffic. Tweetwasters and Mr Tweet are great examples. Because they is also tied to a highly viral social network and taps into the natural curiosity built into us humans, they are very well talked about and visited on Twitter.

If you can find a sweet spot for your application, watch out, some sweet traffic could be heading your way.

photo credit: JasonRogers

If you haven’t already heard, last Friday in conjunction with my birthday, I decided to make my goal for my new project BlogEnergizer public. The goal - Get 2000 members by December 31st, 2008. When I reach that goal, my reward is to donate to the Feeding America program. All donations to the program are matched by Kraft Foods which means my donation would fill 8000 bowls of food. The one little thing I did not mention to many was, I wanted to reach my goal only through Web 2.0 methods - no paid advertising, except affiliates if you count that as paid advertising.

Anyhow, I started with just a few under 900 members and as of today, we are at 1,067 members. Not a bad start considering my ‘network’ is not as large as some.

I really want to reach the goal and hope you will help me. It costs nothing for you to help spread the word. Members enjoy the benefits of our free BlogEnergizer membership and together we get to feed a lot of people. Blog, Twitter, mention on your social networks. Ask your peeps to join http://blogenergizer.com/ that’s all. It is free.

Last week, after I shared why I check my source code daily, Stephanie Trahd asked me how I do it and suggested a follow up post. This is for you Stephanie - and anyone who really wants to know of course ;-)

It is amazingly simple, you won’t even believe it BUT this method requires CURL which must be installed on your web server. Which means… if your web host does not have CURL installed, it won’t work. You don’t have to know what CURL is or exactly how it works. But you have must know, simply put, CURL is a web content fetcher. You tell it which web site to go fetch and what to fetch and it’ll obediently fetch it.

The other thing your web server requires is the ability to run CRON oh Lord another techno term. Don’t be intimidated by the term CRON is a program that will automatically execute commands at dates and intervals you tell it to. Do you know how in Windows you have something called Windows Scheduler? Say you want to run a program a 12noon every day and you program it to do so? Ah! That’s what CRON does.

Put CRON and CURL together and you get a report of your HTML source code in your email every day. Here’s the code to use. The following are instructions using cPanel.

After verifying your web host can run both, log in to your web host cPanel. Click Cron jobs.

Click Standard

Enter your email address at the top and then the following code that will fetch your page in the 2nd box.

curl --user-agent "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)" http://www.yourwebsite.com

Select the time and day for CURL to go fetch your page.

As you see above, I have 0 minutes, 0 hours, every day, every month and in weekdays, I selected every single day of the week. This means it’ll run every day at midnight, every single day of the month and every day of the week. If you want to check only once a month, you need to select the date under Days and every day of the week for Weekdays. If you want to check only week days, you can leave everything as I have selected above except Weekdsays, select Every Weekday. You can also change the time to whatever suits you.

When you’re done, just click Save Crontab and you’re all set.

Oh yes, just in case you didn’t know the times here are server time not your time zone so you may find that you’ve chosen 12 midnight but it comes a few hours earlier or later. That’s because you and your server are on different time zones. All you need to do is delete the cron job, re-do the above steps and set the correct hours.

P/S: These things are pretty standard on web hosts generally but occassionally, I do run into hosts who over barer than bare bones features. If your host does not support any of the above maybe it is time for a new host. I suggest ReliableWebs.

Still not quite sure how Google Friend Connect fits in. Here’s what it does if you haven’t heard about it yet. It let’s you build a mini social network in your site. Sorta. You put a widget on your site that allows others to ‘join’ your site using their existing YahooID, Google ID, AIM or OpenID accounts.

Once they joined they can invite their friends from other networks like MySpace, Facebook, Delicious and also interact with site members.

You can also add other gadgets like a ‘Wall’ so people can leave comments or a Review gadget. So far I haven’t seen any gadget I’m interested to put on there yet since I actually prefer the content to be on my site and spiderable. However if you’re not concerned about the SEO aspect and just the social network and social traffic this might be an interesting experiment.

I’ve got it up on MomsGadgets.com - look in the sidebar and come join us. I feel kinda lonely :-)

To see how it works, check out this video from Google Connect

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/N94s7ix0JPo[/youtube]