Automate Your Business

Archive for March, 2007

A while ago, I purchased Iopus Software’s iMacro software – a tool for automating Internet Explorer operations. It cost me $199.

Last week I came across a Firefox plugin my Iopus. It seems to do the same thing (but I’ve only had a cursory glance at the plugin). And it costs $199 less.

Damn.

And so it continues (read this post first if you’re not sure what ‘it’ is).

The latest launches:

Undercover Profits (fantastic idea, fantastically overpriced). If all goes well, I’ll be able to over a comparable product for under $50, one time payment, in just over a month… stay tuned if you’re interested.

Jason Potash’s Content Composer …. didn’t even read the sales page, so I’m not sure what it is. Some sort of content writing aid.

And I think I missed a couple.

Again, March is looking pretty busy for big launches. Make sure you’re not competing tith these launches next year.

I’m struggling with a bit of work in my day job at the moment, covering for someone who does this particular piece of work every day, whilst she’s on holiday.

The process is:
1. Open an email in particular Outlook account
2. Read two pieces of data
3. Depending on those pieces of data (one of which can only have one of 6 options, the other is a customer name), do the following:
4. Check for the customer name in an Excel spreadsheet, and pull out the names of two employees who manage that acconut
5. If the customer name is not in the Excel, look up the customer name in a web-based tool and then pull two names out.
6. If the name is not in the web-based tool, panic….
7. Then find all other mails with that customer and message, group them all together, forward them en-masse to the named employees, with a specific template to the mail subject and body.
8. Then delete the source mails and do it all over again till the mail box is empty

She does this manually.

Jesus wept.

Time to pull out autoit, a tool idea for this sort of situation. AutoIt, in case you’ve not heard of it before, is a great little tool to write complex automation tasks (you guessed that bit, right?), including fully-fledged desktop GUIs (eg, windows, menus, toolbars, etc), Internet Explorer automation, and a whole bunch of other interesting bits and pieces.

It’s a great tool to have up your sleeve for quick and dirty automation. If you’ve got no programming experience at all, it’s not one you could just start using, but if you know a bit of Visual Basic, PHP, Perl, or just about any other language (probably even JavaScript), you’ll be up and running with AutoIt very quickly.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write the script before I stop doing this period of covering the person who’s on holiday, but next time she goes away, I’ll have it all automated.

In the meantime, I’ll just bandage my bleeding fingers.

Of course, this should all be fixed at source in the system which sends out the initial emails, but that’ll take a team of 20 developers, 6 months, and cost of $x0,000 to do….

I’m caught in the Registerfly debacle, and this is one of the domains that’s affected. Hopefully, I’ll get it transferred to another registrar now that ICANN have finally taken off the kid gloves.

Oh, and feel free to link to Registerflies.com using Registerfly as the keyword link, and help to get Registerflies into first place in Google for keyword ‘registerfly’ …

Well, not so much “automate” it, as “think about it”.

If you’ve been around online for more than 6-9 months, you’ll remember a MASSIVE rush of internet marketing related products launched back in September or thereabouts. I remember several people commenting on there being a good reason for this, but all I remember is getting hammered by mail after mail promoting the same 6-10 products, most of which were WELL out of my zone of interest and the size of my wallet.

And the thing I took from this was my golden rule: Never launch in September…

Well, it’s possible there’s a new rule: Never launch in March…

This week so far: The Rich Jerk X-Ray software. James Jones’ audio-video package. Adsense Wealth Empire. Adwords 180. And the “income multiplier” report or whatever it’s called. Now, I did buy this last one, and am mid-way through reading it. I also bought Adwords 180, since the Multiplier product is based on Adwords, and I intend to do some Adwords promotion in the next few months for the first time. But they were cheap (well, cheap compared to the others).

So, when you’re working your business plan (you DO have a business plan, right?), remember to schedule things for outside these two months (although I’m waiting to see what happens next March to see if it is an annual thing – maybe it’s a result of people taking time off over the New Year, doing some thinking, and taking 2-3 months to get their products ready for launch). If you avoid these periods, when marketing products to marketers, you’ll face a lot less competition for your potential customers’ eyeballs and dollars.