The Dreamer’s Path to Autopilot Success
I get a lot of emails promoting the latest and greatest products for easy success at home. Going through my emails, just the subject lines, I have offers for “30 days to a $25,000 business,” “how he “snowballed” himself into his first $300K online,” “Make $557.22 every 24 hours,” “Sneak $86,143.08 on autopilot,” and “How Would You Like $5,539.95 In Just 24 Hours?”
Damn, I wish it were that simple. Really I do.
These guys are selling dreams, of course. We’d all love to see our money troubles vanish. Most of us would just be glad to have a home business that paid the monthly bills. It’s just not usually going to happen in 24 hours or even 30 days.
It takes work.
The people who have earned big bucks in a short period of time have usually been in business for some time. They know what they’re doing. They often have a list to sell to. They aren’t still trying to figure it all out.
They also aren’t telling you about their expenses, usually. Most of them don’t discuss their pay per click costs when they show you their supposed sales data, yet that’s a vital piece of the puzzle.
If you don’t know what was spent, you don’t know what was really earned. After expenses, earnings could even have been negative. You just don’t know.
Not to mention how easily sales data is faked. There are sites for that.
Is It Wrong to Put Your Business on Autopilot?
Not everyone is a fan of autopilot home business models. There’s autoblogging, for example, which too often is merely clutter for the search engines. It doesn’t tend to produce highly useful sites. The goal with something such as autoblogging is usually to get visitors, and therefore ad clicks or sales, nothing more.
At that, autoblogging usually cannot automate more than the postings on a blog. You’re still going to have to do work to get backlinks and such. It’s still not completely automated.
There are good ways to put parts of your business on automatic. Setting up a squeeze page that sends subscribers through an email series you’ve set up is a good use of automation. You can set up promotions and information to keep them interested to improve your chances of making a sale, yet be fairly hands off about your list.
AWeber and GetResponse are my two favorite autoresponders. They both offer good service with a lot of options so you can manage your list and the emails you send them.
You can set up standard responses to questions you get by email too. This allows you to hire a virtual assistant to handle routine emails, freeing you to work on other issues.
You should look into automating or hiring someone to do any kind of repetitive work which doesn’t require your personal touch. That allows you to focus on the important stuff.
Your social media marketing can be automated to a limited extent, at least if you intend to take fullest advantage of the social part of social media.
You can automate the tweeting of your blog posts, for example. There are a number of sites such as TwitterFeed and HootSuite that allow tweet posts from an RSS feed automatically. Alex King offers plugins for your WordPress blog to automate tweets.
If you share your login information with any service, as you would need to do to automate them, make sure they’re legit. You do not want your login information used for someone else’s purposes. That’s a great way to lose your Twitter account.
Just don’t expect great social results if all you do is send automated tweets. There’s more to Twitter than that.
Where’s My Autopilot Success?
Will automating aspects of your home business help you to succeed? Certainly. But they won’t guarantee it. Nothing guarantees success. The only thing you can do to improve your odds of success is to work hard, do your research on your topic, and not give up.
You might hit it lucky and succeed in a fairly short time. Then again, it could take months or years or not happen at all. Be prepared for whatever path your home business takes and don’t give up too easily.
