This week, I’m detailing all the things I’m doing to streamline my business after getting my hands on a book called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss.

Am I working 4-Hours a week? No, but I have carved out alot of time in my schedule to do the things I love to do. Because I’ve outsourced all the administrative tasks I don’t like doing and because I have curbed my social media consumption, I now have more free time to do what I really love to do, which is:

• Create new products.
• Promote my business.
• Sell podcasting to businesses.
• Present at conferences.
• And very soon – Promote my book.

I’ve worked in technology since 1994. I’ve seen it move and shake and renew itself. One of the reasons I love technology is because I can automate my business. Any task that is done the same way more than twice becomes automated. I either find the tool that can help me save time or I hire someone to create it for me.

Here are some things I’ve automated that help me manage my business – and customer expectations – better:

• For online sales, I use a shopping cart system. Whenever I receive a payment for a digital product, it’s delivered right away. I don’t even have to do anything manual because my shopping cart does everything for me.
• Autoresponders are tied into my shopping cart, but it allows me to talk to customers on a weekly basis without having to manually send out emails. There is a bit of work up front, but once I input all the emails, I schedule them to be sent in the future and people get them one by one.

Here are some things I need to do to automate my business further:

• I need to create video tutorials that answer the most frequently asked questions I get. “What is podcasting?” is the most popular one, so I’m going to create it and encourage people to view it.
• I have alot of free information that I give online, along with my blog and podcast. I spend about 3-hours a week offering free information through my blog and podcast, so I’ll be packaging all my other freebies into existing products to create additional value for prospects. That way, instead of maintaining a dozen or so websites, I can point people to one spot. This lessens the amount of hosting I need and the amount of support tickets to answer.
• Another thing I need to automate – speaking requests. I get so many and it becomes a pain to try and remember who to send my bio, picture and speaking description to. So, I’m going to consolidate all my speaking tools into one area so when an event organizer needs my information, I point them to a URL.

My question to you:

• What repetitive tasks are you doing that can be automated?
• Who can you partner with to make automation even easier?
• What tools are you using to automate and for what task?