Serious online marketers know that the best way to achieve scalability in their online business is to automate as much as possible.  If you’re doing everything manually, you’ll likely never make more then a few thousand per month.  That’s because there are only 24 hours in every day, and you have to sleep at least a few of those hours to maintain your health – and sanity.

But if you can outsource some of the work to others – or better yet, automate it through the use of software, you can build your business to work without your direct involvement.  You can be the captain of your ship rather than a member of the crew.  This allows you to steer your business toward the goals you’ve set for yourself, and it allows you to create real wealth – and to help others do the same.

Social media sites allow you to interact with others and get the word out about your products and services.  It’s important to engage your visitors and to provide quality information that will help to position you as an expert on your chosen topic.  But you don’t want to spend all of your time at the keyboard interacting with visitors.  After all, you have a business to run.

Where it makes sense, you can automate a lot of the mundane aspects of social media interaction.  A perfect example of where automation makes sense is the Twitter follow process.  If someone follows you, and you want to reciprocate, you would normally send them a message to thank them for following.  And you’d click their follow link to add them to your list.  But that takes a lot of time when you’re usually going to respond with the same information for each follow.

To automate this process, there’s a great tool at TweetLater.com that is perfect for the task.  You can set up an automatic message to be sent to your followers, and you can automatically follow those that follow you.  You can also un-follow those that drop you.  This helps to keep your follow ratios in balance to stay within the Twitter terms of service. 

Your follow message should be something that sounds somewhat personal.  I get responses from a lot of users that include a link to one of their products.  That’s okay if you have lots of followers or already have an established reputation.  But if you’re just getting started and trying to build a following, you’ll probably do better to keep it to a simple “Thanks for the follow” type message.  This sounds more personal, so you’re less likely to have them drop you when receiving your reply. 

People are smarter than you think.  If they think you’re simply after their money, they’ll find someone else to provide the information they’re seeking.  But if you genuinely care to provide quality information while also getting compensated for the effort, you’ll be much more successful.

Things change at such a rapid pace online that it’s easy to get caught off guard while your business tanks.  If you’re relying on one stream of income, it’s easy for a change to come along and wipe you out. 

Examples:

• If you relied on Google AdSense income prior to 2006, you probably saw it all but dry up a couple of years ago due to changes in terms.
• If you rely on PPC advertising for most of your traffic, a change in Google’s terms can drive your costs beyond your break-even point.  This happened to a lot of site owners in the past year.
• If you rely on affiliate income from a single vendor, that vendor can change any of their affiliate terms and send you down the tubes in a split second.
• If you rely on income from the sale of a product or service, a bigger competitor with deeper pockets can enter your space and drive you out of business.

Any number of things can change to leave you scrambling to keep the lights on while you figure out which way to go.  The only surefire way to keep this from happening to you is to have income coming from several channels.  Get your traffic from organic and paid search as well as offline methods.  Set up affiliate programs to let others help you sell your own products, and promote products offered by multiple vendors.  Offer your services to other business owners for a premium and use that as an upsell behind your other product offerings.

You have to prepare before the storm hits so that you’re ready to go if or when it ever happens.  And if it never happens, at least you’ll be enjoying the benefits of multiple streams of income.  This doesn’t mean to jump around between opportunities.  You’ll only lose focus that way and never get anything accomplished.  But once you have one or more income streams running smoothly, you owe it to yourself to work on setting up 2-3 different cash-generating methods.