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.

Customizing a BANS template can be quick and simple.  And, if you’re really daring, you can completely overhaul the entire layout.  This requires a bit of knowledge of CSS, and it doesn’t hurt to have a little knowledge of PHP programming, too.

But to just make some basic site changes that help to make your site stand apart from the rest of the crowd, there are a few quick things you can do:

1. Select one of the base templates.  Any template will do.  I usually select one that has the logo section centered on the screen, but you can choose any theme.

2. Create your own logo.  This is important because the basic template includes a blank gray logo with the name of your site in large text.  You want a good graphical logo.  But even if you’re not an artist, you can use the graphics software of your choice to create an image 968 pixels wide by 180 pixels high.  Even the Paint program that comes with Windows will allow you to create a jpeg image that will suffice.  I prefer PhotoShop, but I also use Paint Shop Pro and GIMP.  GIMP is open source, so it’s a good choice if you don’t want to shell out the cash for PhotoShop.

Now comes the fun part.  You get to create the logo.  And if you’re not an artist, you may want to get help with this part.  You want your design to look professional.

Once you have your logo image finished, save your file as logo.jpg.  You can easily upload the new logo to your website through the admin panel.  Click the “Template” button to go into the editor and click the “Upload Logo” link beside your selected template.  This will allow you to locate and upload the logo you saved.

3. Remove the title from the BANS template by clicking the header.php link beside your selected template. Don’t worry if you don’t know what you’re looking at.  You don’t have to for this. 

Just find the words <a href=”<?php print URL_PATH.”/”;?>”> <?php print SITENAME.”";?></a>.

Then delete that whole line.  Don’t worry, it won’t break anything.  That’s just code to print your site name and make it a clickable link.  Be sure to click the “Save” button at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

4. Now you can customize the template even more by changing the style sheet.  To do this, click the styles.css link beside your selected template.  This will open up the style sheet file for editing.  Then you’ll want to open Notepad, select all of the text in the style sheet editor and paste it into the Notepad window.  This will preserve the original style sheet in case you make a change that you’d like to reverse.

Changing Colors

Now look for lines that include the word “color.”  The number value beside the “color: ” tag is a hexadecimal value that indicates the RGB (red-green-blue) value to be used for a particular part of the website. 

You can use your graphics program to choose a color and get the RGB value.  This is the easiest way to get the number to use for a particular color.

The number is actually the combination of three values – one for red, one for green, and one for blue.  So, if you see a value like #000000, this is black.  The first two 0’s are the red value, the next two are the green value, and the final two are the blue value.  They’re all 0, which means red, green, and blue are all turned off.

But the numbers are hexadecimal (base 16), so they don’t range from 0-9 like you’re used to.  They range from 0-16.  And since we don’t have digits to represent value greater than 9, we use the first several letters of the alphabet instead.  So, A = 10, B = 11, C = 12, … F = 16.

Since all 0’s is black, it makes sense that white would be the exact opposite – all values turned on.  And since F = 16, the value for white is #FFFFFF.

If you want red, you can use #FF0000.  Green is #00FF00.  And blue is #0000FF.

You can vary the values of each to get different shades.  And combinations of red, green, and blue will give you just about any color you can imagine. 

Changing Borders and Fonts

You can also change the borders and fonts of any section of the site.  Just find the corresponding tag in the style sheet and change it to the value of your choice.  After making a change, click the “Save” button at the bottom of the page to save your change.  Then click the “View Store” link at the top of the page to see your latest changes.

Advanced Changes

You can make many more advanced design changes by altering the style sheet.  If you learn the rules of CSS, you can learn how to move parts of the design around to completely alter the site layout.  The sky’s the limit when it comes to the ways to customize a BANS template.  I’ve seen many unique designs that in no way resemble the original BANS templates.  Making these types of changes will help your niche store website stand apart from the crowd.