(an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Becoming an OBM)
I find that the tedious tasks are usually the ones that are easiest to automate. Article submission is a good example. Many clients want to do some form of article marketing, and will quite often delegate this task to a VA on their team. Depending on how many sites they are submitting to, submitting one article can take a VA up to five hours or more! Plus, most VAs really don’t enjoy this task, and it will quite often fall to the bottom of their list and in some cases not get done at all.
There are some great article submissions systems available now that will automate this process for you. You just enter your article once and these systems blast out that article to a bunch of sites. This frees your VA to focus on other business-building activities for you. (Or you may want to question doing article submission at all – does it bring a good ROI?)
It is especially important to see what kinds of tedious tasks your client is doing themselves. Again, we want to always be trying to take things off our clients’ plates so they can focus on the more important business-building activities that only THEY can do.
I once worked with a client who was manually entering names into her newsletter database from an online free quiz that she offers. Eek! First of all, she shouldn’t be the one entering those names into the newsletter database; her VA should be doing that for her. And more importantly, this could easily be an automated process. So we setup the online form to send this information directly to the newsletter database as soon as someone takes the quiz – no fuss, no muss!