Whether you are selling a product or service, the key to being able to profit online is to be able to grow beyond your current capacity.

If you are spending all your time answering emails, fulfilling orders and taking care of things that a robot or software program can take care of, you are wasting your time and you will not be able to significantly grow. Your competitors, who are automated, will blow right past you!

It is a vicious circle. You think, "Oh, why should I spend $500 for this software when I can easily take care of it myself." Well, this can really damage your business in the end. Yes, you can run your business without being automated, it will work and you can make money. But if you have true vision of where your business can grow and want it to grow and make you a lot of money -- you have to get automated.

And for those of you that have my course where I reveal the secret of generating small streams of income from 5+ businesses by working under an hour a day once they are setup and marketed correctly. You know the key is to put those businesses on "automatic pilot" - which, for the first time, you can actually do online with technology currently available. This is technology that wasn't available as little as 4 years ago.

I'm not saying you can't make money on line without being automated, you can. But in order to make a lot of money, and to grow and obtain a substantial income, you have to be automated.

One reason for getting automated is so that you can spend your time marketing your product or service, not fulfilling orders and performing tedious tasks.

Another reason is that when you are using manual systems, it is very easy to get bogged down so that you don't have time to grow - literally! You can't take on new promotions because you are too busy answering email, fulfilling orders, charging credit cards, shipping products, taking care of customer service, answering the phone and so on. These are all things that should be done automatically for you. You can get totally caught up running your business instead of growing your business. This is so important that it needs repeating...

You can get totally caught up "running" your business instead of growing your business.

This is a death trap for your business. You have to make sure that everything is taken care of so that you can spend the bulk of your time marketing and growing your business, NOT spending it by running day to day operations.

And you should start getting automated right from the start, because that's when you have the time to set things up correctly. What usually happens is that most people say "I've got time to do this myself, and I don't want to spend the money." Then, as you start growing faster and faster, you'll find that your whole day is taken up in just running your business. You are literally trapped! You are so busy just trying to keep up with orders, customer service and phone calls that you don't have time to research software and convert your existing systems to automation. By this time, you not only have to convert your current operation, but you will have to go back and convert your historical files as well!

Then one day you'll find that your competitors have blown right past you... because they continued to market, market, and market. People that could have been your customers are now their customers!

If you have the entire automated processes in place, all you have to worry about is bringing in more orders. Order fulfillment and customer service will be taken care of automatically and you will have time to market and to grow.

Marketing and growing a business takes time. You will find that as you get bigger and bigger the problems accumulate exponentially. You may not have a lot of customer service problems or questions now, you may not have a whole lot of returns, and you don't spend much time charging credit cards, or issuing refunds... now. But as you grow each of these issues grow right along with it. Customer service issues multiply and you will have more and more people asking you questions. The volume of email will get larger by the day. The volume of phone calls to your office will also increase. If you don't have automated systems in place, confusion will attach itself to the bulk of your day. Products won't get shipped on time or things will get lost because you put it aside thinking you will take care of it later, and that later never comes! There are a billion problems that could happen. Well a "billion" may be stretching it a bit, but you get the picture.

Say you are selling downloadable software and something happens with your server. You then have to find new solutions to getting your software to the customer. Or perhaps your website is too slow because your HTML isn't coded properly and your site takes way too long to load... so you then have to redo all your HTML, redo all your CGI and Perl programs because they are clogging up the system. Your site is getting too big, too fast.

I could go on for days talking about the problems you will run into as you get bigger. And trust me, these problems happen fast. What people don't realize is that business growth causes problems... growth-related problems. You should be spending your time working on these growth problems and marketing in order to keep on growing your business.

We use a lot of software to help us and, I'll be frank, some of our software is custom designed to automate our systems for us but a lot of what we use is also available to you.

One example is Mailloop Business Automation Software. We use Mailloop to automatically import all of our order forms and newsletter subscriptions into our database. So if we want to email our customer or newsletter database, all we have to do is press one button and drop in a letter. The software then fully mail merges and personalizes the letter to all our customers or newsletter subscribers. We also have Mailloop set up so that when an order comes in, it extracts all the information for us and puts it into our order database.

Mailloop has an unlimited number of autoresponders and also has an unlimited message forwarding function. It helps us send bulk email messages to our client and newsletter databases. It has a suite of other tools that help us automate large chunks of work. For example, it filters a lot of our email, separating out a lot of the spam, subscribing and removing customers for all of our newsletters.

If you want to find out more about Mailloop, go to http://www.marketingtips.com/mailloop.html.

Another thing we do is fully automate our order processing system. We use an e-commerce system for that. When an order comes in:

• the credit card charges are approved
• the money is then transferred to our bank and
• the order is sent to our fulfillment company to be shipped
• the customer will get a notification that their credit card has been charged
• and it extracts the order information and puts it into a database for us.

The beauty of using programs like this is that everything is done for us. If you have an e-book or any kind of electronic digital product such as software, for example, you don't even have to fulfill the product! Once the order comes in, the credit card charge is approved and the money is deposited into your bank account! You can automatically email your customer with information on how to download and extract the software. And you don't have to do a thing... the whole job, including fulfillment, is taken care of without you having to lift a finger. That's the beauty of online marketing using e-commerce!

Also, E-Commerce will let you do simple things such as searching for credit card numbers in your database. For example, if someone asks for a refund, you can simply do a search for their credit card number. It allows you to automate the refund process as well. There are so many other things it allows you to do. It is BEAUTIFUL!

One of the real benefits is that it allows you to charge credit cards online, in real time. This will increase the number of orders you get because customers can have their orders fulfilled almost immediately! The fact that your soon to be customers know their order is being processed without having to wait a day or two is a big benefit in getting people to do business with you.

So having your order system automated is very important. If you need a credit card payment system like this, just go to http://www.marketingtips.com/creditcards/ and you'll get the rundown of our e-commerce information webpage.

Having your email system automated is also very important. We talk about the details of how to do this in the Insider Secrets course. You can set up Eudora Pro to filter your messages and send back "canned" responses to answer common questions. You can also personalize your email messages and use boilerplate paragraphs that allow you to answer your email inquiries very quickly.

For example, we handle over 300 emails a day and a lot of these inquires are very similar in nature. We have certain boilerplate paragraphs that answer many of the common questions we receive. So if someone emails us with five questions, we can literally cut and paste the answers to those questions into the appropriate areas. We can answer an email and send it back within 30 to 40 seconds. If we had to answer the questions individually, it might take us 10 to 20 minutes to write an answer. This isn't a problem if all you have to do is answer a couple of emails, but when you start getting 100+ emails a day (which happens very fast) it sure makes a difference!

This is a critical part of getting our business done and it is important to make sure all of our customers are satisfied. We do this by taking care of their inquiries promptly. To find out more about Eudora Pro visit http://www.eudora.com

If you can't answer inquiries immediately you should have an autoresponder operating so that every time someone emails you, the autoresponse lets them know when you will get back to them. This is very important and is something not very many people do anymore! You'd be very surprised how many "newbies" think that you are online just waiting to receive and answer their email. We've had people email us and then email us again in 10 minutes saying "where are you guys, I haven't heard back from you yet, are you trying to rip me off?" They expect you to answer their email instantaneously!

Many small home based businesses have only one person working in the company with time to answer their email once a day or so. If you are in the position of only being able to answer your email every 24 or ever 48 hours you should have an autoresponder that sends a message saying something like "Hi, we've received your email, we will answer your email within the next 48 hours. If you have any urgent questions you can call us at this following number." This will help you build credibility and rapport with your customers. They won't think you are ripping them off and are trying to hide behind some website. A lot of people are very skeptical of online businesses and you need to do everything you can to set their minds at ease. You can set up these autoresponder messages through your server, or by using either Mailloop or Eudora Pro.

A very critical component of our automation process is the automation of our Associate Program. We built software called AssocTRAC from scratch in order to help us track and administer our Associate Programs. It took us 4 years and cost us approximately $150,000 to develop. We are now sharing this software with our clients for under a thousand dollars.

AssocTRAC allows instantaneous associate activation and instantaneous web page creation. It does all the reports for you and allows associates to check all their stats in real time. It prints associated checks for you automatically every month, including labels for the envelopes. It is beautiful because it fully automates your Associate Programs so that running an Associate Program does not become a full time job. For more information on that software, just go to http://www.marketingtips.com/assoctrac.html

There is a real advantage to Associate Programs that almost no one else has tapped into but us. An Associate Program is really the ultimate ad-tracking software!

What I mean by this is that when you place your banner ads, your text links, buttons, or any type of advertising you pay for, you can assign an associate number to that advertising and track its results to see if it is making (or losing) you money.

Then you can track exactly how many visitors come in and how many sales were generated by each individual ad. You can tell exactly what ads are making you money and which ads are losing your money. It is the ultimate ad-tracking software!

In fact, depending on how you use it... it is like ad-tracking software with a built-in bonus Associate Program! We have been using this technique for years and it has made us a fortune!

The way we run our Associate Program now gives us great credibility. The program gives contact and sales stats in real time, and offers a lot of advantages to not only our associates but to the Associate Program owner as well. If you want to learn more about creating your own Associate Program, I wrote over 75 pages on everything you wanted to know about joining or starting an associate program - all the ins and outs and exactly how to do it the right way to become instantaneously profitable. Check out the articles at http://www.assoctrac.com These articles contain a lot of details on the power of Associate Programs, including how to start and run your very own.

Right now Associate Programs are the hottest and most effective way of marketing your business online. They are also the least risky way of marketing your business online, hands down! If you don't get on the bandwagon now with Affiliate or Associate Programs, you will be left in the dust. That's how powerful they are.

Amazon.com grew in leaps and bounds using Associate Programs, now this marketing method is hitting the web in force. Our own Associate Programs have exploded in the last eight months! We do over a million dollars in business just with our Associate Programs, so you can see the awesome potential of doing business this way. If you haven't yet, read our newsletter now and get involved in your own Associate Program, http://www.assoctrac.com and to check out the AssocTRAC software that runs the associate program for you go to http://www.marketingtips.com/assoctrac.html

We are always striving to automate as many things as possible to make running our business easier, software helps tremendously to do this. The unfortunate thing is that software often costs money. But the time you will save is unbelievable! As far as I'm concerned you can get the cost of the software back literally within days. If your business is really slow, it might take you a couple of weeks, but the bottom line is that it will save you time and make running your business that much easier.

Here are a few more of the programs we use:

WinZip Compression Software
WinZip brings the convenience of Windows to the use of Zip files and other archive and compression formats. Zip files are "archives" used for distributing and storing files and contain one or more files. Usually the files "archived" in a Zip are compressed to save space (especially when you are emailing attached files). These files make it simple to group files and make them faster to transport online (usually via email or FTP). For more information, visit: http://www.winzip.com

WS_FTP Pro File Transfer Program
Upload your web pages with WS_FTP Pro -- the fastest, most powerful Windows file transfer protocol (FTP) client available. With WS_FTP Pro, you can connect to any FTP server, browse through directories and files, and transfer files in either direction quickly. For more information, visit: http://www.wsftp.com

Eudora Pro Email Program
All of our staff here uses Eudora Pro and, in my opinion, it is the best email program available. It sends, receives and filters e-mail while you read and compose messages. It has great organizational features that make reading and processing your email a pleasure. It includes a real-time spelling checker that underlines misspelled words and a powerful search feature that now displays all results in one easy to access and navigate window. For more information, visit: http://www.eudora.com

AssocTRAC Associate Program Software
This is the hottest thing on the Internet right now! This is the software we have created and used for the last 4 years to build our associate program to become one of the biggest on the Internet. Just imagine having a workforce of hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet promoting and selling your product or service for you... and at no cost until they actually make a sale. Associate programs are the most cost-effective and risk-free way of promoting your business on the Internet today. Why? Because you pay them a portion of the sales... you are paying them for "results", not advertising! You cannot lose money when you are only paying them a portion of the profits... and only AFTER they have made the sale. AssocTRAC (Associate Program tracking software) is some of the most advanced software available that will track customers and associates, calculate how much is owed to them... and even print the checks for you at the end of the month. For more information, visit: http://www.marketingtips.com/assoctrac.html

Time & Chaos Day-Timer/Organizer Software
Much of the staff in our office use this software for their daily planning. Time & Chaos is a feature-packed personal information manager for Windows with extraordinary network features. The interface is easy to understand with all of your data available on one screen! For more information, visit: http://www.isbister.com

Power Submitter Classified Ad Placement Software
This is great software to test your ads and headlines to see which ones pull better results. Power Submitter automates your placing of classified ads to the top 400+ free classified ads sites. It places over 30 ads per minute, which in effect saves you literally days of effort typing, when typing in each ad manually could take from 5 to 10 minutes. For more information, visit: http://www.marketingtips.com/classifiedad.html

HotDog Pro HTML Editor
We use HotDog Pro in our office for all our webpage creation and editing. It is the perfect authoring tool for webmasters because of its incredible power, comprehensive feature-set, user friendliness, and intuitive interface. Wizards for obscure and otherwise exhaustive tasks make life easier without taking over the operations, which require undivided attention and scrutiny. For more information, visit: http://www.sausage.com

Internet Explorer 5 Web Browser
Internet Explorer 5 not only displays Web pages faster, it's designed to save you time on the things you do most often. It also has the most popular plugs-ins built-in, saving you the time and hassle of downloading them later on. For more information, visit: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Ie/default.htm

Other Internet Browsers
As mentioned in the course, you always want to have both Internet Explorer and Netscape on your computer. And you will want to have older versions of them so you can view your website to make sure it appears proper in all the new AND old browsers.

You can get old versions of Internet Explorer at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.asp?

You can get old versions of Netscape at: http://www.netscape.com/download/archive/

A combination of all of this software helps to automate the majority of our daily tasks and allows us to operate from one small office. I completely believe in business automation, and these programs help to reflect that.

If you haven't already done so, I recommend you take the time to view each product's website for more thorough explanations and run-downs on how each program works and its benefits to you and your business. As I have preached to you time and time again, let the software do the work for you so you can take care of more important things like promoting and growing your business!