If your trying to survive in the business of the internet, and your still doing things manually, you need to stop right now.  Think, about how you can be more efficient and productive in your daily tasks.  Being a small businessman myself, I know how difficult it can be sometimes to get out from under the yolk of the daily grind.  Your so busing doing your regular day to day tasks, that you don’t even consider the bigger picture.  Well, it’s time to come up for air.  Every once in a while, I like to consider all the things I do in a day, and start looking for ways to automate and make my life better.  I come up with a wish list of productivity tools, SEO tools, and things that should be eliminated from my daily routine.

Being an software developer by trade, makes it a bit easier.  Of course, my first impulse is to develop my own tools.  I like developing the software, and I can get it to work exactly the way I want it to.  And, let me tell you, there’s no better feeling, than installing a piece of software you wrote into production, enjoy the extra time it frees you up from some manual effort you had to do in the past.  It’s really instilled in me an understanding of why end users are so happy when they get the software working just the way they want.  This business of ours is rife with automation, and if your not leveraging it, then I can assure you that your competition is.  The time you spend thinking about the big picture and doing things better will pay off for your business in the long term.