Computers Should Work Harder Than You

Posted In News | 53 comments

Minimalism is something I am becoming slightly obsessed with. It started in my personal life but is also now extending itself into my business – blogpig.com

You’ll see from the latest site design and no fuss sales pages that we’re trying to keep things simple.

I always try to keep my business processes simple too, with as few steps as possible. Constant improvement is also required, revisiting the processes each time to see if they can be reduced further.

The idea is to have systems & software doing as much of the work as possible and NOT YOU. This is the essence of a Passive Income business.

Here’s an example.

Our product release process ends with these 4 final steps:

Create blog post
Create email broadcast
Publish post
Tweet post
Send broadcast

The create blog post/broadcast should also be 2 separate steps so it’s really 5 actions.

My internal warning sign is a feeling of repetitiveness and perhaps even boredom. Whenever I get this feeling I re-examine the process steps and the systems I am using to see if things could be simpler.

This is exactly what happened whilst I complete these steps for the latest CSVPiG update. I re-examined the process and the features available from our systems and replaced the steps above with this:

Create blog post

So 5 steps down to 1 step AND I still get all of the actions I require from the previous 5 step process. Pretty cool huh? Well if you’re a minimalism geek like me it’s pretty cool :)

This was achieved because our mailing provider, Mailchimp, allows you to setup RSS Driven campaigns that monitor your blog’s RSS feed for new posts and then send out an email containing the post. You control the format.

I had to tweak a few things to get it working exactly how I wanted it, full-text in RSS feed etc. But once it was done I had completely automated campaign setup in mailchimp.

In theory (and this is the first test) I should now be able to just create a post on my blog and it will automatically be sent as a new email to all my customers. It works on a daily schedule and if nothing new is posted nothing is sent.

Mailchimp also have a feature where they will send a tweet to your twitter account whenever a mail is sent. I’ve setup a plugin that tweets whenever a publish a new post on the blog so that’s the other step covered.

I have another list with Amember and have confirmed they offer exactly the same RSS driven campaign functionality too but they call it blog broadcast. I’m sure most companies do.

As an added bonus, the content that was previously sent out in emails is now also available in an archive on the blog so that it can be indexed by the search engines and bring in more traffic.

5 actions into 1 action equals less time but more functionality – that’s my kind of minimalism…

If you thought this was useful and would like to hear about how computers work harder than us please leave a comment or retweet on the blog.

Tags: personal life, driven campaigns, passive income, systems software, new email