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.

I’ve got most of my life wirelessly synchronised on the cloud – mail, contacts, calendar, my documents etc. I can pretty get to anything I need regardless of where I am or what device I’m on. One the areas were the iPhone is somewhat lacking is in its Safari browser. Don’t get me wrong, it works well enough as a stand-alone browser but it has no real connection between my desktop or laptop browsers, which is a pain.

Nuke My iPhone

I already use Google for my mail, calendar & contacts sync across all my devices so Apple’s MobileMe solution didn’t really appeal. I finally gave in and got a £60/year account when they released the ability to remotely locate, lock and wipe your iPhone if it’s lost or stolen. That’s the trouble when a single device contains so much of your data, losing it doesn’t bare thinking about! With this in place and of course PIN protection I feel pretty secure.

When I activated the MobileMe account on the iPhone I noticed that in addition to ‘find my phone’, mail, contacts & calendar it could also push bookmarks. This sounded like a nice bonus, getting my desktop bookmarks pushed onto my iPhone would be sweet. I know you can already sync your bookmarks via iTunes but I only ever plug my iPhone in via USB for software updates once every blue moon.

Unfortunately a quick glance at the windows client for MobileMe showed that for some reason MobileMe will only synchronise with Safari or Internet Explorer bookmarks and of course I use Firefox for everything!

If you’ve got iTunes installed on Windows the chances are you already have the MobileMe client installed and you’ll find it in your Control Panel folder. If not you can download it from here:

Full setup instructions for the MobileMe Control Panel are available on the Apple website but it is pretty intuitive stuff.

Once this is done you’ll have your IE favourites synchronising with the MobileMe cloud which in itself is pointless as I don’t use IE…

X Marks The Spot

I already keep the Firefox bookmarks on my 2 laptops & 1 PC in sync using a cloud service and plug-in called Xmarks. They also have a sync client for Internet Explorer which is slightly different to the Firefox version as it’s not a plug-in, it runs as a separate program in the taskbar. This is actually a distinct advantage because it means that you never have to open IE to have it synchronise the IE favourites. It all happens seamlessly in the background. Which is good, because I don’t like opening IE.

If you’re installing Xmarks for the first time you’ll need to sign-up for a free online account that will used to store all your bookmarks in the cloud. Install the Firefox plug-in first and then the IE application. When running the IE application setup use your exiting Xmarks username & password so that it pulls the bookmarks from the same account.

TIP: Whilst Xmarks is a free service they have to make money somehow and they do this by adding some additional features to your browsers called Discovery which is essentially smarter web search and annotated search engine results. This may or may not be your cup of tea but it’s not for me so was easily turned off in the settings menu in both the Firefox plug-in and IE taskbar app. Full credit to Xmarks for making it so easy to turn off.

Now you should have 2 new icons in your taskbar, MobileMe (the cloud logo) and Xmarks for IE (the X logo).

Your Xmarks plug-in will be sending your Firefox bookmarks to the cloud which in turn will be downloaded into your IE favourites folder (without touching IE) by the Xmarks IE taskbar application.

MobileMe is of course monitoring your IE favourites folder for new bookmarks and when it spots one it will synchronise with your MobileMe cloud account which will then push the new bookmarks to you iPhone Safari browser.

I’m not exactly sure of the polling intervals of the various pieces of the jigsaw, but I can pretty much guarantee a new bookmark will appear in my iPhone browser within 10 minutes of me adding it to Firefox on my laptop and that’s perfectly good enough for me. Et voila!

TIP: I turn on Encrypt All in the advanced settings on both the Firefox and IE Xmarks apps.

Finally to complete the solution you will need to install & setup the MobileMe and Xmarks clients on all your various desktops and laptops to ensure wherever you add a bookmark it ends up on your phone browser too.

It’s a little bit clunky I’ll give you that but it works seamlessly none the less which is what matters in end. I had already subscribed to MobileMe and was an avid user of Xmarks so the addition of the IE client was no great shakes…

We all make mistakes, especially when using mass automation apps like the BlogPiG suite of passive income generation tools. Imagine importing over 3000 schedule posts only to find out that you’ve a typo in every affiliate URL. Even with WordPress 2.5′s new bulk deletion feature you could only delete 10 posts at a time, that’s a lot of clicks!

NukePiG allows you one-click deletion of all your blog posts, pages, tags, categories or links, no messing around in the database, just select what you want to reset and hit NUKE! Within seconds you can reset an entire blog or simply just certain content elements, it’s your call.

You can download NukePiG from here: NukePiG

I’ll be keeping this blog updated with news and announcements about the impending launch of BlogPiG™. The latest version is currently undergoing extensive testing and is earmarked for a September release.

Here are a just a few of the features:

• BlogPiG™ automatically generates its own relevant & unique content
• BlogPiG™ intelligently publishes new content from its database over time
• BlogPiG™ automatically generates its own taxonomic internal linking structure
• BlogPiG™ intelligently expands its linking structure to incorporate new & old content items
• BlogPiG™ automatically grows a network of high quality organic backlinks

BlogPiG™ autonomously revives archived content items by adding new relevant comments

Much more to come and please don’t hesitate to ask any questions…