opinion

Cutting Costs, Upping Productivity

Merriam-Webster defined automation as “the state of being operated automatically.”

Our daily life is full of automation. Dishwashers, hair dryers, coffee makers… if we can automate, we will.

Robust CMS solutions boast impressive features complete with content management and site management tools for running adult sites with little effort.

Automation is a great way to cut costs. Efficiency saves money. It creates opportunity. It frees up the time and cash needed to grow a business. This is especially true when building and managing web sites takes up so much of our time.

Increased productivity + lower operating costs = increased returns.

Embracing automation doesn’t mean replacing people with technology. It means using technology so you can free up staff to work on things that DO generate ROI such as content production, marketing, building in-house traffic sources and building more websites.

Start by automating as many day to day tasks as possible. Adult site automation methods range widely. There are free open source scripts, simple gallery scripts, programmers for hire and comprehensive adult site specific content management system software products and affiliate management platforms. There are general site managers and usage specific scripts designed with one purpose in mind be it blogs, tubes, affiliate program sites, VOD sites, subscription pay sites and even networks of pay sites. Regardless of your needs, there’s a product or service for you.

On the site management front, automatic photo watermarking, resizing, compressing, zipping, and thumb-nailing is common, as is watermarking, resizing and encoding of videos as well as cutting videos into clips and taking screen captures of videos. A solid CMS will automate the gallery creating process 100 percent. Being able to automatically encode/convert your videos online is attractive to just about everyone. The convenience of uploading a source video to your server and having software encode it into several popular video formats, high and low bandwidth video versions and video clips is an invaluable perk that a select few systems offer.

Robust CMS solutions boast impressive features complete with content management and site management tools for running adult sites with little effort. A few go beyond this and offer customer interaction and money making features like tour and trial area management, banner management and video on demand.

With a solid CMS, building new sites quickly is a breeze. Often the site management process is little more than data entry and a few mouse clicks. Adding a photo set and video update to a site can take less than five minutes. Powerful stuff.

On the affiliate program side are solutions that handle everything from billing, traffic tracking and comprehensive stats to banner, FHG and promotional content management. Some are designed to work with a specific billing company, others work with a number of billers simultaneously.

Choose between cheap, quick and dirty automation scripts and full-fledged out of the box solution products sold by companies with dedicated tech support staff. If you feel you may need help and you appreciate customer service, you may want to choose a software company with a reputation of good service. Sometimes this peace of mind is worth the extra price you pay for a premium product.

Technology changes rapidly. It’s a good idea to evaluate your business about once a year. Part of this should involve spending some time researching and learning what’s new, how your current software has improved (if it has) and how it can help you save time and make more money. No matter what type of web sites you run currently or what kind of business you’re looking to start there are lots of automation products out there that will change the way you do business. You may even find yourself questioning how you ever lived without them.

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