Amin: Yep, time is the great leveller isn't it?

I've dabbled with outsourcing up to now with varying levels of success, and now I think it's time to get myself a virtual assistant that I can offload to. There are far too many tasks that I'm doing myself that are just not the best use of my time.

It's a bit of a hair puller but the first thing I need to do is sort out the tasks that take most time and which I can define properly. Once I've defined how they should be handled I can pass them over for someone else to deal with.

Bill Gates said "The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."

I'm not going to argue with that.

Once I've defined the tasks, then comes the testing and selection process to find someone who is capable of doing them. My first thoughts are that it would be another me, but there's bound to be someone out there who's much better at it.

On the definition front, one of the first tasks to define is the handling of support questions which is becoming a real time sucker.

Then the next task to define is the process of finding new staff to do the tasks.

Vincent: Hey thanks for that link. I think in my case it's partially handled by my settings in the All-In-One SEO plugin where I've set it to use NoIndex for categories, archives and tags. Not perfect but I think I'm covered.

You know what? I've been gradually getting a little concerned with WordPress releases recently, due to the huge amount of code generated. I have my suspicions that there may even be an unintentional "WordPress penalty" in Google despite what most people may think about the SEO capabilities of WP.

Without having tested this yet, my gut feel is that hand built sites get indexed faster and ranked higher than WP ones. By hand built, I also include my Site Builder in this.

At the moment if this is so (and I won't know until I've tested), I suspect it may be due to the high code overhead that's generated on a WP page.

I could be barking up the wrong tree with this of course.

Dave: Hey I'm sorry if you think I'm changing for the worse, but I always go with what works for me. So I experiment a bit, try something new out and if it works out I tell everybody else about it and I'm happy to do so. Most importantly I do it with a clear conscience.

As a result, the things I actually tell you about are few and far between. You *never* hear a dicky bird from me about all the stuff I test and products I try which don't work out.

I actually sat down and checked the other day what promotions and "sales pitches" that I've done in the last few months.

Promotion #1 – I promoted IPK in November and again in December with a $28 discount on the $107 product so you could have grabbed it for $79 (which you did). I also then created a cut price Automated Price Comparison service and Site Builder so that my subscribers could use that to build their IPK sites instead of the "official" IPK Site Builder (no auto price comparisons with that either).

Yep IPK is a great product and I've discovered ways of making it better, so watch out for my own version in a few weeks time. If you bought IPK with my link you can have a copy for free.

Promotion #2 – I promoted Graham Cox's Ultimate Footer Ad (UFA) twice last month by email with a discount of $20 so you could have grabbed it for $27. (Offer now over.) UFA is awesome and increased the number of sign ups to this blog by almost 250% in just 1 week.

So. Two promotions for other people in 5 months. I've also run 3 or 4 promotions for my own products at a heavy discount this year…

I've also now just gone back over my blog posts to check out what useful content I've added in the last few weeks and I can see there's some good free stuff there.

#1 – There's a video on how to do market research.
#2 – I've talked about a useful WordPress theme called Mandigo which is visually very flexible and has some nice features including "HTML inserts".
#3 – I've come up with a mathematical method of identifying good niches / keywords, which on the face of it is IPK related, but can be used in any niche research situation.
#4 – I've discussed the importance of testing and tracking.
#5 – I said how well my wife was doing using the Price Comparison service and shown some results. (Okay I guess that's a plug. Guilty.)
#6 – I've written about autoblogging and how easy and useful it is to do.
#7 – This post which I hoped would inspire people to kick back and take some time out to think about their own business.

I think I have the balance right, or at least I thought I did until your comment which I think is very fairly made.

My wife has said to me on more than one occasion that my subscribers like to buy stuff from me and not so much other people which is one of the reasons why I don't do many promotions and why I'm very picky.

I can't deny I maintain this blog to make money. That's why we all do it, right?

And I see other people coming up with great products about which I feel envious that I didn't think about them in the first place.

What I could do (and I sometimes do so) is not mention them at all, and put them on my list of future product ideas. And sometimes I just decide to go promote them.

It's inevitable that while I continue to create my own products, I'll also promote (a few) other people's products too. (And I do have some new products in the pipeline, with one I hope to get out in the next 7-10 days. Via a nickel sale probably.)

So if there's something specifically that I used to do but don't do so much anymore, then please let me know and I'll try to correct it.

I thought I was doing the same kind of thing with a bias towards more content, but maybe I've got the balance wrong. Let me know what you need me to do and I'll fix it if I can.

Ray: There's so much to do on CMS Anywhere to make it more appealing to marketers that I can't see it being released until next year. Maybe Paul will surprise me.

However, we're still working on memberships, subscriptions and a decent affiliate scheme for SmartDD v4. Pencilled release of June but don't hold me to that.

I'd also like to release a derivative we've been talking about for a long time called Site Flow Manager and which I promised to some people a (long) while back.

So the product line up would be entry level SmartDD, then up to Site Flow Manager, and finally CMS Anywhere. All of them based on the same code, all with differing levels of functionality. SmartDD is actually based on the ecommerce code from CMS Anywhere and always has been.

That's really interesting what you say about the WP sites. Like I said above my gut feel is that hand built sites do better faster. Do you think that might be the case but that longer term WP sites win out?

BTW we've now added auto-generated RSS feeds to the Site Builder sites (which now also validate, ahem) so they can be submitted to all the RSS sites.

I've just searched for and found that Amazon plugin you mentioned and tried out the free version. It crashed after creating 7 posts with a fatal error, but the posts it has created look completely natural, so thanks for that.

I think I have to create a few plugins of my own.

Roy: I've not tried Infolinks, but it seems to me that these services don't give you enough control over the keywords that generate the ads, or the content of the ads themselves. They also take a cut of the revenue.

AdSpurt is totally standalone and you get full control and all of the revenue.

-Frank Haywood