In today's super competitive online world, it can be exasperating for a new webmaster or website owner to try and compete with established sites that have round the clock all year round support or service. For a lone entrepreneur or small team striking out, being able to provide this type of service is virtually impossible. Don't despair because it is possible to have your website do most of the heavy lifting for you...

Any quality web presence should have what are known as trigger and action facilities - or something very similar. A trigger is a specifiable event that can occur during a website's normal operation, such as a new user signing up or writing a comment. An action, as the name implies, is any type of specifiable action the website can take, for example sending an email. Put these two together and your website can take actions based on certain events (triggers).

Since your website is up and running 24/7, it pays to shift as much of the time consuming waiting on customers to the website itself, and only utilize human labour to fulfil tasks that only humans can do - such as moderating comments, fulfilling an order, or undertaking a service. In fact, you'll be surprised at what important tasks can be undertaken by a website and shifted away from humans. So long as the initial triggers are well understood, there's no reason a human has to be around to assign, for example, a new affiliate to your affiliate program.

Safe in the knowledge that the website will SMS or email you as soon as, say, a new subscription to your premium content has been purchased, you can now leave the office without having to worry about a customer waiting ten or twelve hours for their order to be fulfilled. As soon as you get the SMS you can hop online and do whatever work is required (that cannot be automated), giving the appearance that there is always someone online and available. Admittedly, you and your team still have to sleep - but, the amount of time the website is left unattended is drastically reduced.

All this aside, any task that is repetitive in nature is a good candidate for automation and hopefully you've got a quality website that makes it as easy to assign new triggers and actions for users, content, comments, etc as clicking a few buttons. Being able to reduce paid manhours can be a real life saver for any business, so it really pays to look into website automation.