Cutting costs is more important than ever. One of the best ways to increase production and lower operating budgets is to save time with automation. Doing so frees up both time and cash—two resources that can be used to grow one’s business.
Saving time is critical in any enterprise where content production and website building and management take up a significant amount of energy. There’s never any direct ROI from updating and managing a website, encoding video or prepping photos. The goal of automation is to boost productivity and cut operating costs by reducing the cost of this work. The result is increased returns.
It’s always best to cut costs in ways that make sense and don’t involve panic, impulsive decisions or emotional responses. This doesn’t mean replacing staff with technology; it means using technology that will free up staff to work on things that generate ROI. These might include marketing, building in-house traffic and developing more websites.
Paysite Automation Methods
There are open-source scripts, simple gallery scripts and programmers available for hire. There’s also a selection of comprehensive content management system (CMS) software that is specific to the adult industry, ranging from entry-level products to high-end software packages intended for those who are serious about running adult businesses.
This is a competitive market, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Do your research and make your buying decision carefully, and you’ll have few regrets.
Robust CMS solutions offer extensive automation. It’s common for a high-end software product to automate almost every aspect of building and running paysites. The Elevated X CMS is a literal example of this, automating upwards of 95 percent of the tasks associated with paysite creation and day-to-day management. Automatic processing of photo watermarking, resizing, compressing, zipping and thumb-nailing is standard. Automatic watermarking, resizing and encoding of videos, as well as cutting videos into clips and taking screen captures of videos, is an optional add-on. Any CMS offering such features will often automate the gallery creation process 100 percent.
Being able to encode/transcode videos online is attractive to just about everyone. The convenience of uploading a source video to your server and having software that encodes it into several popular video formats, high- and low-bandwidth video versions, and video clips is highly valued—and with good reason.
With a solid CMS, performance is never an issue. Building new sites quickly is a breeze. In some cases most of the management process consists of basic data entry and a few clicks of the mouse. The time needed to add a full photo set and video update to a site can be less than 5 minutes.
Depending on your needs, you can choose between free or cheap scripts and full-fledged out-of-the-box CMS solution type products sold by companies with dedicated tech support staff.
It’s always good to evaluate your business once a year. Part of this should involve researching to see what’s new, how software has improved and how it might help you save time and make more money.
Is there such thing as too much automation?
You really can have too much of a good thing. Cutting costs is smart, cutting corners isn’t. As beneficial as it is, it’s possible to take automation too far. When this happens there’s more room for error, things get sloppy and quality suffers.
Automation breeding laziness is a pitfall for both owners and staff. This can happen after seeing huge time and cost savings for the first time due to a new software purchase. Staff is at risk once they realize they no longer need to do tedious work by hand. The temptation to go beyond using automation as a productivity booster lures some people into trying to automate every aspect of what they do. This is where cutting costs becomes cutting corners and causes problems.
Some things are better off not being automated. Good examples are paysite tours and anything related to sales or promotion. It’s a good idea to automate routine, repetitive tasks like cutting video clips, zipping photos and bulk creating FHGs for an affiliate program. It’s probably not such a good idea to let a software program select which photos are used on tours, or have it automatically generate text that every one of your customers or affiliates will read.
The decision as to how much of your operation you automate should be based on how important it is to you to maintain quality control. I believe you can safely automate about 95 percent of the building and managing of most websites without grossly sacrificing quality.
