Automation And Why You Should At Least Know PHP

Over at Contempt.me, the recent flavor of posts have been focused on automation, and why everyone should utilize automation to their fullest potential. In the latest post, Contempt has listed several ways to implement automation that had never even crossed my mind, including:

• Check your server load and send a SMS message to your cellphone alerting you if it goes above your specified threshold
• Send an SMS message to your cell-phone whenever a page of yours gets de-indexed
• Analyze your top 50 competitors and send you daily reports including where their links are coming from, what sites have snuck up into the top 50, what sites have made their way to the top 10 ranking, etc.

The possibilities when it comes to automation are endless. He even went over a situation where a woman he knew decided to use being implementing automation and wound up not needing the work of 2 employees anymore. In the end, she was saving $500 per month on employees she didn’t need anymore – she just turned over the tedious (yet important) tasks to macros / scripts.

Automation really is necessary if you want to stay at the top of the game, which leads me to my next point – programming skills are almost necessary. I say almost necessary because if you have enough cash laying around, you could just outsource whatever automation jobs you have in mind. My only qualm with this scenario is that in the future if you want to make any chances to the code, you might have a hard time doing it yourself and lets face it, the majority of the people who do outsource work these days aren’t quite reliable. The whole point in automation is to be able to set up scripts to take care of the tedious work, and what’s the point if you can’t quickly make changes on the fly to keep your business on the up and up?

Since reading Contempt’s latest blog post, I decided to bust out my old PHP / MySQL books and start refreshing. I haven’t really used PHP to my advantages the past few years, and a refresher course is what I need to start messing around again. I highly suggest everyone do the same. Come up with a good automation process, and if it’s good enough, start selling it off as a service (link building, “manual” directory submissions, etc.).