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Running a business is difficult. It's even more difficult if you have an autoimmune disease or chronic illness and don't feel well for long periods of time. If you're an entrepreneur who has an autoimmune disease, you probably started your business so you'd have the flexibility to make a living on your own terms. So, how do you run a business on autopilot when you just don't feel well? How do you keep a business going when you have a hard time keeping yourself going? How can you keep that income coming in if you're hospitalized or bed-ridden?
Run A Business On Autopilot
Delegate and Outsource
As the owner of a business, you simply can't do it all. You don't have enough time, so you have to outsource or delegate some tasks. When you're ill, you should be reducing what you're responsible for even more.
For whatever you don't like doing in your business or what you're not good at, you should outsource that function. At sites like Fiverr and Upwork, you can hire people to do your copywriting, graphics, accounting, video editing, video voiceovers, and much more. It may cost you a little money, but it will save you time and allow you to accomplish so much more. It's like having a team to run your business instead of just you. And if you set things up right, that team can run your business on autopilot while you take care of yourself.
Automate
You may have heard the term “passive income” before. It basically means you make money without doing any work. Few income streams are every truly totally passive. However, there are some that come close that will allow you to make money by only putting in a few hours a week to keep things running smoothly. Some examples are drop shipping, print-on-demand, affiliate marketing, and social media marketing. For most of these, you do a bit of work up front to get things started and then work on it a few hours a week to keep things up to date and customers happy. For the most part, the business runs on autopilot with just occasional input from you.
Drop Shipping
Drop shipping is a business in which you are a middleman for the company that has inventory in its warehouse. You select which products you want to sell, fill an online store, and market it. When you make a sale, the drop shipper packages the items up and ships the package with your logo/label on it. You don't have to deal with keeping inventory, arranging shipping, or anything like that. You just have to market and provide customer service.
With the drop shipper doing most of the work, you can make a decent income working a few hours a week to find products, create and update listings on your site, marketing them, and helping out your customers if there are issues. If your operation grows, you can even hire people to handle most of the work, leaving you to just oversee the operation.
Print-On-Demand
Print-on-demand is a business where you create designs to sell on several different types of items like t-shirts, hats, mugs, stickers, and more. The item isn't created until an order comes in, so you don't have to carry a large inventory of designs that may or may not sell. And the great news is that you can outsource the printing!
There are companies like Printify and others who will take your customer's orders and print the design you made (or hired someone to make) on the item they ordered. They'll then ship the item(s) to your customers. You pay them for the base cost of the item, shipping, and a fee for the service. You keep the rest of the price you charge as profit. This can truly be a business on autopilot that requires only a little time to maintain.
There's even a simpler way to do it, in case you don't want to invest in your own website/shop and integrating it with Printify. Sites like RedBubble and TeePublic allow you to upload designs, put them on several different types of products, and sell them in their online marketplace. If you make a sale, they will simply deduct the costs from the price you charge and pay the rest to you as a commission. You don't have to worry about charging sales tax and submitting that to your state. You don't have to handle shipping or returns. You don't even have to talk to your customers, although providing good customer service will keep them coming back!
It's a simple way to start a business without having to invest a lot up front. You will spend most of your time coming up with designs and uploading them to your print-on-demand shop. You can spend as little or as much time as you want on that. After that, the rest is automated.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another quick and simple way to get started with an online business. Essentially, affiliate marketing is when you partner with a merchant to promote their products. They give you a special link to use when promoting their products and if a customer clicks that links and buys, you get a commission.
There is a lot of work up front, but once you have a site built out, it's a business on autopilot. You just need to update the site once or twice a week to keep it fresh. This type of income stream does involve a little bit of investment to register a domain and get web hosting for your site. If you're not a technical person, there may be a bit of a learning curve, but it isn't incredibly difficult no matter what your skill level.
To start, you find a niche you're interested in that has the potential for a good customer base. Create content for the site, such as articles on the topic or product reviews. Then, look online for affiliate programs related to that niche or sign up at an affiliate network like Commission Junction or ShareASale. Make sure you have a decent amount of content on your site first because you want to assure merchants who might work with you that you have a quality website that can drive sales.
I won't go into detail on how to do affiliate marketing in this article. I will likely write an article about that soon. In the meantime, the Super Affiliate Handbook is where I learned a lot about affiliate marketing. It's fairly inexpensive ($27 last I checked), which is a good deal considering many marketers sell their affiliate marketing courses for $200 or more.
Once you have the site built and affiliate links incorporated into your content, you can focus on driving traffic to your website via social media, SEO (search engine optimization), paid ads, and more. Traffic strategies involving ads and social media can be automated, meaning you could literally make money while you sleep. There is no cooler feeling than waking up in the morning to find people purchased through your affiliate links overnight and made you a commission.
Social Media Marketing
With certain affiliate programs, you don't even need a website. Some merchants allow you to market their products directly through your social media accounts. This is social media marketing and it can be automated too. Sites like MeetEdgar allow you to create your social media content in bulk and set it up to go out on the schedule you specify to the social media accounts you specify. You can also set up categories that will cycle through a number of your posts and tweets on a regular basis on autopilot. You could go on vacation and MeetEdgar will keep posting and tweeting on your set schedule and no one will know you're gone!
If you can't afford a service like MeetEdgar, many social media companies like Twitter and Facebook now allow you to schedule posts in advance. It's a little less efficient to have to login to each platform and set up your content rather than doing it in one place, but if cost is a factor, the extra time is well worth the savings. You could spend one hour every Sunday setting up all your posts and tweets for the week, or even several weeks, and take the rest of the week off from social media.
There is so much more that could be discussed regarding running your business on autopilot when you're not feeling well. We've really only just scratched the surface, but I hope this gave you a good idea of what's possible and inspired you to delegate and automate in your own business. Running a business on autopilot can be such a blessing at times when you need to focus on your health.
If this article helped you, please leave a comment below and share it with others who might be interested. If you would like more tools I recommend to help you in your business, check out the resource page.
To your success!