By AJ Hall

YNOT – Cutting costs is more important than ever. One of the best ways to increase production and lower an operating budget is to save time with automation.

Doing more in less time frees up time and cash — two resources we can use to grow our businesses. Saving man-hours is critical in an industry like ours where content production and website building and management take up much of our time.

There’s never any direct return on investment 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 to do it in a way that doesn’t involve panic, impulsive decisions or emotional responses. To me this doesn’t mean replacing staff with technology. Instead, it means using technology to free up staff to work on things that generate ROI. These might include marketing, in-house traffic building and building more websites.

Pay site automation methods
Open-source scripts and simple gallery scripts exist readymade, and programmers are available for hire to create custom platforms or modify what you already use. There’s also a selection of comprehensive adult-industry-specific content management system (CMS) software ranging from basic entry level products to high-end software packages intended for those who are serious about running adult businesses. But how do you decide what you need? This is a competitive market, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Do your research and make your buying decisions 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 pay sites. The Elevated X CMS is one example of this, automating upwards of 95 percent of the tasks associated with pay site creation and day-to-day management. Automatic processing of photo watermarking, resizing, compressing, zipping and thumbnailing is standard, and 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 often will automate the gallery creation process 100 percent.

Being able to encode or transcode videos online is attractive to just about everyone. The convenience of uploading a source video to your server and having software encode it into several popular video formats, high- and low-bandwidth 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 consist of basic data entry and a few clicks of the mouse. The time it takes to add a full photo set and video update to a site can be less than five minutes.

Depending on your needs, you can choose between free or nearly free 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 research to see what’s new, how software has improved and how it might help you save time and make more money.

Is there such a 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 automation can be, it’s possible to take it 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 the first time a company realizes huge time and cost savings 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 left un-automated. Good examples are pay site 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 galleries 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 you make as to how much of your operation to 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.

AJ Hall is a 12-year adult industry veteran and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Elevated X Inc., a leading provider of adult CMS software for the online adult entertainment industry. The product is used by more than 2,000 adult sites. He welcomes feedback and questions via email.