For someone who gave up their IT background in search of the green grass in the new fields of Internet Marketing the choice is clear, you need both. Now a person with just a marketing background needn’t worry but it seems that once you have been enthused and skilled by the possibilities offered by automation, you really shouldn’t leave it behind.
It seems I have had a bit of a change of heart. The decision I made long ago was that I would leave all my programming abilities behind and concentrate on a totally new industry, marketing on the Internet. Well, I have decided to combine the two skills going forward.
Now going back to programming is a very big decision. I was actually very good in this area in the past, but obviously now things have moved on and I have quite a bit to learn to catch up.
The reason is because I want to ensure that I can semi-automate all the things that I need to do.
This has been because after looking at all the things I want to do in Internet Marketing I found that I was quickly drowned in tremendous amounts of manual tasks that needed to be done on a regular basis.
Seeing that what I needed to do didn’t really involve complex thinking or decisions I thought that maybe I could get some Macro type programs that would do the job for me. I did try iOpus iMacros which in one sense was nice and easy, I felt didn’t really give me the power to do the things I really expected of it. I know there was an Enterprise edition that did ‘scripting’, giving me the opportunity of writing my logic there, it involved splashing out and buying this edition and using an older, less supported programming method to do it all. I did think that the iMacros way was a bit proprietary too, meaning I would have to do it all their way, using their syntax and suffering from any broken functionality, should it happen, without the means of finding any workarounds. It was obvious however that no matter which way I looked, programming was always there.
Would I be stuck in iMacros with something that didn’t do what I wanted it to and not being able to complete it?
I resolved I needed to go back to my roots, well the programming ones anyway. If I was going to develop all these automations then I needed something that would work with anything and everything I could throw at it. I know what I am like and I can get pretty ambitious in this area at times and using iMacros or any other product would not give me the security of a proper development model.
Now I will add after my negative personal attitude to iMacros, that actually it is a very good piece of software that I would recommend. It is certainly useful to anyone wanting to automate common web activities. However, for me, I need to go forward with some intensive plans and back to programming.