Want to keep your business efficient, or just lazy? Here is where automation comes in.

While you may have a hard time automating your product creation process—after all, who understands your product better than you?—there are several areas of your business that you can and should put on auto-pilot. Some entrepreneurs hover over every operation in their business to feel busy, to kill time or simply because they’re perfectionists.

This practice, however, is self-defeating. You only have 24 hours in a day, and your head needs to be where the money is: product creation. Below are five areas of your business that you should be automating like a boss.

Automating traffic huh? Well, I’m not talking about buying some magical “push-button” software to automate your traffic or paid channels like Adwords or Facebook Ads. Automating your traffic organically takes months to build but in the end is worth the initial time spent. The simplest way to automate your traffic generation is to create as much unique, high-quality content as possible. Encourage and make it easy for your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed or any email newsletter and build a core readership that keeps coming back again and again.

Once you establish yourself as an authority in your niche, your core readership also becomes brand ambassadors for you as they will begin to share your content on their social networks. We all know that content marketing is a powerful means of bringing folks to your site. Having your readers act as foot soldiers on your behalf can be extremely powerful.

You can also submit your best pages to sites that aggregate high-quality content like AllTop, Technorati and the like. These sites receive lots of traffic and make it easy for their users to share great finds with others.

Creating content all the time is one of two things initially: time intensive or expensive. Still, traffic begets traffic. Continue to serve your niche well, and you will get to the point where you can publish your content and receive hundreds of hits within hours. It’s really best that you handle the content creation in-house, but if you have the budget and are short on time or resources you may consider investing in particularly sharable content that you may be able to outsource, such as videos and infographics, which can speed the process along.

You can quite easily automate the process of introducing visitors to your sales funnel. The way that most marketers go about doing this is by offering an ebook or other downloadable item for free on their site in exchange for an email. Permission marketing is powerful, and having a big, targeted list can take a lot of the work out of launching a new product.

Some marketers automate their lead generation by placing content that subtly promotes their product or surface around the Internet. This way, receptive leads come to your site “warmed up”, and they will be more receptive to your products.

You can—and should—have a fully-automated sales funnel. You can automate everything from the initial email capture to the “Thank You” page after a prospect becomes a customer. There are many platforms you can use to go about doing this. Some services are more complex than others, but they all provide the same basic features: a shopping cart, payment processor, and product delivery.

All e-commerce systems will allow you to make changes manually as well. For instance, you may want to manually process a refund or set an alert in case a customer orders a bulk quantity of a physical product.

Relationship building may be the single most important component of all. Internet users are more savvy than ever, and if they’re not familiar with your brand, they aren’t likely to buy from you. Once on your list, however, you can establish a rapport by sending emails that contain valuable information. To automate this process, use an autoresponder that will allow you to create a series of emails to send to consumers as they join your list.

You may want to invest in an autoresponder that will allow you to segment your list by metrics such as age, gender, occupation and location. You may not always have this data handy, but if you do, you can earn substantially more by segmenting your subscribers into proper groups to target their interests even further. Research has shown, for instance, that more often than not, people open an email within an hour of receipt, if they open it at all.

Knowing when the majority of your list is likely to be in front of their computers is savvy Internet marketing. Of course, the best time to connect with your subscribers will vary depending on where in the world they live. Some autoresponders have features that allow you to email your subscribers at a set time that is relative to their local time zone, which means everyone gets your email at the most optimum time.

Once you’ve set about creating a relationship with your list, you can use your autoresponder to automate market research. Simply create a survey and send it out periodically to your subscribers. Find out what your list wants, and then give it to them. This is a great way to seed your future product ideas and since these ideas are coming from your subscribers themselves, you know that you’ll have a product that is extremely targeted to their specific needs.

While automation requires an initial investment, the infrastructure you create can pay for itself many times over. The benefits of automating one segment of your business will spill over into other segments, meaning that the entire process becomes easier as you go. Once you have one automated business under your belt, you may find that you have the time to start another, or else to dramatically scale up your existing business and increase your bottom line exponentially.