Everyone is trying to automate these days. Whether you use tools, or outsourcing work to others, automation is clearly a way to expand your business and bring in more profits. For example, if you are building links for your newly launched site, there are many mundane tasks that you have to do each day to increase your search engine ranking including blog commenting, posting articles on article directories and web 2.0 sites, and more. These are completely necessary tasks, but not something anyone wants to personally do for several hours each day. The answer to this is automation, and in this article I want to look at two tools that will make your life easier called iMacros and UBot.
iMacros is a really cool free Firefox Add-on that lets you automate the Firefox web browser. Once installed, it basically allows you to record and play back tasks that you perform on your browser. This is especially useful for basic tasks like form filling or repetitive tasks like checking your stats on multiple affiliate networks. If you learn how to use its datasources feature, it can even be expanded to create macros to perform more complex tasks like creating accounts and posting links for you. To create scripts, it really is as simple as pushing a button to record and then performing a sequence of tasks in the browser. You can then save your scripts and play them back whenever you need to. iMacros is simple and I recommend it for people just getting started with automation.
UBot is a little more powerful than iMacros, but it has a higher learning curve. Basically UBot allows you to create your own web bots using its own Visual Scripting Language. This language is completely graphical, unlike standard programming languages. That means that even non-programmers should be able to pick it up if they have the inclination to. UBot is more flexible than iMacros because it supports branching, looping and constructs like that. It also comes with built in functions for proxy switching, captcha input, page scraping and a whole lot more. Plus if you build some decent bots with UBot, you can compile them into self contained programs that you can then give away or sell.
Both iMacros and UBot are great tools for automating repetitive tasks that you need to do on the web. If you are just getting into automation, then I would recommend taking a look at iMacros first. It’s free and quite easy to use. However, if you want to build something more sophisticated, then take a look at UBot. It’s extremely powerful and you can create bots that do some amazing things with it.
