As I said at STM London, my favourite kind of outsourcing is the kind that’s free, never makes mistakes, and works 24 hours a day – outsourcing to a computer, otherwise known as automation.

You can save surprising amounts of time by automating even very simple tasks – for example, if you can automate a 2-minute task you do once a day (like, say, logging into your traffic source and downloading your stats), you’ll save a day and a half a year. Do that a bunch of times and it really starts to add up.

But the usual problem is that automation isn’t easy for non-programmers.

In particular, automating tasks you do on the Web has been a bit of a bitch in the past – Selenium is very powerful but it’s not exactly accessible for non-techies.

But I’ve recently discovered a new tool which you can use to automate any task on the Web, and it works like Photoshop actions – no programming required.

Enter iMacros, for Firefox and Chrome.

What iMacros Can Do

iMacros is pretty impressively fully-featured. You can easily set it up to:

• Automatically open single or multiple tabs and navigate to pages.
• Fill in forms, including login forms, comment forms, etc.
• Download single or multiple items.
• Upload items.
• Take screenshots.
• Interact with Javascript elements.

As I said at STM London, my favourite kind of outsourcing is the kind that’s free, never makes mistakes, and works 24 hours a day – outsourcing to a computer, otherwise known as automation.

You can save surprising amounts of time by automating even very simple tasks – for example, if you can automate a 2-minute task you do once a day (like, say, logging into your traffic source and downloading your stats), you’ll save a day and a half a year. Do that a bunch of times and it really starts to add up.

But the usual problem is that automation isn’t easy for non-programmers.

In particular, automating tasks you do on the Web has been a bit of a bitch in the past – Selenium is very powerful but it’s not exactly accessible for non-techies.

But I’ve recently discovered a new tool which you can use to automate any task on the Web, and it works like Photoshop actions – no programming required.

Enter iMacros, for Firefox and Chrome.

What iMacros Can Do

iMacros is pretty impressively fully-featured. You can easily set it up to:

• Automatically open single or multiple tabs and navigate to pages.
• Fill in forms, including login forms, comment forms, etc.
• Download single or multiple items.
• Upload items.
• Take screenshots.
• Interact with Javascript elements.