Increase Leverage for Your Online Business by Outsourcing
Saturday, October 31st, 2009The purpose of leverage is to obtain the maximum advantage with the minimum effort. Especially, for Internet Marketers, that means highest ROI with minimum personal involvement, and we can realize this via outsourcing.
Previous articles described ways of increasing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content. In this article, we’ll address gaining leverage by outsourcing routine, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply isn’t a match with our individual skills, experience and/or temperament.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman have reported some interesting findings from more than 25 years of research by the Gallup organization – initially in their book, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, and subsequently elaborating on those findings in later books. Two of their most important findings for affiliate marketers and home-based business owners are these: 1) Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Hire workers for ability.
Internet marketing has a large learning curve and requires a lot of diverse skills. However, not very many people are talented at all of them – and even those who multi-skilled, probably are not applying their available time and other skills should they focus on areas that are relative weaknesses for them.
William of Occam, best known for “Occam’s Razor,” has noted: “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As internet business owners, Occam’s Razor has a big lesson for us in terms of our own time usage.
Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a terrific fan of the use of virtual assistants to handle recurrent, low prioritiy activities or other non-favored tasks.
It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not relegated only to giant organizations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, home-based organizations can now afford to delegate a lot of tasks to virtual assistants.
One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is article marketing. They see the value of article marketing, but either don’t like to write, don’t have the skills, don’t want to spend the time, so they turn over those writing tasks to freelancers.
Another task you might consider outsourcing to a virtual assistant (or call center) is the telephone and email follow-up required for lead generation and sales closings.
If you improve your areas of strength, you gain the benefits of leverage and multiply your results, whereas, focusing on your weaknesses willonly marginally improve your results.
Which is more important to you – the ability to multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?
If you would like to discover how to leverage your efforts, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.