Add Leverage for Your Home-Based Business by Outsourcing
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
The intent of leverage is to obtain the maximum advantage with the lowest effort. Especially, for affiliate businesses, that means greatest return on investment with minimum personal involvement, and we can accomplish this via outsourcing.
Previous articles discussed gaining leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content. In this article, we’ll address increasing leverage by outsourcing routine, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply isn’t a match with our personal skills, experience and/or temperament.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman recounted some interesting findings from 25 years of Gallup organization research – 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 internet marketers and home-based business owners are these: 1) Focus on your strong suits, not your weaknesses, and 2) Acquire staff for talent.
Internet marketing has a large learning curve and involves a lot of diverse skills. But, few people are gifted in all of them – and even those who multi-skilled, probably are not applying their available effort and other skills to focus on areas that are relative weaknesses for them.
William of Occam, who developed “Occam’s Razor,” has noted: “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As internet business owners, this has much to teach us in terms of our personal time allocation.
Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a terrific proponent of outsourcing to virtual assistants to handle repetitive, low prioritiy activities or those for which he does not have either the time or inclination to perform.
It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not restricted to giant corporations, but recognizing the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, internet organizations can now afford to outsource many tasks to virtual assistants.
Many internet marketers elect to outsource writing articles. They see the importance of writing articles, but either don’t like to write, don’t have the skills, don’t want to spend the time, so they delegate article authoring to ghost-writers.
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 focus on your areas of strength, you can multiply your results, whereas, focusing on your weaknesses willonly marginally improve your results.
Which would you rather do – multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?
If you would like to learn how to leverage your time, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.
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