Increase Leverage for Your Internet Business by Outsourcing

The objective of leverage is to secure the biggest advantage with the least possible effort.  Specifically, for us, that means greatest profit with smallest personal involvement, and we can make this happen via outsourcing.

Earlier articles described ways of providing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll discuss obtaining leverage by outsourcing recurring, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply isn’t a match with our unique skills, experience and/or character.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman addressed 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 then elaborating on those findings in several subsequent books.  Two of their findings, that are important for affiliate marketers and home-based business owners in general are these:  1) Emphasize your strengths, not your negatives, and 2) Hire workers for potential.

Online business has a rather large learning curve and involves a lot of diverse skills.  But, not very many people are talented in all of them – and even those who are, probably are not making the best use of their available time and other skills if they focus on areas that are relative weaknesses for them.

William of Occam, noted for “Occam’s Razor,” has said:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As affiliate business owners, Occam’s Razor has a big lesson for us relative to our personal time management.

Tim Ferriss, who wrote “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a major proponent of outsourcing to virtual assistants to handle repetitive, non-value-add activities or other non-favored tasks.

Contrary to popular opinion, outsourcing is not relegated only to large businesses, but given the low cost of international VAs, even small, home-based companies can now afford to delegate a lot of tasks to VAs.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles.  Many see the importance of article marketing, but either can’t write well, or simply don’t want to write, 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 improve your areas of strength, you gain the benefits of leverage and multiply your results, whereas, focusing on your weaknesses will, at best, result in only an incremental improvement in results. 

Which is more important to you – the ability to 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.