Achieve Leverage for Your Home-Based Business by Outsourcing
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The objective of leverage is to provide the best advantage with the smallest effort. Specifically, for affiliate businesses, that means maximum return on investment with minimum personal involvement, and we can realize this via outsourcing.
Prior articles described ways of obtaining leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content. In this article, we’ll discuss acquiring leverage by outsourcing recurring, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply doesn’t fit our unique 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 then elaborating on those findings in several subsequent books. Two of their most important findings for online marketers and home-based business owners in general are these: 1) Emphasize your strengths, not your negatives, and 2) Select staff for ability.
The world of online business has a large learning curve and requires many different skills. However, not very many people are gifted at all of them - and even those who multi-skilled, may not be using their available time and other skills should they focus on areas that are relative weaknesses for them.
William of Occam, noted for “Occam’s Razor,” has noted: “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As affiliate business owners, Occam’s Razor has much to teach us in terms of our individual time usage.
Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a major fan of outsourcing to virtual assistants to handle recurring, non-value-add tasks or other non-favored tasks.
It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not limited to the world of giant businesses, but given the low cost of international VAs, even small, online companies can afford to delegate many activities to virtual assistants.
One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles. They see the importance of writing articles, but either can’t write well, or simply don’t want to write, so they release those writing tasks to ghost-writers.
You also might want to consider outsourcing to a call center (or virtual assistant) all the phone 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 improving areas of weakness 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 efforts, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.