Gain Leverage for Your Home-Based Business by Outsourcing

The intent of leverage is to gain the most advantage with the minimum effort.  Especially, for affiliate businesses, that means greatest profit with minimum personal involvement, and we can make this happen via outsourcing.

Earlier articles discussed obtaining leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll address 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 documented 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) Play to your strong suits, not your weaknesses, and 2) Select staff for ability.

Affiliate business has a large learning curve and requires many diverse skills.  But, few people are gifted in all of those areas – and even those who multi-skilled, probably are not making the best use of their available time and other skills should they focus on their weaknesses.

William of Occam, who developed “Occam’s Razor,” has said:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As online business owners, this has much to teach us relative to our personal time management.

Tim Ferriss, who wrote “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a huge supporter of the use of virtual assistants to handle recurrent, low prioritiy activities or those for which he does not have either the time or inclination to perform.

Contrary to popular opinion, outsourcing is not restricted to large organizations, but recognizing the low cost of international VAs, even small, home business organizations can afford to outsource many activities to virtual assistants.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles.  They see the value of writing articles, but either can’t write well, or simply don’t want to write, so they release article authoring to freelancers. 

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 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 resources, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.