Add Leverage for Your Home Business by Outsourcing

The objective of leverage is to secure the maximum advantage with the smallest effort.  Especially, for internet businesses, that means maximum return on investment with least personal involvement, and we can realize this via outsourcing.

Earlier articles discussed providing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we'll address obtaining leverage by outsourcing repetitive, 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 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 are these:  1) Focus on your strong suits, not your weaknesses, and 2) Select workers for talent.

Internet marketing has a rather large learning curve and involves a lot of diverse skills.  But, not very many people are personally skilled in all of them - and even those who are, may not be making the best use of their available effort 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 small business owners, this has a big lesson for us in terms of our personal time usage.

Tim Ferriss, who wrote "The 4-Hour Workweek" is a huge proponent of the use of virtual assistants to handle repetitive, non-value-add activities or other non-favored tasks.

It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not limited to giant corporations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, home business 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 value of writing articles, but either can't write well, or simply don't want to write, so they outsource those writing tasks 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 would you rather do - multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?

If you would like to discover how to leverage your energy, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.