Achieve Leverage for Your Affiliate Business by Outsourcing
The objective of leverage is to return the most advantage with the smallest effort. Especially, for online businesses, that means greatest return on investment with least personal involvement, and we can accomplish this via outsourcing.
Previous articles discussed obtaining leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content. In this article, we’ll discuss developing leverage by outsourcing repetitive, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply doesn’t fit our personal skills, experience and/or nature.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman described some interesting findings from more than 25 years of research by the Gallup organization – 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 findings, that are important for affiliate marketers and home-based business owners are these: 1) Emphasize your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Hire workers for potential.
The world of online business has a large learning curve and requires many diverse skills. But, not very many people are gifted at all of them – and even those who multi-skilled, may not be using their available energy 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 small business owners, Occam’s Razor has much to teach us relative to our individual time usage.
Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a big proponent of the use of virtual assistants to handle recurrent, low prioritiy tasks or those for which he does not have either the time or inclination to perform.
Contrary to popular opinion, outsourcing is not restricted to giant organizations, but recognizing the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, home-based organizations can afford to outsource a lot of activities to virtual assistants.
One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles. They see the importance of article marketing, but either don’t like to write, don’t have the skills, don’t want to spend the time, 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 focus on your areas of strength, you can multiply your results, whereas, focusing on improving areas of weakness willonly incrementally improve results.
Would you rather 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.
