Increase Leverage for Your Affiliate Business by Outsourcing

The purpose of leverage is to return the best advantage with the least possible effort.  Specifically, for internet businesses, that means greatest return on investment with minimal personal involvement, and we can accomplish this via outsourcing.

Previous articles discussed gaining leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll discuss gaining 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 personality.

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 subsequently elaborating on those findings in later books.  Two of their most important findings for online marketers and home-based business owners in general are these:  1) Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Hire assistants for potential.

Internet marketing has a rather large learning curve and requires many different skills.  But, not very many people are talented at all of those areas - and even those who multi-skilled, may not be using their available energy and other skills should they focus on areas that are relative weaknesses for them.

William of Occam, best known for “Occam’s Razor,” has noted:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As online business owners, Occam’s Razor has much to teach us in terms of our personal time usage.

Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a major fan of outsourcing to virtual assistants to handle recurrent, non-value-add tasks or other non-favored tasks.

It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not restricted to the world of giant corporations, but given the low cost of international VAs, even small, home-based companies can afford to outsource a lot of tasks to virtual assistants.

Many internet marketers elect to outsource article marketing.  Many see the importance 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 telephone 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 discover how to leverage your efforts, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.