Add Leverage For Your Online Business By Outsourcing

The purpose of leverage is to return the most advantage with minimum effort. In particular, for online businesses that means greatest profit with minimal personal involvement.

Preceding articles discussed providing leverage by 1) re-using content, and 2) re-purposing. In this article, we'll focus on developing leverage by outsourcing repetitive, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply doesn't fit our personal skills, experience and/or personality.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman described 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 findings, that are important for internet marketers and home-based business owners are these: 1) Play to your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Acquire staff for talent.

Internet marketing has a large learning curve and involves a lot of different skills. Unfortunately, few people are personally skilled at all of them - and even those who are may not be making the best use of their available time and other skills when they focus on areas that are relative weaknesses for them.

William of Occam, best known for "Occam's Razor," has stated: "It is vain to do with more what can be done with less."

Tim Ferriss, author of "The 4-Hour Workweek" is a big advocate of the use of virtual assistants to handle repetitive, non-value-add tasks or those for which he does not have either the time or inclination to perform. Contrary to popular opinion, outsourcing is not limited to giant corporations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, affiliate companies can afford to outsource many tasks to virtual assistants.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles. They see the value of article marketing, but either don't can't write well, or simply don't want to, so they outsource article authoring 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 only incrementally improve results.

Which would you rather do - multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?