Obtain Leverage for Your Home Business
The purpose of leverage is to achieve the maximum advantage with bare minimum effort. In particular, for online businesses that means most profit with smallest personal involvement.
Earlier articles described ways of gaining leverage by 1) re-using content, and 2) re-purposing. In this article, we’ll focus on obtaining leverage by outsourcing routine, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply doesn’t fit our personal skills, experience and/or temperament.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman recounted 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 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) Emphasize your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Hire staff for talent.
Internet marketing has a large learning curve and involves many 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 their weaknesses.
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 promoter of the use of virtual assistants to handle repetitive, non-value-add tasks or other non-favored tasks. It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not limited to large corporations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, internet companies can afford to outsource many tasks to virtual assistants.
Many internet marketers elect to outsource writing articles. They see the value of article marketing, but either don’t like to write, don’t have the skills, don’t want to spend the time, 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 focus on your areas of strength, you can multiply your results, whereas, focusing on improving areas of weakness will only marginally improve your results.
Which would you rather do – multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?
If you like what you’ve just read, and would like to learn how to leverage your efforts through outsourcing, and become a millionaire – get the FREE Infinite Income Plan report and put your income on autopilot.
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