Increase Leverage for Your Affiliate Business by Outsourcing

The intent of leverage is to gain the maximum advantage with the smallest effort.  Specifically, for us, that means highest return on investment with least personal involvement, and we can realize this via outsourcing.

Prior articles described ways of increasing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll address increasing leverage by outsourcing recurring, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply doesn’t fit our unique skills, experience and/or temperament.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman have reported 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 in general are these:  1) Play to your strengths, not your negatives, and 2) Select workers for ability.

The world of online business has a rather large learning curve and involves a lot of different abilities.  But, few people are gifted at all of them – and even those who multi-talented, may not be using their available energy and other skills if they focus on their weaknesses.

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, this has a big lesson for us in terms of our personal time allocation.

Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a huge proponent of the use of virtual assistants to handle recurrent, low prioritiy activities 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 organizations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, affiliate organizations can afford to outsource many tasks to virtual assistants.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is article marketing.  Many 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 turn over 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 willonly marginally improve your results. 

Would you rather multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?

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