Achieve Leverage for Your Online Business
The purpose of leverage is to secure the maximum advantage with minimum effort. Specifically, for online businesses that means most profit with minimal personal involvement.
Prior articles discussed increasing leverage by 1) re-using content, and 2) re-purposing. In this article, we’ll focus on increasing leverage by outsourcing routine, 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 most important findings for internet marketers and home-based business owners in general are these: 1) Play to your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Acquire staff for talent.
Online business has a rather large learning curve and requires 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 if 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 advocate of the use of virtual assistants to handle repetitive, non-value-add tasks or other non-favored tasks. Contrary to popular opinion, outsourcing is not relegated only to major corporations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, online 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 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 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?
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