Get Leverage for Your Affiliate Business by Outsourcing

The objective of leverage is to secure the greatest advantage with the lowest effort.  Especially, for affiliate businesses, that means greatest ROI with least personal involvement, and we can accomplish this via outsourcing.

Preceding articles described ways of increasing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll address gaining leverage by outsourcing repetitive, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply isn’t a match with our individual skills, experience and/or nature.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman addressed 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 strong suits, not your weaknesses, and 2) Acquire staff for ability.

Online business has a large learning curve and requires many diverse abilities.  However, not very many people are talented at all of those skills – and even those who multi-skilled, probably are not making the best use of their available effort and other skills when they focus on areas that are relative weaknesses for them.

William of Occam, best known for “Occam’s Razor,” has said:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As affiliate business owners, Occam’s Razor has a big lesson for us in terms of our individual time allocation.

Tim Ferriss, who wrote “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a terrific supporter of the use of virtual assistants to handle recurrent, low prioritiy activities or other non-favored tasks.

It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not limited to major companies, but recognizing the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, online organizations can now afford to delegate many tasks to virtual assistants.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles.  They see the importance of writing articles, but either can’t write well, or simply don’t want to write, so they outsource 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 improve 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?

If you would like to learn how to leverage your time, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.