If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work involved in running your own internet business, then you’ve probably considered outsourcing various tasks at one point or another.
Let’s face it, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything. So if you’re still trying to blog, social bookmark, recruit JV’s and affiliates, write articles and do all the other myriad jobs involved in marketing online, then it’s time to consider outsourcing.
In fact, don’t just consider it…actually start outsourcing as soon as your pocket allows. If you have your own products to sell, the cost of outsourcing work should more than pay for itself in increased revenue anyway. Plus you’ll have more time to focus on the aspects of your business you enjoy the most, whilst giving the more mundane, tedious tasks to someone else.
Since I became a full-time marketer online in July 2008, I’ve been focussing my efforts on creating automated processes for outsourcing different areas of my marketing. For instance I’ve created a process for recruiting JV partners and affiliates. The process is simply a templated html document which gives step-by-step details (usually a mix of camtasia screen recordings and written instructions) on how to contact other marketers for JV’s. I just give the url of the doc to the person I’m outsourcing the task to and let them get on with it.
If I then ask another outsourcer to do the same task a week later, I just customize the instructions accordingly.
Currently I’m using 5 freelancers to help build my business. One is developing my first software product Ultimate Footer Ad, two are blog commenting to get backlinks to drive traffic back to this blog and other sites I own like Small Lists Big Profits, and another two are doing webmaster work such as installing scripts, setting up split tests and creating squeezepages etc.
And you’ll be surprised how little it can cost to outsource tasks too.
Btw, one of my favourite sites for finding freelancers is GetAFreelancer.com. I much prefer it to Rentacoder as projects are much quicker to post and the site just seems much easier to use generally.
Whilst it might feel a little daunting at first, outsourcing a task is actually pretty easy once you’ve done it a few times. Why not give it a try and start leveraging the work of others to benefit your business.
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Hi Graham
Great points about outsourcing. I’ve now used a couple of different freelancers for graphics and server admin tasks via elance and guru.com. I’ve had fantastic service, very affordably in both cases and I’m now also much happier to outsource more of the less-productive tasks that can otherwise bog you down.
It would be great to hear how you get on with outsourcing traffic generation to the blog. I could do with a boost now that I’ve (finally) started one of my own!