Get Leverage For Your Home Business By Outsourcing

The intent of leverage is to return the greatest advantage with minimum effort. Specifically, for online businesses that means highest profit with least personal involvement.

Earlier articles discussed gaining leverage by 1) re-using content, and 2) re-purposing. In this article, we'll focus on acquiring leverage by outsourcing repetitive, 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 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 subsequently elaborating on those findings in later books. Two of their most important findins for internet marketers and home-based business owners in general are these: 1) Emphasis your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Select staff for talent.

Online business has a rather large learning curve and requires many different skills. Unfortunately, few people are talented at all of them - and even those who are may not be making the best use of their available time and other skills to 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 proponent 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 restricted to giantcorporations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, home-based 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, or don't want to spend the time, so they outsource article authoring 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 improving areas of weakness will, at best, result in only an incremental improvement in results.

Which would you rather do - multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?