The purpose of leverage is to gain the best advantage with the least effort.  Specifically, for Internet Marketers, that means highest ROI with minimal personal involvement, and we can make this happen via outsourcing.

Earlier articles described ways of providing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll address obtaining leverage by outsourcing routine, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply doesn’t fit our individual skills, experience and/or character.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman have reported 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 then elaborating on those findings in several subsequent books.  Two of their most important findings for online marketers and home-based business owners are these:  1) Emphasize your positives, not your negatives, and 2) Hire workers for potential.

Affiliate business has a rather large learning curve and involves a lot of different abilities.  But, few people are personally skilled at all of those areas – and even those who are, probably are not making the best use of their available time and other skills should they focus on areas that are relative weaknesses for them.

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 affiliate business owners, this has much to teach us in terms of our individual time management.

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

It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not limited to the world of giant organizations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, affiliate organizations can now afford to outsource a lot of activities to VAs.

Many internet marketers elect to outsource writing articles.  They see the importance 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 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 gain the benefits of leverage and multiply your results, whereas, focusing on your weaknesses will, at best, result in only an incremental improvement in results. 

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

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

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