The purpose of leverage is to return the best advantage with the smallest effort.  Specifically, for affiliate businesses, that means highest ROI with minimum personal involvement, and we can realize 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 developing leverage by outsourcing routine, 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 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 online marketers and home-based business owners are these:  1) Focus on your strengths, not your negatives, and 2) Acquire workers for potential.

Affiliate business has a large learning curve and involves many different skills.  But, few people are talented at all of them – 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 noted:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As online business owners, Occam’s Razor has a big lesson for us relative to our individual time usage.

Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a huge proponent of the use of virtual assistants to handle repetitive, non-value-add tasks or those for which he does not have either the time or inclination to perform.

It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not limited to large organizations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, home-based companies can afford to delegate a lot of activities to VAs.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles.  They see the value of article marketing, but either can’t write well, or simply don’t want to write, so they outsource article authoring to freelancers. 

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 improve your areas of strength, you gain the benefits of leverage and multiply your results, whereas, focusing on your weaknesses willonly incrementally improve results. 

Which is more important to you – the ability to multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?

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

About Ryan Perry

Ryan Perry has taken his 10+ years of business ownership and hands-on marketing skills and focused them on online marketing. In April of 2009, he started Simple Biz Support with an emphasis on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Ryan is propelling local business websites to the top of Google, Yahoo and Bing resulting in increased market exposure and revenue for his clients using a variety of internet marketing tools including blogs, article submissions and video. Additionally, Ryan speaks and vlogs (video blogs) about internet marketing, educating business owners how to effectively use various SEO tools and techniques to promote their business on the internet. Connect with Ryan on Google+

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