The purpose of leverage is to achieve the most advantage with least possible effort. In particular, for internet businesses that means highest profit with minimal personal involvement.
Earlier articles described ways of providing 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 temperament.
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 internet marketers and home-based business owners in general are these: 1) Emphasize your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Acquire staff for talent.
Online business has a rather large learning curve and involves 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 areas that are relative weaknesses for them.
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 supporter 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 restricted to giant corporations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, internet companies can afford to outsource many tasks to virtual assistants.
Many internet marketers elect to outsource article marketing. They see the value of article marketing, but either don’t like to write, don’t have the skills, don’t want to spend the time, so they outsource those writing tasks 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 only marginally improve your results.
Which would you rather do – multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?
If you like what you’ve just read, and would like to learn how to leverage, and become a millionaire – get the FREE Infinite Income Plan report and put your income on autopilot.
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