The intent of leverage is to return the best advantage with the lowest effort.  Specifically, for internet businesses, that means most profit with minimum personal involvement, and we can accomplish this via outsourcing.

Preceding articles discussed 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 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 internet marketers and home-based business owners are these:  1) Improve your strengths, not your negatives, and 2) Acquire staff for talent.

Affiliate business has a rather large learning curve and requires many diverse skills.  But, few people are personally skilled in all of them – and even those who multi-skilled, probably are not applying their available effort and other skills should they focus on their weaknesses.

William of Occam, noted for “Occam’s Razor,” has noted:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As affiliate business owners, Occam’s Razor has a big lesson for us in terms of our own time management.

Tim Ferriss, who wrote “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a terrific proponent of the use of virtual assistants to handle recurrent, low prioritiy tasks or those for which he does not have either the time or inclination to perform.

Contrary to popular opinion, outsourcing is not restricted to large corporations, but given the low cost of international VAs, even small, home business organizations can afford to delegate many activities to virtual assistants.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles.  Many see the importance of writing articles, but either can’t write well, or simply don’t want to write, so they turn over 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 improve 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?

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

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