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The intent of leverage is to achieve the best advantage with the least effort.  In particular, for us, that means highest profit with minimum personal involvement, and we can realize this via outsourcing.

Prior articles discussed providing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll focus on obtaining leverage by outsourcing recurring, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply isn’t a match with our individual skills, experience and/or temperament.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman documented 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 findings, that are important for online marketers and home-based business owners in general are these:  1) Play to your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Select assistants for talent.

Affiliate business has a large learning curve and requires many different skills.  But, few people are gifted in all of those skills – and even those who multi-skilled, probably are not making the best use of their available effort and other skills should they focus on areas that are relative weaknesses for them.

William of Occam, who developed “Occam’s Razor,” has noted:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As internet business owners, this has much to teach us in terms of our individual time usage.

Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a major supporter of outsourcing to virtual assistants to handle recurrent, low prioritiy 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 major businesses, but recognizing the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, online companies can afford to outsource many tasks to VAs.

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 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 focus on your areas of strength, you can multiply your results, whereas, focusing on improving areas of weakness will, at best, result in only an incremental improvement in 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 efforts, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.

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