The purpose of leverage is to provide the most advantage with the minimum effort.  Especially, for online businesses, that means greatest profit with smallest personal involvement, and we can accomplish this via outsourcing.

Previous articles described ways of obtaining leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll discuss increasing leverage by outsourcing recurring, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply doesn’t fit our unique skills, experience and/or nature.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman recounted 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 internet marketers and home-based business owners in general are these:  1) Play to your strengths, not your negatives, and 2) Select assistants for potential.

Online business has a rather large learning curve and involves many different abilities.  Unfortunately, not very many people are gifted at all of those areas – and even those who multi-talented, probably are not using their available energy and other skills when they focus on their weaknesses.

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

Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a big fan of outsourcing to virtual assistants to handle recurrent, low prioritiy activities 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 relegated only to the world of giant companies, but given the low cost of international VAs, even small, home business organizations can now afford to delegate a lot of tasks to virtual assistants.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is article marketing.  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 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 willonly incrementally improve results. 

Would you rather 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.

According to the Wikipedia dictionary, leverage is “A force compounded by means of a lever rotating around a pivot” and “By extension, any influence which is compounded or used to gain an advantage.”

Most of us were almost certainly first introduced to the concept of leverage as we explored the wonders of the Teeter-Totter in our schoolyard or at the nearest park.  At first, we played only with same age children – and weight class – and we were perfectly content with the relationship of the lever and the fulcrum being fixed.

However, as we aged and began playing on the teeter-totter with older and heavier kids – we rapidly discovered that if we could change where the children sat in relation to the fulcrum (thus for practical purposes adjusting the length of the lever relative to the fulcrum), we could easily lift bigger and heavier children.

When we just re-use content, we go for largely the same market segment and use effectively the same tools and media to reach them.

But, when we re-purpose the content, we switch our focus to a different use, usually for a slightly different market niche, and we may well change the media as well. When we re-purpose content, we effectively alter the length of the lever and position of the pivot point.

Many online marketing businesses sometimes hold live events ; e.g., a workshop, seminar, training class, etc.  If we’re smart, we plan (from the beginning) to re-purpose available content and extend its value to a larger audience.  In the example of the workshop, seminar, training class, etc., we will be smart to audiotape and/or videotape the event for later distribution via audio or video files, CDs, DVDs, etc.

Re-purposing extends the benefits of leverage beyond simply re-using existing content – it extends our advertising efforts into additional market segments, thus increasing overall visibility of our products and services, and ultimately increasing the bottom line.

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