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.

Serial Entrepreneur & Ultravagabond

Timothy Ferriss, author of the 4 Hour Work Week, is a self-described “serial entrepreneur and ultravagabond” who lives a lifestyle that most of us could only dream about — until now.

Ferriss presents a step-by-step guide to his free-wheeling lifestyle, allowing us to follow in his footsteps and realize lifelong dreams. Ferriss has been called “Indiana Jones for the digital age”.

Ferriss’ free-wheeling book has been a #1 Wall Street Journal Best Seller, a #1 NY Times Best Seller, and a #1 BusinessWeek Bestseller.

Replace Obsolete Assumptions

His basic premise is that we need to fill the vacuum created by replacing outdated assumptions with the “Rules of the New Rich”.

Home Business owners need to replace limiting assumptions and learn to enjoy life now. In particular, we need to replace assumptions that waste our time and force us to live in a particular location.  We’d like to be able to manage our businesses from anywhere, anytime.

Ferriss encourages us to abandon deferring a luxurious lifestyle and instead, build the life we want right now, using the currency of freed-up time and increased mobility.

Rules of the New Rich

According to Ferris, the “Rules of the New Rich” include the following:

• Retirement is Worst-Case Scenario Insurance
• Interest and Energy are Cyclical
• Less is Not Laziness
• The Timing Is Never Right
• Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission
• Emphasize Strengths, Don’t Fix Weaknesses
• Things in Excess Become the Opposite
• Money Alone is Not the Solution
• Relative Income is More Important than Absolute Income
• Distress is Bad, Eustress is Good

The 4HWW Model

His model provides us with a roadmap for realizing our own lifelong dreams. He shows us how to:

• Live like a millionaire
• Free time and automate income
• Outsource our lives to overseas virtual assistants for $5/hour
• Travel the world without quitting our jobs
• Eliminate 50% of our work in 48 hours
• Trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and mini-retirements

He uses the DEAL acronym to describe his model, where:

• D = Definition
• E = Elimination
• A = Automation
• L = Liberation

He encourages us to use “Dreamlining” to design our own luxurious lifestyles. We can join the New Rich (NR) by focusing our current efforts on elimination, simplification and outsourcing.

Lifestyle Design (LD) incorporates elements of both art and science. Lifestyle Design (LD) relies heavily upon automation, i.e., building systems and processes that remove ourselves as bottlenecks. Don’t automate something that can be eliminated, and don’t delegate anything that can be automated or simplified.

Carpe Diem!

This book shows how to recognize and seize opportunities that others miss. Having choice; i.e., the ability to choose is powerful.

If you’ve ever wanted to work less and enjoy it more, read this book.

Tim Ferriss shows us how to apply our courage and self-confidence in realizing our lifelong dreams – easier and cheaper than we ever thought possible.  I plan to implement many of his ideas into my own life.

Agreat starting point for obtaining all the  knowledge about internet marketing that you will need to be successful is to join the Online Success for Beginners classes.

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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