Increase Leverage for Your Internet Business

The purpose of leverage is to obtain the most advantage with lowest effort. In particular, for affiliate businesses that means highest profit with least personal involvement.

Previous articles discussed providing leverage by 1) re-using content, and 2) re-purposing. In this article, we’ll focus on developing leverage by outsourcing repetitive, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply doesn’t fit our personal skills, experience and/or nature.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman have reported 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 findings, that are important for internet marketers and home-based business owners are these: 1) Play to your strengths, not your weaknesses, and 2) Hire staff for talent.

Affiliate business has a rather large learning curve and requires many different skills. Unfortunately, few people are personally skilled 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 their weaknesses.

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 fan of the use of virtual assistants to handle repetitive, non-value-add tasks or other non-favored tasks. It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not relegated only to large corporations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, online companies can afford to outsource many tasks to virtual assistants.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is 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 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 focus on your areas of strength, you can multiply your results, whereas, focusing on your weaknesses will only incrementally improve 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 your efforts, and become a millionaire – get the FREE Infinite Income Plan report and put your income on autopilot.

Tags: affiliate business, business, curt coffman, gallup organization, Internet Business, internet marketers, leverage, marcus buckingham, online business, outsource, outsourcing, re-purposing, task, tim ferriss, virtual assistants, Work