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== Sorry for the long article, I meant to post this
== as a sequence of articles, hope you enjoy it though!
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I’ve often been emailed or receive comments asking how on Earth I manage to do so much stuff and have my hands in so many pies.
Well, I’m going to let you into a little secret that has sent my productivity skyrocketing.
That secret is: Outsourcing
If I talked to you about outsourcing, you’ll probably have an image in your head of outsourcing being something that you get done that you can’t do yourself.
And as definitions go, it’s a pretty accurate observation. If you can’t do something yourself or no one in your company can do a particular task, hire someone to do it, or contract another company (outsource) to do the task for you.
On the internet, a lot of internet entreprenuers outsource the design and programming aspects of web development and carry on doing all the things that they can do.
But today, I want to suggest a method of outsourcing that is guaranteed to increase your productivity and ultimately your profits.
The first thing I want you to do is assign a realistic hourly wage to yourself. It can be whatever you think you are realistically worth per hour, be it $20 or $200. I hire myself out on a consulting basis (web development orientated) for $40 an hour (and I know at least one customer who things she’s getting a real bargain!).
The second thing I want you to look at is define your role in your company (it doesn’t matter whether it’s just you, a partnership or a network). What is your role, and what are you best at.
The final thing I want you to look at is look at all the jobs you are currently doing and what tasks you are spending most time on.
Once you have done this, you can start seeing what sort of jobs you should be doing and concentrating on, and how much you are ’spending’ (your hourly wage) doing them. If your main job role is pretty similar to what you actually spend your time doing, then fantastic, you are nearly there to success!
If you find that you are spending more time (and money) doing things that are not part of your job role, then you need to take a step back and consider your options. For example if your job is to market your product, but you are spending half your time adding new content to your website, find out how much it is costing you based on your hourly rate, and then find out how much it would cost you to pay someone else to do it.
I did this exercise a couple of months back. I considered myself to be a internet entrepreneur who’s main role was to dream up and develop new web based software products. What I actually found was that I was spending nearly 90% of my time dealing with customer service and promoting my websites.
Important Note: Customer service and basic webmastering are $10 an hour jobs. If you are happy with $10 an hour, I could have plenty of jobs for you! :~D
Even though I was more than capable of doing the customer service and webmaster jobs myself, it was distracting me from my main job function and holding me back on success.
My solution was to contact my programming company, with whom I have a fantastic relationship with and are cut above any other company I’ve worked with in the past. I was able to get a webmaster for $1000 per month who would do all my menial jobs for me.
The things that you can get a webmaster to do for you include:
- Submitting your websites to the directories on Vile Silencer (there’s over 300 directories to submit to, and that will take you about 2 days solid to complete. Doing this job myself would cost me: $40 x 8 hours x 2 days = $640 (per site. I have dozens of sites that need submitting)
- Build AdSense sites for you (are you like me? Do you have thousands of private label articles littered across your hard drive? Hire a webmaster to create adsense content sites for you!). Doing this job myself would cost me $40 x 8 hours x 4 days = $1280
SIDENOTE: Seriously, this is an absolute must! I have sent my webmaster all 150 adsense sites that I bought from Adsense Ready Websites for him to edit and create new templates for. I have also sent him some 1500 articles that I’ve had for the past year and done nothing with to create into about 200 new adsense content sites. This is going to be around 350 new sites with very little effort on my behalf.
- Complete link exchanges for your sites. As some of my regular readers know, yes, both of you (not including my mother (Hi Mum!)), I use LinkMetro.com to try and increase the number of backlinks to abchyip.com. But as you know, this is very boring to go in each day, do new exchanges, monitor broken links, remove pending exchanges yadda yadda yadda. I simply showed the webmaster how to do this and asked him to do it daily. Doing this job myself would cost me: $40 x 1 hour x 21 days = $840
- Article Submission! Have you ever sat down and spent the day signing up for, and submitting articles to article directories? Notice I used the word ‘day’? That’s how long it can take. I simply bought my webmaster the article submitter software that I talk about in this post, showed him how to use it and gave him all my articles to submit. Doing this job myself would cost me $40 x 1 hour x 21 days = $840
- General webmastering. Got a website with 500 pages and need to change the navigation menu on every page? That’s job every entrepreneur will put off, but in my case, I can send it over to the webmaster. I reckon I spend 2 hours a day maintaining and updating my sites. $40 x 2 hours x 21 days = $1680
Total cost of just the above tasks: $5280 a month wasted on tasks I can pay a guy $1000 a month to do.
I hope by now you are realising how powerful outsourcing your menial jobs can be to your bottom line. Heck, you can probably define your job role as lazy lager layabout and have your webmaster do all the jobs and take home a bigger paycheck :~)
The examples I have given above are just some of the things I use a outsourced webmaster for, there’s a whole lot more besides.
Of course, the costs might be prohibitive for some, I guess not many people can justify spending $1000 a month, when in the bigging, that certainly won’t pay for itself. If you visit Scriptlance.com then you can probably find someone cheaper (it can be a hit and miss process though, and maybe that’s an article for the future). You don’t even have to contract someone for an entire month, you might only need a week, or just one project…
TOP TIP: Get all those private label articles converted into adsense content sites today! Take action, just do it! There is nothing stopping you! Get them on the web.
It might cost you a couple of hundred bucks to get a single project done, or maybe a lot less. You will probably find that the webmaster doesn’t pay for itself for a couple of months. However, all the work you are putting in today is future money - as you should know, instant wealth does not happen on the internet, it’s a slow gradual thing that involves constant work (not necessarily hard work, just constant attention). So the 200 adsense sites that your webmaster builds for you this week, might start to earn you money one or two months down the line. If you are able to pay the webmaster to promote all these sites too, then the process will be quicker but obviously cost more.
So is outsourcing right for you? This question is very easy to answer. If there is any job that you have been meaning to do, but keep putting off, not because it’s hard, but because it’s long and boring…then you definitely need to outsource!
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