Viral Marketing Lessons

The intent of leverage is to provide the greatest advantage with the lowest effort.  Especially, for us, that means highest return on investment with smallest personal involvement, and we can accomplish this via outsourcing.

Earlier articles described ways of providing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll address increasing leverage by outsourcing recurring, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply isn’t a match with our unique skills, experience and/or character.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman addressed 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 subsequently elaborating on those findings in later books.  Two of their findings, that are important for internet marketers and home-based business owners in general are these:  1) Play to your positives, not your weaknesses, and 2) Acquire assistants for ability.

Online business has a large learning curve and requires a lot of different abilities.  Unfortunately, not very many people are gifted in all of those areas - and even those who are, may not be making the best use of their available energy and other skills when they focus on their weaknesses.

William of Occam, noted for “Occam’s Razor,” has said:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As affiliate business owners, Occam’s Razor has much to teach us in terms of our personal time allocation.

Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a terrific supporter of outsourcing to virtual assistants to handle repetitive, 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 limited to major organizations, but given the low cost of international VAs, even small, online organizations can now afford to delegate a lot of activities to virtual assistants.

One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles.  They see the importance of writing articles, but either don’t like to write, don’t have the skills, don’t want to spend the time, so they turn over article authoring to ghost-writers. 

You also might want to consider outsourcing to a call center (or virtual assistant) all the phone and email follow-up required for lead generation and sales closings.

If you improve your areas of strength, you can multiply your results, whereas, focusing on improving areas of weakness willonly incrementally improve results. 

Which would you rather do - 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.