Outsourcing plays a huge part in the success of many internet entrepreneurs. I’m sure you have heard of The 4-Hour Workweek before, but if you’ve read it, you especially know how important outsourcing can be.

Ok… so you know that you should be outsourcing to grow your business, but what tasks are good outsourcing candidates and which tasks are not?

The real truth to that question is that you should outsource the things that you feel comfortable giving up control on and the things that you don’t like doing (or never will do) yourself. The specific jobs that you outsource are completely up to you. This article contains some things that are commonly outsourced along with how I handle them within my business. Hopefully they will inspire you to find aspects of your business that can/should be outsourced.

1. Design

Outsourcing design elements, if you aren’t a professional designer yourself, has many benefits. I am a decent artist and graphic designer, but I am too critical of and rarely completely satisfied with my own work. Because of this, I can end up wasting hours of my time creating website designs, logos, or other graphical objects.

I don’t typically outsource as much design work as I should, partly because I somewhat enjoy creating things and partly because finding a really good designer is hard. If you do find a good designer, make sure you treat him/her good and stay in touch.

When I do outsource work to a great designer, I get a product that I couldn’t have created on my own, that I am completely satisfied with, and that costs much less that the time it saves me is worth. Time is a huge factor here because instead of spending hours tweaking, or losing days to procrastination, I can work on the things that actually make me money, like planning marketing campaigns.

2. Writing

My favorite task to outsource. I really don’t enjoy excessive writing, especially when it is on a subject that I have little interest for. Luckily, there are plenty of professional writers who do enjoy writing all day long.

I outsource a lot of writing, and think of it as an investment. The biggest advantage to this (for me) is that it helps my projects move along much faster than if I did the writing myself. Before I started outsourcing content creation, I would always find other things to do instead of writing and would many times get burnt out and give up on projects.

Not anymore! I hardly ever write content for my websites these days. It’s just too easy to find someone else who has a passions for a given subject AND for writing.

You could also hire someone to do sales copy for you, but hiring a good copywriter with a proven track record will cost you.

3. Programming

To be honest, I don’t outsource any programming. I have been practicing computer programming (not counting HTML) since I was 13 or 14 and I genuinely enjoy doing it. On top of that, I have all of my own conventions for how I do things and I don’t think I would feel comfortable handing this over to someone else.

If, however, you are not a programming, this type of outsourcing may be essential. The possibilities of what you can get done are only limited by your own ideas and your ability to delegate.

Just a few of the countless programming jobs that could really help an internet business are CSS/HTML coding, custom tracking, custom database systems, and AJAX usability features. If you felt like investing a lot of cash into a project, you could even hire a programming to develop full-scale desktop applications that you could sell to a niche market.

4. Research

If you need to search through and compile a lot of information, you should almost always outsource. You could spend days searching the internet for (and categorizing) information… or you could pay someone else pennies on the dollar to do it for you.

Back when I was looking for products to sell on eBay, I posted a project on Elance for someone to find them for me. I came up with a predefine criteria of what I was looking for and then showed them how to search for potential products. The winning bid was for $0.20 per product. Even if I was able to find 20 suitable products per hour, I would only be “paying myself” $4 per hour at this rate.

Note: I did not intend to find 100 products to sell, just 100 potential products that I could investigate further. I ended up choosing two that went on to generate about $1000 profit per month for a couple months… until I got tired of the daily management, packaging, and shipping.

5. Promotion & Marketing

As with designers, if you find someone who is really good at what they do, make sure you hold onto them. A good promotion team (search engine optimization, link building, press releases, article submissions, ad buying, etc) can be your most valuable asset. If you can put together a great group of workers, and you know how to monetize the traffic that results from the marketing, you can basically get unlimited promotion without spending your money or your time.

One of the best benefits of outsourcing promotion is that you only pay for it once, but you have the potential to reap the benefits forever. I frequently outsource SEO work on a “pay for performance” basis and have seen some great returns.

I hired my first SEO three years ago for a site that was about 6 months old and only seeing 30-60 visitors per day. Three months after he did his work, I began seeing 500-700 visitors per day. The total project cost me $600, but I have been getting a bare-minimum of 500 visitors per day for three years now. That works out to an eCPC of $0.001 per click (and decreasing daily).

Outsourcing Anything

Those five things are the bulk of what I consider outsourcing within my business, but you really can outsource anything. Once you are making good money, you can think about outsourcing mundane tasks that don’t really improve your business, but save your time.

You could hire someone to log into your affiliate accounts every day and create completely custom revenue, expense, and profit reports. You could hire someone to help you manage your emails, especially if many of them require similar responses. You could hire someone to handle daily updates on your websites, such as uploading new content.

The possibilities of outsourcing are pretty endless. If you aren’t already outsourcing in your business, you should really consider it. If done correctly, you will make more money while spending less time working.

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