So you hear everyone (including me) talking about the wonders of outsourcing. But when you sit down to actually think about doing it yourself, you just end up with a lot of questions. And one of the most frequent questions I get is this: “What can I outsource?”
The short answer is, of course, “almost everything.” But if you’re like most small business owners, you don’t have a deep and unlimited outsourcing budget. So you need to be a little more choosy about what to outsource.
Here are the questions to ask yourself when you’re considering outsourcing a task:
- Is this a low value task? It’s a good idea to outsource your lowest value tasks (such as creating a graphic), which frees you up to focus on high value tasks.
TIP: You can also ask yourself how long the task will take. Doing one low-value task that only takes 10 minutes isn’t a big deal. But if you find yourself consistently doing all your low value tasks – or doing low-value tasks that take a lot of time – then there’s an opportunity for you to outsource.
- How much does it cost to outsource versus do it yourself? Your time is valuable. For example, if your goal is to make $100,000 working 1000 hours this year, then your time is worth $100 an hour. If you calculate how much time it takes you to complete a task, you may find that it’s often less expensive to outsource than to do it yourself.
For example, if a task such as writing a set of blog articles takes you three hours and your time is worth $100 an hour, then that it costs you $300 to write those articles. Chances are, you can find a competent writer to create the articles for less expense.
- Are you good at this task? If a professional freelancer will produce a better end result than you, then outsource the task (even if it costs more to outsource than to do it yourself).
So now that you’re armed with those questions, take a look at this list of common tasks that you can outsource:
Product Creation
You can have freelancers create your products, including text, audio, and video products. You can outsource the entire product creation process, or just a part of it.
For example, let’s suppose you’re creating a slide presentation video. You can hire one or more people to create the entire video. Or you can do part of it, such as creating the content for the slides, and then have someone else create the slides and the video itself.
Content Creation
This includes blog articles, newsletters, lead magnets, social media content and more.
Sales Copy
This is a specialized type of content that you turn over to a copywriter rather than a regular ghostwriter. You might hire this copywriter to create sales letters, lead pages, pay per click ads, press releases and more.
Affiliate-Program Management
You can hire someone to find, recruit and motivate your affiliates. The manager might also be in charge of doing things such as stocking the affiliate center with content and ads for affiliates to use.
Customer Service
This can be service offered by help desk, email or phone.
Research
A good researcher can help you with overall market research as well as product research.
Graphics
This includes graphics for your blog, sales pages, lead pages, social media pages, and other web pages. This also includes your most important graphics, such as product graphics.
Web Development and Technical
This ranges from web design to the more technical aspects, such as server management and security.
So as you can see, there are a lot of tasks you can outsource. And when you do it wisely, it ends up being a great investment in your business.