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The objective of leverage is to provide the greatest advantage with the least possible effort.  Specifically, for affiliate businesses, that means most ROI with minimum personal involvement, and we can realize this via outsourcing.

Prior articles described ways of providing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content.  In this article, we’ll discuss developing leverage by outsourcing routine, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply doesn’t fit our individual skills, experience and/or temperament.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman documented 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 online marketers and home-based business owners in general are these:  1) Emphasize your strengths, not your negatives, and 2) Hire assistants for talent.

Internet marketing has a large learning curve and involves a lot of different abilities.  Unfortunately, few people are gifted at all of them – and even those who multi-skilled, probably are not using their available time and other skills if they focus on areas that are relative weaknesses for them.

William of Occam, best known for “Occam’s Razor,” has noted:  “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” As affiliate business owners, Occam’s Razor has a big lesson for us in terms of our own time management.

Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a big promoter of outsourcing to virtual assistants to handle recurrent, non-value-add tasks or other non-favored tasks.

It may come as a surprise to realize that outsourcing is not restricted to the world of giant companies, but recognizing the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, affiliate companies can afford to outsource a lot of activities to VAs.

Many internet marketers elect to outsource 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 turn over those writing tasks 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 improving areas of weakness willonly incrementally improve results. 

Which is more important to you – the ability to multiply your results, or simply see incremental improvements?

If you would like to discover how to leverage your time, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.