One of the reasons people give up their online business is because they are overwhelmed by the nitty gritty of running their online business. These people tend to do every single thing such as market research, content creation, graphic design, web design, backlinking strategies, on page SEO, driving traffic, testing, tracking, administration, etc… all by themselves without outsourcing. Is this scenario familiar? Does it sound like you? In fact, I must confess, that was me when I first starting up my online business 2 year ago.
Be A Strategic Entrepreneur
Many people have the misconception that online business is a “get rich quick” scheme. That’s why they overlook the fundamental principle to build a successful online business, which is to possess the mindset of a strategic entrepreneur instead of an employee.
When you become a business owner, whether in a brick and mortal business or the online business, you need to act and think like an entrepreneur. Essentially, an entrepreneur sets the vision and direction of his business while an employee follows the instructions from the boss to carry out the jobs. The fact is when you are dealing with all the ground work of your business, you won’t have enough time to do the strategic thinking and planning, which is critical to your business. That’s why outsourcing is a must if you truly want to grow your business.
Essential Steps Of Outsourcing
So, do you start by outsourcing every single task? Not yet. There are 4 essential steps you must go through before you start to delegate the tasks to others. I will use traffic generation as an example of how outsourcing tasks is best done below.
1. Simplify & Optimize Your Proven Methods
Firstly, you need to identify your proven traffic generation method by doing it yourself. When you see the results, you know that the techniques are working and you can start to scale it up by outsourcing to your workers. Before you can move on to work on the next method, you should simplify and optimize the process until a lay man can easily follow the instructions to carry out the task. The idea is to find a way to complete the task in a simple and systematic way so that your worker can do it for you without confusion.
2. Know Your Matrix
Obviously, you need to know your matrix before you start to scale it up. You need to realize the value of your visitors. Ask yourself the following questions:
- How many visitors turn into prospects?
- How many visitors become customers?
In other words, you need to know how well your squeeze page and sales page are converting. Once you know the numbers, you will know the value for each of your visitor. Then you should calculate the money you spent to attract the visitors to your site. Eventually, you will know your profit margin for that specific site. This is crucial information before you start outsourcing the traffic generation task. You need this information to gauge the maximum amount you can afford to spend on outsourcing yet still earn a chunk of profit you desired for that site.
3. Project Management
Every time you outsource the tasks, you should have a contract to protect yourself and avoid being ripped off by inferior quality works or any possible misunderstanding between both parties. Write the task/instruction you expect your worker to follow in simple English. Ask your worker to provide you a summary of his work progress every day to make sure he/she is on the right track. Make sure both you and your worker are happy about the payment terms. If you are concerned about the payment issue, you can always put it through Escrow service (an independent trusted third party receives and disburses money and/or documents for the transacting parties) to be fair for both parties. You will also have a chance to monitor the task daily to make sure their work meets your satisfaction.
Your role as a project manager is to ensure that your worker can deliver the work on time with satisfaction. So, do whatever you can to help your worker to perform such as providing guidance, learning materials and communicate to sort out any issues.
Once your worker is familiar with your working style and the nature of the work, you can reduce the monitoring time to once per week instead of daily.
4. Review, Feedback and Reward
When your worker completes the tasks given, do a thorough review on top of the daily/weekly monitoring. Give him constructive feedback, praise him and reward him once in a while (such as cash reward at Christmas). The key point here is to maintain a great relationship between your worker and yourself and help your worker to handle the tasks competently. Remember, even though you might not even meet up with your worker face by face, be nice to him and you will be rewarded by his quality work too.
Now you should understand the 4 essential steps before you start outsourcing. As a successful strategic entrepreneur, you can take your business to the next level by outsourcing with these 4 essential steps. I hope you can put these 4 steps into use and create passive income without going through the pain and suffering I had during outsourcing.
Do you have any other outsourcing tips or experience? I’d love to hear your stories or advice in relation to outsourcing.