Posts tagged leverage
Get Leverage for Your Home Business by Outsourcing
Nov 24th
The purpose of leverage is to return the best advantage with the smallest effort. Specifically, for affiliate businesses, that means highest ROI with minimum personal involvement, and we can realize this via outsourcing.
Preceding articles described ways of increasing leverage by 1) re-using, and 2) re-purposing content. In this article, we’ll address developing leverage by outsourcing routine, or non-value-add work, and any work that simply isn’t a match with our individual skills, experience and/or nature.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman described 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 most important findings for online marketers and home-based business owners are these: 1) Focus on your strengths, not your negatives, and 2) Acquire workers for potential.
Affiliate business has a large learning curve and involves many different skills. But, few people are talented at all of them – and even those who multi-skilled, probably are not making the best use of their available effort and other skills when 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 online business owners, Occam’s Razor has a big lesson for us relative to our individual time usage.
Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” is a huge proponent of the use of virtual assistants to handle repetitive, non-value-add tasks 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 large organizations, but given the low cost of international virtual assistants, even small, home-based companies can afford to delegate a lot of activities to VAs.
One task that many internet marketers choose to outsource is writing articles. They see the value of article marketing, but either can’t write well, or simply don’t want to write, so they outsource article authoring to freelancers.
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 improve your areas of strength, you gain the benefits of leverage and multiply your results, whereas, focusing on your weaknesses 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 resources, sign up for the Online Success for Beginners course.
4-Hour Work Week Strategy
Nov 16th
Serial Entrepreneur & Ultravagabond
Timothy Ferriss, author of the 4 Hour Work Week, is a self-described “serial entrepreneur and ultravagabond” who lives a lifestyle that most of us could only dream about — until now.
Ferriss presents a step-by-step guide to his free-wheeling lifestyle, allowing us to follow in his footsteps and realize lifelong dreams. Some people consider him to be heroic, like an “Indiana Jones for the digital age”.
This exciting book has been number one on three different best seller lists: Wall Street Journal, NY Times and BusinessWeek.
Replace Obsolete Assumptions
His basic premise is that we need to fill the vacuum created by replacing outdated assumptions with the “Rules of the New Rich”.
Entrepreneurs need to replace the limiting assumptions that prevent us from enjoying life now. We should replace limiting assumptions that waste our time and force us to live in a particular location.
Freeing our time and increasing our mobility are pathways to the lifestyle of the New Rich (NR).
Rules of the New Rich
According to Ferris, the “Rules of the New Rich” include the following:
- Retirement is Worst-Case Scenario Insurance
- Interest and Energy are Cyclical
- Less is Not Laziness
- The Timing Is Never Right
- Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission
- Emphasize Strengths, Don’t Fix Weaknesses
- Things in Excess Become the Opposite
- Money Alone is Not the Solution
- Relative Income is More Important than Absolute Income
- Distress is Bad, Eustress is Good
The 4HWW Model
His model provides us with a roadmap for realizing our own lifelong dreams. He shows us how to:
- Live like a millionaire
- Free time and automate income
- Outsource our lives to overseas virtual assistants for $5/hour
- Travel the world without quitting our jobs
- Eliminate 50% of our work in 48 hours
- Trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and mini-retirements
He uses the DEAL acronym to describe his model, where:
- D = Definition
- E = Elimination
- A = Automation
- L = Liberation
He encourages us to use “Dreamlining” to design our own luxurious lifestyles. Using principles of elimination, simplification and outsourcing are keys to creating our own lives among the New Rich (NR).
Lifestyle Design (LD) incorporates elements of both art and science. Another key component of the lifestyle design process is automation, i.e., creating systems and processes that remove ourselves as bottlenecks. But he cautions that we should never automate something that could be eliminated, and we should never delegate something that could be automated or simplified.
Carpe Diem!
Use these guidelines to recognize opportunities and sieze them – Carpe Diem. Along the way, you’ll come to realize that having options; i.e., the ability to choose is powerful.
This is a very compelling book and presents a plan that is easy to understand and apply.
Following Ferriss’ lead, I plan to aggressively pursue my lifelong dreams. I plan to implement many of his ideas into my own life.
One superb starting place for collecting all the knowledge about internet marketing that you will need to be successful is to join the Online Success for Beginners course.