Unless You Know What You’re Doing – DON’T Try This At Home – 5 Easy Tasks To Outsource As You’re Growing Your Business.

Posted by Grainne Foley on Aug 3, 2011 in Blog | View Comments

As business owners and yes, I’m sorry – women, we tend to try and accomplish everything on our list by ourselves and it’s just not possible.  We drive ourselves crazy, exhaust ourselves and NEVER actually accomplish everything.

It’s one thing to do it in our personal lives but when we start to do it in business, it’s NOT GOOD; in fact it’s hurting our business.

As individuals, there are certain things we are fantastic at, then there are things we are good at and finally we have things that we haven’t the slightest clue how to do yet we convince ourselves that we do them anyway.

Spending time on tasks that you are clueless about is damaging, costly and ineffective. Top athletes spend their time training for the big game – not clearing out the gutters or mowing the lawn!

These are the top 5 tasks to outsource unless you are an expert in them.

1.  Website Design

I LOVE my website (hope you agree) but I did not build it, the brilliant team at Virtual Miss Friday built my lovely site and in fact they can vouch for my cluelessness in website design- I wouldn’t know where to start. So while they built my site, I was able to work on other aspects of my business to be ready for my launch.

2.  Social Media Profiles

If you don’t know how to set up a Facebook profile or a Twitter account or even a linkedIn account, don’t spend time figuring it out because it will take you a lot longer than if you were to outsource it to someone who can have it done in no time at all.

Look at it this way, if this something you are ever going to use in your business again, or are you planning to offer it as a service to clients, find out how to do it. But if it is not – find someone to help and get it off your desk NOW.  By not outsourcing these type of tasks, you are delaying your success.  You know it will take longer to get yourself out there if you try and do everything yourself; the most important part is that you’re out there so find a Virtual Assistant and outsource it and within days you will be building relationships with other successful business owners.

3.  Blogging/Article Marketing

Blogging is a great way to increase your search rankings and to get back links and it’s also a great way to get people interested in you and what you have to offer- but it is very time consuming.  It is recommended that you blog 3 x per week but let’s look at what is involved – writing the articles, editing and adding links on the blog post, finding and adding images, adding keywords, description and proof reading everything.  Can you imagine how much time this takes THREE TIMES per week – 5 hours at least.  Can you imagine how much more revenue you would bring in if you spent those 5 hours on networking, working with clients, or presenting a teleseminar.  Get rid of it now.

4.  SEO

Do you even know what SEO stands for, if I mention page titles and descriptions, will your eyes start to glaze over.  SEO is not for the faint hearted, it’s very detailed and vital to the success of your website – nobody will come if they don’t know you exist.  Having the right keywords and having your website optimized correctly is vital for your search engine rankings.  If this is way beyond your spectrum, delegate it to an expert and expect to pay for it. This is money well spent so don’t scrimp because it will cost you in the long run.

5.  Bookkeeping

Let’s be honest here, most people aren’t good with numbers and we don’t enjoy it AT ALL.  Why give yourself the stress – delegate it to a bookkeeper, they love playing with numbers, nobody knows why, but they do.

By outsourcing these tasks, you have increased your productivity, decreased your stress level and traffic is flowing to your site. Soon you will be enjoying the REAL benefit – MORE REVENUE. SO keep your eyes on the prize- the reason you got into business – and let some pro’s take the rest off your hands – you’ll be glad you did!

As always, I’d love to know your thoughts