This is a guest post from Jacob, he talks about outsourcing your work. I will be writing a blog post about how I do my outsourcing soon, seems like everyone is getting more into outsourcing these days. Remember that outsourcing doesn’t mean just India or Philippians. You can outsource to Americans as well.
When you are building a business, you can take two paths to success. The first is the one where you do everything. You code the website, design a logo, write the content, promote it and build links all by yourself. Instead of focusing on one thing that you might be amazing at, you focus on a whole bunch of things you’re decent at. Sure, you are not going to be spending very much money, but you’re also not going to be growing at the speed you might want.
The second path, and the one that I would advocate for almost every time is the route where you hire someone to do work for you. For example, you might be a writer (which I am), but when the time comes for me to get a logo, I go where the quality is. I might have to spend some money, but the quality that I am getting far surpasses what I might be able to do.
The problem people have with outsourcing is the ? Evil? Connotation that comes with it. When we think of outsourcing, we think of companies sending jobs overseas to China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia. We think of Americans not having work because greedy corporations want to cut the cost of labor by sending jobs overseas. If you’re going to succeed and increase your profitability, you need to get this mentality out of your mind.
In some instances, outsourcing is exactly what I described above. But, for the most part, outsourcing simply means that you are sending work to someone else because you are not able to do it as effectively. You hire someone to write an e-book because you know that when it is sold, fewer people will return it because the quality is greater. You hire someone to create your website because you know that it will look so much nicer.
Think of it in another way. If you spend $50 for an article on your site, you might be out $50. However, what if, because the quality of the writing is greater than yours, it hits the front page of digg? And, because of well placed keywords, it starts to rank in the search engines. On top of that, it starts to get mentioned around the blogosphere because the quality is great. Suddenly, your $50 spent has turned in to a ton of traffic and notoriety. Would you have been able to do that if you wrote the article yourself when your specialty is design?
We’ve all built businesses where we did a lot of the work by ourselves. However, we need to remember that we don’t have unlimited time. If we want to succeed and we want to make more money, we need to use the time of other people to expand our operations. By hiring someone to handle all of my design needs, I have someone who does all logos for my projects, so I am able to focus on what I’m good at. The same is said about any of you.
When you’re thinking about whether or not you want to outsource, ask yourself one question: does the investment I make using this person mean I’ll make more money? Most of the time, the answer to that question is, without a doubt, yes. Outsourcing doesn’t have to be evil. It just means you’re managing your time and your growth a lot more effectively.
About The Author: Jacob is the owner of CoDon Media Group. Check out what services his group offers to help you grow your business.
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Very good article with a strong point, Jon and I’ll agree on you.
In the web hosting/domain registrar company I own/work in, we practice outsourcing many years now.
We have limited time for certain tasks, so we prefer to invest in someone else to do a better job than we’d do in less time- thus deliver a better service to the client.
Also, in cases where we lack of expertise in a certain subject, we assign the task to the best pro’s, cause we want to support local freelancers (we assign some tasks even to some loyal clients) etc.
Generally we’ve not been pleased AT ALL with outsourcing from overseas (India, China etc) so we do it w/ local professionals, w/ whom we can maintain more direct, personal & effective relationships. So, outsourcing may be the key (especially for 1 person or very small businesses) to providing better, cheaper (on the long-term) and more complete services and products.
Cheers,
Jef.
Totally, Jef. I’ve found that you don’t quite get the same quality when you outsource to India, China and other countries like that. However, they do work hard and that is important. I think when you’re looking for something that requires impeccable grammar, you want to go with someone who is a native with the language or, if not a native, has some sort of a degree in it. Otherwise, you get really garbled content.
I can only say: I agree! That cant not be more right then this articel tell.
Thanks for sharing!
But what if you happen to be amazing at everything?!
Then you’re very lucky. However, I don’t know anyone who is amazing at everything, so I’d say stick to outsourcing.
Nice topic,nice post.Thanks for searing.