Recently, I reached a point in my business where I felt that I needed to start outsourcing if I really wanted my business to grow.  I’ve heard the term outsourcing so much that I wasn’t sure what it meant exactly and how it could apply to me, so I decided to do a little research.

What is Outsourcing?

Entrepreneur Magazine defines Outsourcing as:

” The practice of having certain job functions done outside a company instead of having an in-house department or employee handle them; functions can be outsourced to either a company or an individual”

So for instance, if you spend a lot of time social bookmarking your websites, you can easily contract that task out to a third party.   While outsourcing is similar to subcontracting, the term generally refers to hiring an international company as opposed to a domestic company.  If you want to hire a telemarketing service or appointment setting services to build your book-of-business and lead generation lists, it is important to understand the benefits of outsourcing as opposed to hiring in-house employees.  While you will have to pay for the services, the costs for outsourcing are much lower than the costs of hiring and training employees.

Benefits of Outsourcing

One of the main benefits of outsourcing is the fact that you can save a lot of money, this is especially true if you outsource to overseas companies or individuals.  I outsource some of my article writing to a woman in the Philippines and the cost savings I have achieved by hiring someone overseas as opposed to here in the U.S. has been staggering.  Saving money, though, is not the only benefit of outsourcing.  Outsourcing can help a business to increase their profits as well as their productivity.  When you outsource repetitive and time consuming tasks,  you can spend more time focusing on  ways to  expand your core business model .  When you are able to spend more time on your business as opposed to wasting time on inconsequential tasks, you can really brainstorm and grow your business.

“When small and mid-size businesses outsource work, it allows them to focus more on their core competencies. In many cases, this approach to outsourcing is a smart way for businesses to add value to their operations.”
~ Nancy Pechloff

What do I Outsource

Currently, I outsource the following tasks:

Website Creation/Maintenance – I’m not that fond of WordPress because I always seem to “break” something while I tinker around with it.  Whenever this happens, It used to take me hours to figure out how to fix it.  So now I pay someone to maintain my WordPress blogs (setups, periodic backups, etc..)

Content Creation – I write a lot of article for the purpose of obtaining back links.  This takes up a lot of my time and is also boring as hell.  I now outsource most of this work.  The Filipino woman I hired can bang out hundreds of articles every week.

Video Creation – When I need a high quality video, I outsource this task to a guy I know who makes great videos.

Link building – In the past I have hired people to do link wheels for me.  Most recently, I hired someone to do a backlinking campaign for a few of my niche sites.

Graphics – I suck at creating good graphics, so I have hired people to do them for me.

More on outsourcing in a later post.

Do you outsource?  What type of tasks do you outsource?