If you re a small business owner like myself, you already know how important it is manage your (and your employees) time effectively.
There never seems to be enough time to complete all the special tasks and one time projects that you d like to, even if you know that they would provide a positive benefit to your small business and sales.
As such, one area that has become increasingly popular with small business owners is that of outsourcing tasks, projects, and in many cases, entire job roles to less expensive contracted providers in different locations around the world.
If you re not familiar with outsourcing, its basically the process of farming out different time consuming tasks or one time special projects to an outside provider, in a location and at a pay rate that provides the maximum benefit to the small business owner.
There are a multitude of benefits to outsourcing, and here are several high return projects that you can do, starting today:
Article/Content Writing
You will find that article/content writing is one of the primary items that you need to accomplish to build up traffic in search engines, and to build incoming links. It s very useful for a variety of things. In addition to rewriting product descriptions, it s writing short articles, writing blog posts, writing content for your site, and then writing longer articles for posting at the various article directories.
Virtual Assistants
Virtual Assistants are invaluable. They do anything that you ask them to do and are typically very organized. They can do a variety of tasks, and it s incredible the load they will lift off you.
Customer Service
Over time as your E Commerce sites grow, customer service becomes a burden Where s my tracking number? Why is this product broken? Etc. All those questions take a lot of human bandwidth. And, even though there s some automation in place, it still takes a tremendous amount of time to deal with those.
If you ve ever done customer service for a company, you know that many times it doesn t allow you to do too much else. It s a time consuming process. So, that s one thing that I outsource. Now I don t have to worry about all the day to day customer service calls and emails.
Research
Research is where outsourcing really shines, because it s easy to provide a very detailed script as to what they re looking for and the exact format that you want it provided in. If you have specific information that you need to have somebody search on Google for and categorize into a spreadsheet, where it s more usable outsourcing s the best way to get it done.
Time Intensive Tasks
One time intensive task is adding products, another might be editing products, another might be link building, and the list goes on. Anything that takes a large amount of time and bandwidth are excellent, either one time, or ongoing tasks, for outsourcers.
Repetitive Tasks
If you are into video marketing at all, you know that there are many video sites where you can submit product videos, or any type of video. You add a title, keywords, a description, you upload the file and then you move onto the next one.
To outsource you just need to create the account, give your outsourcer the videos through an FTP program, and they do it for you. It s an excellent task for outsourcing.
Using outsourcing in your business can provide a huge ROI, and can many times, be the key component in differentiating your business from your competitors...
Finally, the only way to ensure that you re receiving the maximum benefits from your outsourcing system is to become educated on small business outsourcing from a reputable outsourcing training institute like Outsourcing University...
Author Resource:
Kyle Grant runs http://www.OutsourcingUniversity.com where he offers free "how to" training videos on how outsourcing can used by entrepreneurs just like you to grow your business' sales and profits...today! Claim your 100% FREE Outsourcing Training CD at http://www.OutsourcingUniversity.com