Are you overwhelmed by the amount of tasks that you have to do and keep up within your business? Oh my God, do I feel you. Well in today’s episode I’m going to be talking to you about how to start outsourcing some of those tasks that is just super overwhelming, so you can run your business far more efficiently and stay sane (most of the time!)
As you’re building and growing your business, you’re naturally going to get to a point where you literally cannot keep up with all the tasks that you have to do. So, the natural process is to start outsourcing some of the work to other people so that they can help you stay on top of your work. For me, I started outsourcing at the beginning of 2017 and I swear, I wished I had done it sooner! So today, I’m going to share my three tips on how you can get started with outsourcing.
COMPILE A LIST OF ALL THE TASKS THAT YOU HATE DOING IN YOUR BUSINESS
The tasks that you find tedious, that are completely not in your zone of genius. These are the kinds of tasks that take a long time to execute, they’re repetitive and they don’t give you enough time to do anything else.
Once you have made that list you need to prioritize which is the most important task to outsource first. For me, when I was doing this, the most important thing for me was blog posts and writing content but I had lost my passion for writing and I decided I wanted to start doing video. But, I knew that a lot of my readers still loved to read my blog posts. What I choose to do was to get my videos transcribed. But I didn’t want to sit there all the time and be transcribing every word that I wrote. I know I wanted someone else to do it!
So, I went on to Fiver! Fiver is a website where you can get a ton of different kinds of projects outsourced; anything from animation to transcription to voice over work to creating intros and outros for your videos to virtual assistant work. There’s literally everything on there that you could possibly want to outsource.
I went onto Fiver, I searched transcriptionists, I went to all the listings and I found the right one for me. She was a lovely girl, a student from Nigeria who transcribed all my posts for me, for five bucks apiece! Now that’s not that much money when you think about the amount of time that it gives you back. For me, it could take anything from half an hour to an hour to transcribe my video. And that’s just an hour I could spend doing something else like working on the moneymaking tasks.
THINK ABOUT THE ONGOING TASKS THAT YOU DON’T LIKE DOING OR THAT YOU SHOULDN’T BE DOING
For me, the second thing I needed to tackle was customer service. I had so many friggin’ emails coming into my inbox every single day that I just could not keep on top of! On top of travelling, on top of doing other things for my business. So, what happened was, my inbox just stacked up with crap loads of emails.
So, what I chose to do was I decided to hire a Virtual Assistant. She started off with a couple of hours here and then tending to my inbox. Now, I know it’s scary to think about hiring someone in and thinking “oh my god, I can’t afford this” or “I don’t know if I can continue having work for a virtual assistant”. That’s all normal. You don’t need to hire someone for a specific, set amount of time or hours every week. It could be on a casual contract, or it could be just one hour a week that someone tends to your customer service emails. Or it could just be one hour a week that someone comes and does your customer service for you. It doesn’t have to be that strenuous.
And if you look hard enough, you can find a really good deal. You know there are Virtual Assistants out there you can start from ten dollars all the way up to paying a hundred dollars. But if you’re new then work with someone who’s at the same level as you. Or pay someone a little bit more (around 25 to 45 dollars) who is a pro who knows how to do this and can do it for you easily and efficiently.
FIND THE MARKETING TASKS THAT YOU NEED TO START OUTSOURCING
Marketing is a huge part of our business and the one that we sort of neglect the most to outsource. I think also this is because a lot of people think it’s really, expensive. For me, I had to really think about the amount of time that it was going to save me having to put in the work for my marketing. And especially because I wasn’t an expert at working with these different social media platforms. What I decided to do was invest in a Pinterest Management Strategist. Why? Because Pinterest is the highest traffic driver for my website and I feel like the platform changes so much that I just cannot keep up with it. So, I was like “well, if it’s my highest traffic driver, I would rather have someone who is an expert who’s keeping up to date with all the changes in the algorithms, in the layouts and everything who can do that for me.”
I decided to work with a lovely lady who is a Pinterest whiz. I started on her basic plan and ever since then my traffic and my followers have been growing exponentially. Now, I wouldn’t have been able to do that myself unless I took a huge amount of time to dedicate to working on a Pinterest strategy. But I don’t have that time, and that’s why I outsourced to my Pinterest Strategist.
Now again, you can start freaking out and thinking “argh this is going to be really expensive!”. But it’s not. I started on the basic plan which was 100 bucks a month; that’s 25 bucks a week. That is nothing for the reward that you are getting!
But you’ve got to make sure you shop around and find the right person for you. I’ve got an awesome little download. It’s a cheat sheet on different ways that you can start outsourcing in your business. It’s helpful and it’s going to save you a lot of time having to do the things yourself.
All right, that’s it from me today. Now I’d love to hear from you. Do you currently outsource any of the tasks in your business and if so, what? And if you don’t, are you thinking about outsourcing and which is the task you would outsource first?
