In business, there is nothing like the feeling of having work done for you.

You assign someone a project that you would normally dread doing yourself and just like magic…it’s done!

In the beginning of my internet marketing career, I did everything in my business myself! I didn’t trust anyone else to do work for me because I thought I could do the best job. Boy was I wrong.

One person can’t do everything themselves. Over time, it’s impossible because you wouldn’t find the time to focus on the high level money generating tasks in your business because you would be too busy with the important but menial tasks.

I learned this quickly and I eventually took on a partner to split the work. Even still, with a partner, I was still doing things in my business I had no business doing!

For example, graphics. Even though I know a bit about Photoshop, I am probably the worst designer on the planet! Still, I was doing all my own product graphics. Was I getting by and making sales? Sure. But in no way did my graphics look great at all!

The point is just because you know how to do something, effectively or not, it doesn’t mean you should be doing it!

My Lightbulb Outsourcing Moment in 2010

I learned about outsourcing when I first started to market online in 2010. The person who I listened to a lot on this topic was Tim Castleman at the time. Tim conveyed the importance of outsourcing and he explained how he was outsourcing many of the tasks I will be talking about in this post. 

I used to listen to Tim on audio files in my car when I was traveling for work. The one thing that stands out was he admitted he didn’t need to know everything about everything to make money online. He just needed to know how to hire the right people to help him get things done. I think this is where a lot of people who try to make money online get stuck…they think they have to know and learn everything which couldn’t be further from the truth! 

By the way, if you haven’t checked out Tim’s podcast, 2 Drink Tim, you should. Tim is highly entertaining and he knows how to market online!

I went on for too long not utilizing great people to help me do the tasks that were keeping me at my desk for more hours than I should have been.

When I started outsourcing and getting help with the different tasks in my business, I went to the next level. Going to the next level in your business is something you can physically feel. It’s a great feeling! It’s a feeling of freedom.

The Moment You Know You Need To Start Outsourcing

If you are like me, you might be a control freak and want to take on everything yourself. This will eventually change as you grow. I promise.

So when do you know you need to outsource? It will be very clear. You will have tasks that you will just completely avoid doing because you physically hate doing them.

For example:

Several times a week, I create new lists and new forms in my autoresponder account all the time to build segmented lists for the products I sell.

There came a point where I completely HATED doing this task. I hated creating the list, naming the list, and all the mundane settings that went along with it. The crazy part about it is that the overall process probably takes less than 5 minutes, but the time a task takes is no indication that you should be doing the work. It all adds up…believe me!

The moment of dread and procrastination of simple tasks is the very point where you need to start outsourcing and delegating…when you can’t bring yourself to do the tasks that need to get done. This happens over time and it happens the more projects you do. It’s inevitable.

All it takes is a simple, less than 5 minute video to create a step-by-step process for someone else to follow and get the job done for you. The only thing you will really need to change is to assign the task a day or two before you need it done so it’s ready when you need it. These minor adjustments are worth it!

To have lists set up and ready and waiting for me is a dream! As little as it is, it’s life changing and freeing, at the very least!

In closing before we get to what you should be outsourcing it’s important to realize that even if you are good at doing these outsourceable tasks, it doesn’t mean you should be the one doing them.

I can create autoresponder lists like a champ but many other people can do that task for me to free up my time to focus on money making things that need to get done in my business.

With that said, let’s get into what you can start doing right now to take work off your plate and free up your time so that you can start focus on the important, high-level money tasks in your business.

Let’s Talk About:

• 6 Tasks To Outsource Immediately To Free Up Your Time
• One Awesome Tool You Need For Effective Communication With Your Outsourcers
• How To Find Great Outsourcers

Let’s Do It!

6 Tasks To Outsource Immediately To Free Up Your Time

Let’s get into the tasks that you can easily take off your plate for a better life, more efficient business and an overall happier you!

1. Graphics

I alluded to this example earlier and it’s first on my list. If you do any type of marketing online, you know you need graphics for just about everything. Things like:

• Logos
• Product Covers
• Banners
• Custom Images and Touchups
• Image Editing (removing backgrounds)
• Memes
• Social Media Images
• Video Splash images

And the list goes on.

Leaving your images to a professional will not only save you tons of time but your marketing will look so much better and appealing to potential customers.

Depending on your business, you don’t necessarily have to have a full time graphic designer on the payroll. What you want to do is find someone reliable that learns the kind of graphics you need and is “on call” whenever you need them.

Tip: The easiest way to communicate with a graphic designer is to find something you want created that already exists. Instead of describing what you need, show them an example of what you are looking for. A picture says 1000 words. This way they know exactly what you are looking for and the chances of miscommunication are very slim.

For example, if you want an image created for your product, find the image you want online and then send the sample over to your designer. I would send an image over like this one and have my designer customize it for my product:

This way the designer knows exactly what you want and you barely had to explain a thing!

2. Writing / Proofing / Editing / Posting

Even if you are a great writer, this task might bog you down in the long-run and keep you from focusing on the more important tasks in your business that immediately generate income. You can still contribute to writing in your business, but you can certainly get help from people who can do a great job at creating even more content for your business.

Neil Patel writes something along the lines of 50,000 words a week on his blog Quick Sprout. He is a bad ass content creator.

However, all he does is write. Do you think Neil takes his word doc, then re-reads it, edits it, proof-reads it, copies it to his blog, posts it, adds, images, add hyperlinks and builds all the graphics for each post? NOPE. Neil’s only job is to create the amazing content and the rest is up to his team of people. That’s ultimately where you want to be in a company. You just focus on your craft and leave the tedious stuff to people you employ.

3. Researching & Analyzing

Researching and Analyzing are great tasks to outsource.

If you need information on a particular topic, like, for instance, a round up of the best productivity tools, you can ask someone to compile the research for you. This will save you hours of time.

Analyzing stats for your business is another huge task. If you are selling products on multiple sites, you can have someone make a report for you detailing your totals from all the sites. There is no system that will do this for you and it needs to be done so you can see where you are performing the best, and not performing at all.

This is a very timely task that a competent person can get done easily for you.

4. Repetitive Tasks

Repetitive Tasks need to be outsourced IMMEDIATELY! Your business is losing money if you are still doing repetitive tasks.

One example could be the autoresponder example I gave in the beginning of this post. Creating lists and forms in autoresponders is a repetitive task.

Another repetitive task could be posting Facebook ads.

All businesses will be different in terms of what tasks are always repeated. Get them all off your plate…fast!

5. Video Editing

Video Editing is such a waste of time (doing it yourself). Wouldn’t it be so nice having someone you can just reach out to to edit all your videos so you didn’t have to do it yourself? 

If you take the time to do awesome videos in your business, then you are essentially doubling your workload if you are also editing your videos.

I know, I know, you are nervous your video editors will miss something and not cut the video properly and you will have mistakes in your video…here’s the solution.

Video Editing Trick:

Getting organized and structured on how your videos are to be edited is important. One way to do is like this:

If and when you make a mistake in your video OR you do a retake, make it a habit to clap 3 times.

The 3 claps will be your indicator of what needs to be edited. It will look like this:

There will be 3 claps and a pause.

This is what a regular file will look like in your video editor program:

Do you see how the bottom image looks much different from the top? The bottom image has no indication (at a glance) of where someone would quickly need to edit.

It’s up to you to get into the habit of knowing how to structure your edits. If you make a mistake and you don’t stop talking or you quickly correct yourself, there is no indication in your audio that you’ve made a mistake so you or  someone else would have to listen to the ENTIRE THING to make the perfect playback.

If done correctly, all you would need to do is tell your video editor person where and how to look for the edits. This means your video editor person won’t have to listen to your entire video AND it reduces the margin for error. It also reduces the amount of time the person spends on your project so you don’t have to pay them as much. 

Brilliant right?

6. Support

Support might be the easiest slash hardest thing to outsource. The easy stuff to outsource when it comes to support is helping people find things and helping people with their downloads and purchases.

The part that’s not so easy are refunds. There are 2 reasons why this is not easy:

1. You Need Someone Super Trustworthy
   You need to be able to trust this person to go into your backend office and handle your customers who pay you their good money.  You also need to trust someone to take away money from you and give it back to someone else (aka, the right person). One of my biggest nightmares is outsourcing the task of refunding and the wrong person getting refunded.
2. Not all Refunds Requests Result in Refunds
   Not every refund request results in a refund…or at least it shouldn’t. Sometimes people ask for refunds because they assumed something completely wrong or they were just a little bit frustrated and they needed extra help. Most of the time, you can save people from refunding by just helping them and that takes skill, effort and training.

Keep this in mind when you are looking for a support person. Make sure they are smart, can follow direction and pay your support person well.

There are hundreds of tasks you can outsource in your business, but I didn’t want to overwhelm you so I only touched on 6 in this post.

I am sure you can think of more….just go ahead and comment down below about what you outsource…I’ll remind you again later 🙂

One Awesome Tool You Need For Effective Communication With Your Outsourcers

There are tons of management tools for communicating and tracking people who do tasks for your business. You can check out this amazing post that explains a ton of the management tools in depth. There are a few to choose from so you just have to pick the one that works best for your business.

The one tool I can’t live without is a tool called Screencastomatic.

When you get to outsourcing tasks, you will need to clearly demonstrate the tasks you need to get done. The best way to do that is to shoot short videos showing the exact process.

I know what some of you might be thinking…”I use Jing for this!”

I do not recommend Jing. It’s a great tool however, it’s got it’s limitations. The tool is free up to a certain point and then when you max out your storage, it turns into a monthly fee. A monthly fee is not horrible but when you can avoid them, you should…because they start to add up which I am sure you realize!

Screencastomatic is an awesome little tool that has unlimited video hosting for just $15 a year. You can’t beat that. You can film easy videos and simply send the training links to your outsourcers.

Lastly, the reason why I absolutely love this tool is because it’s quick. I don’t like using YouTube for this because it takes too long. First, you have to create an mp4 and then you need to go through the process of uploading your video to YouTube…it takes a long time and it might cause procrastination.

How To Find Great Outsourcers

The “how to” to find great outsourcers is a huge topic and can’t be entirely covered in just a few sentences on a sub-topic in a blog post.

The best thing for you to do is start by going to my favorite site for finding great people, http://upwork.com. There are awesome people on this site!

To find out more about the entire hiring process and how to weed out finding the best people who will help you in your business, visit Dream Team now.

This is only the tip of the iceberg to start optimizing your business and hiring people.

If you are really serious about bringing your business to the next level, then you should check out Dream Team.  

Please comment below on what tasks you outsource that completely changed your business (and life) for the better!!