Grow Your Business With Outsourcing

March 13th, 2007

It doesn’t matter what kind of business you own. Whether you’re making Internet content websites, selling affiliate products online, or running an EBay shopping site, as your business grows you will soon find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard spot.

You see, a home or internet based business is almost always started as a solo operation. One person - you - is the only person available to do all the required work in your business. As that business grows though, you quickly find that you’re not able to keep up. Then you’re faced with a tough decision: Do you keep the work at manageable levels at the sacrifice of generating more income, or do you hire someone to help?

Most home and internet based business owners don’t particularly like the idea of hiring employees. They do after all, come with a lot of extra responsibilities. You have to provide work space and tools for them, provide insurance, take care of their tax deductions and much more. The result unfortunately, is that many home and internet based businesses end up sacrificing profits because they don’t want to hire employees.

There is another option though. You can allow your business to continue growing and continue earning more money month over month, and year over year. It’s called outsourcing.

When you outsource, you’re essentially hiring independent freelance specialists to take care of some - or all - of your business workload. Since these freelancers are independent, that means they run their own business providing services for business owners like yourself. In other words, they take care of their own work space, tools, taxes, insurance and so on.

There are many aspects of your business that can be outsourced inexpensively, freeing up your time for other things, and helping to increase the overall profitability of your business. Let’s look at some of the most common outsourcing services most businesses use:

Writing - This is often outsourced by content based websites, newsletter and ebook publishers, news focused blogs, and any websites that require a lot of words written regularly. By outsourcing your writing needs to a freelancers, you can free up hours of time every day. Often you’ll also find that much more writing gets done once it’s outsourced too, since it’s not dependent on what else you need to get done.

Customer Support - This is another daily business chore that can eat up a lot of the owner’s time, and it’s easily outsourced to freelancers. Not only does this free up your own time, it also allows you to provide customer support and service 24 hours a day, instead of just when you are available personally.

Website Design and Maintenance - This is particularly useful as an outsourced project when businesses are not large enough to need a full time web designer or developer. By outsourcing this as a project to a freelancer, your website will be done much more quickly than you might be able to do it yourself, and it will usually look much more professional as well.

Product Photography - This is a time consuming, and often frustrating task for anyone with an ecommerce website. Whether you simply run an ebay store which turns over 100 or more products each month, or you’ve started a full fledged large ecommerce operation with thousands of products for sale, getting the pictures created for all of those products takes a lot of time. And if you’re not a professional photographer, you also tend to spend a lot more additional time trying to get better pictures, or trying to fix the pictures using graphics design software.

This is another excellent example of how you can save time in your day-to-day business activities, while also increasing the overall profitability too. By outsourcing your product photography, you’ll get professional top quality photos that will help you sell more products - without having to spend hours of your own personal time doing so.

There are many more standard business activities that can be outsourced of course, but this list gives you a basic starting point. In the end though, if you want your business to be more profitable, and you want to have time for yourself and your family, you should seriously consider outsourcing to professionals who specialize in these tasks.

Kathy Burns-Millyard. Kathy is a professional freelance stock and product photographer with 10 years of advertising and marketing experience. When you’re ready to boost your business with professional product photography for your online or print product catalogs, please visit http://www.ElectronicPerceptions.com to see her wonderful product photography services.

Entry Filed under: Outsourcing (General)