The Art of Outsourcing - How much is your time worth?

What’s Your Time Worth? - The Art Of Outsourcing

June 11th, 2009, Author: Nathan Hulls, Categories: Make Money Online

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So let me start today by apologising - Sorry! I missed publishing a post yesterday as the last two days I have been moving house. To be honest I cant think of anything that is much worse than moving, packing boxes, lifting heavy things, wrapping precious glassware etc etc When it comes to moving house, which I’ve only done twice in my short independant life, I do as little as possible, which leads me to today’s post.

Let me ask you this question:

What Is Your Time Worth?

Tim Ferris, in his book “The 4 hour work week” talks a lot about outsourcing, and honestly this is one of the most powerful concepts and one which has given me both money and freedom in my online and offline world.

Let me give you a real world, everyday, microwavable example.

The last time I moved house I thought, cant be that hard, I’ll hire the truck myself and do it with a few mates.

After hiring the truck and spending a good 8 hours lifting, shifting, carrying and moving (8 hours at my hourly consulting rate $275) in total it probably cost me - $250 for the truck and $2200 opportunity cost for my time = $2450.

Now before you go howling me down, I know I wouldn’t necessarily have been paid for those 8 hours which I gave up, but to be honest, those 8 hours could be valued at much more than $2200. How you ask??

Well if I had have spent those 8 hours working ON my business, planning, strategising, writing, building passive income streams, those 8 hours could easily be worth $10,000 or MORE!

So what’s the solution?

Outsourcing is the solution!

This time, I boxed up the stuff I needed to, and maybe spent 3 hours at most getting everything ready for the professionals to come in and do their thing. It cost me $154 to hire a removalist truck with 2 guys to do all the work for me! They were in and out in 2 hours…

But it gets better!

In the process we discovered that my fridge wouldn’t fit through the door of my new place (and to be honest I was wanting to get rid of it anyway - it had been sitting in my garage unused for 12 months and had mould growing in it), so I sold it to one of the removalist guys!

The outsourcing ended up costing me $104, and 3 hours of my time = $929.00 in total dollars and opportunity cost.

Giving me back 5 hours of my time to spend working on income generating activities, or even better spending with my beautiful fiance

So how can this work with developing your knowledge of how to make money online?

Outsource Your Repetitive Activities

Repetitive activities such as research, writing, link building, tweeting and customer service are easy to outsource.

These are activities which are non technical and are quite easy to do, but can be time consuming and reptitive.

While they are essential to generating income online, your time is much better focused on strategic activities, planning and building your business.

Some writing, such as blog posts and writing material for your products or membership content may require your attention as you want to make sure you’re providing quality valuable content, but even then you can outsource this type of writing to create the bones and general gist of the material and save you 50% of the time in the content creation.

So How Do I Outsource This Work?

There are a number of options with outsourcing:

1. Friends and Family

If you know people, friends and family, who may have skills in the areas you require then this is a great place to start.

There’s nothing better than being able to create income for your friends and family.

2. Network Relationships

As you’re building your networks through your blog, twitter, facebook and other social media networks you’ll be interacting and building relationship with people who have the skills you require.

Why not put out a few tweets requesting contacts for people with the skills you require, send out some facebook messages, use the twitter search to find people who are tweeting about the skills or topics you require.

3. Online Outsource Portals

There are some fantastic online portals where you can post job specs for any outsourcing jobs you have, here are just a few:

Check them out and see how you go…

I will write more about how to outsource effectively and a few hints and tips for outsourcing in the next few posts so stay tuned, and if you have any questions please feel free to drop me a message on facebook or twitter.

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Lets Make Money!

Nathan Hulls
Internet Marketing Expert and Intrepreneur