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10 tasks to grow your business that you can outsource
Written by Belle Beth Cooper on July 5, 2012
Running a small business or startup can be a tough gig when you’re trying to do everything yourself. Remember that as a business founder or owner, your time is precious. Don’t let yourself get caught up doing small tasks when your time is needed elsewhere.
Finding tasks that you can outsource to grow your business is a step in the right direction if you’re trying to save time and get more done.
You can hire contractors to do all kinds of tasks for you using a site like Odesk or Freelancer.com.
When hiring contractors for the first time, remember that communication is imperative in getting the results you need. Here are some tips to remember:
- Be specific about what you need
- Provide examples if you can
- Communicate often during projects
- Follow up with feedback
To get you started, we’ve collected a list of ten ways to grow your business that you can outsource to freelancers.
1. Copywriting
Whether it’s a press release, a formal letter, or copy for your website, having someone available to draft these documents can save you precious time. Start with a clear explanation of what’s required and what details need to be included. Revising a document before it’s released will take less time and energy than creating it from scratch by yourself.
2. Web development and design
If web design or development skills are your specialty, you’ll obviously want to do this yourself. If they’re not, however, you could spend precious time working towards mediocre results. Outsource these tasks to someone who knows what they’re doing and spend your time more wisely.
3. Research
Research into your clients, competitors or thought leaders in your industry can be a huge time suck but this information is important for getting more customers. Tasks like finding contact details for potential customers, conducting surveys or gathering information about your competitors can be outsourced.
4. Designing marketing materials
If you decide that your business will benefit from printed posters, business cards or flyers, you can outsource the design and printing of these. Sites like Behance and 99designs can help you find designers.
5. Editing content
Once you have the content for your blog, your email newsletter or website copy, you’ll need to edit and proofread it. This is a great job to outsource, as it’s easy to explain to someone you haven’t worked with before.
6. Video production
Like web design, video production and editing is something best left to the experts. Getting a freelancer in to help you create promo or social videos for your business is a good way to branch out from the types of content you normally produce in-house.
7. Cold-calling
Nobody likes cold-calling, but it might be the best way of drumming up new clients for your business. Finding the appropriate people to call can be an outsourced job, but so can making the calls. If you give your contractor a clear, detailed brief of how you want the calls to go, you could save a lot of time and energy by outsourcing this task.
8. SEO services
If your business is struggling to get search engine traffic, you may need to get some help with search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can be fiddly and time-consuming when it comes to keyword research, editing meta data and creating backlinks, so this is a perfect task to outsource.
9. Translation
For businesses with international clients, translation of your products or information is likely to be something you need. Unless you’re fluent in several languages yourself, you’ll probably have to outsource this one.
10. Email marketing
Email marketing is a great way to contact your customers. Tasks in this area that you can outsource might include setting up an email subscription account, designing an email newsletter template, writing copy for your newsletter or adding a sign-up form to your website.
Have you outsourced tasks from your business before? Where have you had the most success finding contractors for your business? Leave us a comment below and let us know.
Nice post, looking into doing this right now.
Would be good to get info on the how? One person, multiple people & how much time is allocated to manage the outsourcers?
Great questions, Sean. I’m not sure there are hard-and-fast rules that would work for everyone, but when you have some feedback on the process of using a virtual assistant to manage freelancers, we’d love to hear about it – perhaps in a guest post?