A colleague of mine runs a small business, well basically he works on his own. Every time I see him, he complains about how little time he has and about how much time he has to spend on this and that and the next task relating to his business and I keep saying to him, get someone else to do it but he is a control freak and so the likelihood of this happening is minimal.
This reminded me of myself and my business last year. I was basically breaking even, making minimal profit and things were going great but then I realised hang on, I am tired, I am doing everything myself and at this rate I would never be able to go on holiday or for that matter grow my business or make money and my business would never become profitable. I then came to the realization that if I don’t make a decision now to let go and get help I would be sitting in this vicious cycle forever and it would result in me hating what I do.
Think of it, if you keep doing everything yourself, how on earth are you going to earn more money, it is virtually impossible. So I figured, ok, if I can just pay my bills then that would be ok, but the amount that I had to work with I could not afford to employ someone full time and besides the amount of work did not warrant too me having to employ someone on a full time basis. I also could not afford to employ someone based in the UK because that would mean I would need to raise my rates and this would not be good for my clients so I had to find an alternative solution.
One of which was to look abroad as this is the way many companies are going these days. South Africa was my first port of call where I outsourced work to a lady Melanie part time. It was a solution to get the basics done but I still needed someone with specialised skills and while networking on online communities I started chatting to this lady in Russia who is very good at what she does. She wanted to leave her current job and so we came to an agreement and now she is working as a part of my team.
The message that I am I’m trying to share with those of you who are too afraid to outsource, or too afraid that it will eat up what little profit you make, is LET GO, in the long run it will be worth it. It will probably be the best business move that you ever made.
Think of it. If you don’t let go you will probably never be able to go on holiday, never be able to increase your profits or grow your business because you will be too busy trying to do everything yourself.
If you outsource you will gain 3 key things benefits:
- You will be able to provide your customers with a better more quality service because you can now be an account manager rather than working and doing all the work yourself.
- You will be able to have the time to focus on marketing and promoting your business which will results in the growth of your business.
- You will be able to take a holiday, and because we all need to take a break so that we can recharge our batteries and come up with new and fresh ideas.
A wealthy successful person once told me that the objective of you being in business is that you should be able to walk away and your business should be able to carry on without you. Say, if for example, if you were to be hospitalised or incapacitated without warning, who would run your business?
Can you honestly say, that your business can carry on without you? If your answer is no, then I would suggest that you sit down and seriously think about what you are doing and think about and start making changes.
By doing this, you will find that your business will grow, you will begin to enjoy what you are doing as well as improving your quality of life.
What areas can you outsource:
- administrative tasks (virtual assistant)
- social media (social media assistant or social media manager)
- Travel (travel agent)
In many ways you actually outsource services all the time without realising, who manages your website, who manages your accounts?
You owe it to yourself to think about it.
Posted in - A part of my job is to find ways to increase my clients online visibility and part of the service I provide is thinking outside the box. One afternoon while I sat preparing content for one of my client’s Twitter accounts, it dawned on me. Let’s use Twitter to not only promote the teleseminar but also to feed content about the teleseminar to the audience while the teleseminar event was taking place. So this is what I did: I scheduled tweets to promote the teleseminar on Twitter. Generally it would be tweets getting people to sign up to the teleseminar.
- On the day of the teleseminar, schedule more tweets promoting the teleseminar but don’t overdo it, you don’t want to spam your audience.
- Reminder tweets of the teleseminar taking place in 1 hr, 30 mins, 15 mins, then about to start. Also do one after the teleseminar has started, saying listening to…., come and join.
This is all done on Hootsuite, so we don’t have to worry about it. Lovely tool Hootsuite.
When the teleseminar starts, have your team, in my case, my clients would use my team who would sit in and listen to the teleseminar and tweet updates on what is being talked about in the teleseminar with a direct link for people to join in on the teleseminar.
Tips:
Use a hashtag to define your teleseminar and track it. E.g. #teleseminar.
When it comes to the questions and answers, announce via twitter, “it’s questions and answer time” and again make use of hashtags.
#Qtopic: What is the best way to use this product?
#Atopic: The best way to use this product is….
This way you are adding more useful content to your Twitter account, and you are generating activity and conversation on your site. After the teleseminar, if the tweets are related to what you do, take those feeds and feed them into your twitter sheet for future use.
If you want to find out more about getting your teleseminars updated via Twitter, tweet @romanythresher
When people appraise a website, they pay attention to different aspects of its quality. To some people it’s important that the site uses Web 2.0 techniques or is interactive; others are indifferent to Web 2.0 gimmicks, but appreciate beautiful, sophisticated graphics that indicate that the creator of the website is handy with Photoshop. Copywriters will look at the quality of the copy – search engine optimisers at the quality of the SEO – general webmasters at the source code. Everyone – especially the first-time visitors – will expect good usability; it annoys when you have to think hard to find your way around the site.
Of course, the importance of these criteria depend highly on the purpose of the site itself. Social networks have to be Web 2.0 by definition; for a purely informational website it’s less important, but the quality of the copy (informativeness, grammar, easiness) becomes top priority. Websites dedicated to design, arts and beauty have to be beautiful; websites talking about accessibility, accessible.
Personally, I pay attention to all the criteria above, though unnecessary animation or AJAX used just for the sake of it on an informational website are more likely to annoy me than to win extra points. Being a web perfectionist, I always look at the code – and cringe if tables are used for controlling the layout. But I know that many visitors to the website won’t even know what I’m talking about. WE have to define our priorities clearly before we agree with our webmaster on the future site’s specifications – and consider everything, including the costs.
What I would like to ask the readers is, what do you look at before you decide whether the website you’ve arrived at is good or bad?
It is definitely time to make sure that your site is ready to go mobile. All the top dogs are making sure that there sites are stipped down to text only. What does this mean really? It means stripping a website from all images and making it text only and viewable for mobile phones.
Well in all truth its not rocket science to get your site to be mobile. If you run your website or blog on a WordPress platform, guess what, WordPress are already a step ahead of you and has a plugin called Mobile Press which you just install and activate.
BBC News – Facebook launches “Zero”