When you’re starting a new business it can be an arduous task. There are a lot of things to think about, do, figure out, map, plan, and some of them are outside your skillset range. Although you could spend a lot of time developing a skill set for writing, SEO, and other marketing tasks, keep in mind we’re not in the dark ages of the internet anymore!
Outsource But Be Knowledgable About the Path
Almost every possible part of your small business from customer service to product to product whitelisting or branding to internet marketing can be outsourced.
You just need to know what you’re trying to accomplish to get a good plan put together that includes all the constituent tasks you need to perform once and redundantly- like adding 2-3 fresh, potent blog posts to your blog attached to your business to drive traffic.
Once you know what you need, how you need it, what tasks to complete, and have seen or witnessed a similar systematic approach (proof of concept), you can draft a list of things to compare.
Figure Out What You Can Do Yourself And What You Need to Export to a Professional
Your first list will be things you can or must do yourself. The rest is things you can get outsourced. Even the things you think you must do yourself can be outsourced, but when you’re starting your business you really want to do it all yourself just to acclimate yourself with the way it needs to be done.
Generally, you can outsource a home page for your site, but then go in and make it your own, personalize it like only you can. You can also just gather the data you want in there and pass it on to a content writer to do it for you professionally from the star
You Can Even Outsource Posting to Guest Blogs!
There are even businesses that will write, post, and automate your guest posts, articles to post on another blogger’s site (one with a lot of traffic and search engines love them, thus love the external links they provide in your article).
Learn SEO Guidelines First
SEO is the foundation of all your efforts!
For the most part you will need to learn how to build a website/page with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind. If your site isn’t built and optimized correctly, nothing you do outside of it will help.
Think of it like this. You go into a store and have a basic expectation of how the experience should go. With a few deviations to allow for the charm and character of that particular store- most things important are global across any stores you could go to.
They need an efficient way to take currency; they need to have a currency accepting system (register?). Products should be easy to find, intuitive and displayed prominently and so on.
Imagine you built your store, decided to only accept barter of items for items, no cash transactions, no cards or forms of payment but barter.
You go out and do a lot of marketing and tens of thousands of people go to your store, with the expectation of using money, credit cards, atm cards etc to buy things at market prices (retail). It will do you no good to get all that traffic if nobody wants to do business that way (barter).
Equally true, if your site doesn’t appease the search engines (who are trying to appease the reader of your article, blog, site, etc).
And it doesn’t perform (easy to read, bullets, subtitles, good opening paragraphs, lots of new details (they don’t already know), then you can outsource to your heart’s content but you will fail.
Your traffic will all bounce. Waste of money, time, and simply bad planning.
Get Ready
So your first step is to understand SEO and the Google E-A-T guidelines (click the word e-a-t there to read about it). This will help you understand on and off page SEO concepts you need to be aware of. Once you’ve dived down that rabbit hole you will see things in a whole new light!
Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole
Once your site is set up correctly, your blog, or any online site optimized and ready to receive traffic more likely to convert, you can start outsourcing things.
What Basics Do Most Internet Marketers Need?
You can have a writer write your article. You can have a company specializing in online marketing, networked with partners like blog sites (that would help you get traffic if your site link was on it embedded in a really great article (informative)) post your article in just the right place.
You can have someone proficient in building out a blog site or template build your blog or entire site (for SEO!), then you can have articles written and posted every other day (or every day if necessary). You can have someone proficient in social media posting create and post your posts.
Some companies can handle the entire suite of tasks where marketing your business online including the site itself is concerned all in one place. Although you could just call one up and ask them to do all the work, the reality is you will need to know exactly what your mission is, your expectations, your needs, and a bunch of other things.
So although outsourcing is great, a time-saver, allows someone more proficient in every task to take care of the heavy lifting, you don’t want to try to outsource the thinking, the system, the mission as this is a result you want based on what you’re trying to do.
They cannot tell you that, they can only help you reach a level of understanding about internet marketing. There are many things you can do, many systems at play you can take advantage of- but your business deserves your best.
Be prepared before you move things to an outsource company. If you want a templated result that has you chasing their tail then don’t worry about it. But if you want to keep your company optimal to your dreams, to your vision, you must interact- at least at first, and you’ll eventually fine tune the system while learning how it all works. You don’t want to half bake your marketing or site development.
Outsourcing Only Works if YOU Work it
Outsourcing is amazing, especially when it works, but it only works if you work it. Your business and vision are yours, but you must bring it into detailed light so the people doing the work for you don’t get confused, do something that won’t work, or simply don’t know your mission enough to know what you’re trying to do.
You also need to be careful who you trust with your outsourcing. Everything you add to or publish on or off your site is your reputation- not theirs. You have to take responsibility for your business, you must learn all you can about internet marketing concepts you will be using.
Google makes that easy as there are literally Billions of pages of information and the algorithm is designed to help you parse through that. Youtube can help a great deal as many have made videos of every conceivable concept. You start by asking yourself what you’re trying to accomplish. Then you start with one concept and try to learn it all you can. That will lead to the next thing and the next.
Complexity is just a bunch of simple pieces networking. Get good at the individual pieces of your tasks, and as you build your business marketing, you will be able to handle it- and eventually outsource the whole thing, but only once you’ve gotten the hang of everything!
Simple. Not Easy.
Once you get all that going, it’s simple, not easy at first, you will be surprised at the level of leverage you can utilize by outsourcing. Knowing the system and how it works, you can find just the right fit for your business or personal site.
You need an article, you know why, you know what needs to be in it including formatting, and you can test out different companies to see who will work with you and bring you what you need.
You don’t want to just trust any company to use their systematic approach, you want to know what they’re doing, why, and how you can leverage professionals to do the complicated, time consuming (especially) stuff so you can manage your business and grow grow grow!
Good Luck out there! Leave questions in the comments if you have them!
