Outsourcing microtasks plays an important role in the growth of a business. Even if you have a team of full-time employees, there are sometimes fluctuations in the number of projects that you are handling.
You shouldn’t overwhelm your staff by asking them to work overtime or to learn new skills that they won’t use in their regular day-to-day work.
There are people to whom you can outsource those tasks and they already have experience at what they do.
By outsourcing microtasks, you and your team can focus on your main field of activity, handing the time-consuming tasks to someone else.
Sometimes by spending money you are actually saving up money. For example, if you earn more money per hour than the money you would pay someone to do those microtasks for you.
In this expert roundup, we reached out to 41 entrepreneurs (From e-commerce to service-based marketing) and asked them to ask the following question:
What are some microtasks you outsourced that changed the way you run your business?
Keep reading to find out what are the benefits of outsourcing microtasks. We will find out together what microtasks other business people outsource. Read this post to find out new ways to free up your workload and spend your time in a cost-effective way.
Stella Moon – MySingaporeKitchen | Affordable Private Dining Singapore
As a private chef in Singapore, I’ve come to realize that outsourcing certain microtasks can be a game-changer for my business. One such task that I delegated was my social media management. Being a chef, I wanted to focus on creating amazing dishes for my clients rather than spending hours on end curating content and coming up with captions for my social media profiles. So, I hired a social media manager who specialized in F&B consultancy in Singapore. This allowed me to focus on what I do best – cooking – while my social media presence continued to grow.
Another microtask that I outsourced was the cleaning up after each event. While it may seem like a small task, cleaning up after a private dining experience can be time-consuming and exhausting. By hiring someone to handle this for me, I was able to finish up the event in a timely manner and maintain my energy levels throughout the day.
Finally, I also outsourced some of the administrative tasks associated with running a private chef business. This included invoicing, scheduling appointments, and responding to client inquiries. By doing so, I was able to free up more time to focus on the creative aspects of my business and deliver exceptional dining experiences to my clients.
Overall, outsourcing these microtasks has allowed me to streamline my business operations and focus on what I do best – creating unforgettable dining experiences for my clients as a private chef in Singapore.
Lim – i-Credit Licensed Moneylender Aljunied
I outsourced tasks that I know I’m either not good at or isn’t revenue generation or operations related. This often include things such as monthly accounting and booking keeping and even website update works such as changing our opening/closing hours …etc. As were are a primarily a loan company providing job loss loans for the unemployed and NSF loans, we also deal with a lot of paper work. For this we hire in-house staff and delegate to them.
Joseph Liu
I’ve outsourced my podcast audio production to an audio engineer who edits, mixes, and produces my podcasts. I initially edited my episodes myself.
However, outsourcing the technical aspects of producing each episode has allowed me to focus my efforts on the content itself and free up time I can then dedicate to the income-generating parts of my business.
I’m also writing a book, and I’ve outsourced all the background research to a research assistant that’s allowed me to dedicate my energies to writing the actual book rather than get bogged down in pulling statistics to support my narrative.
Finally, I’ve outsourced all aspects of my web development to a web-development team that handles all the maintenance, design, and troubleshooting of my site.
I attempted to much of this myself when I first launched my business, but outsourcing to a team has enabled my site to be much higher quality and allow me to focus on the content itself rather than the technical backend of my site.
Nigel Seah – Writing Wildly
The type of tasks I would prioritise when outsourcing microtasks are things that I know I’m good at. This makes it easier for me to verify if the person I outsourced the work to have the right skills to perform the task.
Take this for example. As an SEO blog post writer, I have the knowledge on the best writing tips, best content writing frameworks, and SEO mistakes to avoid in order to write search optimized content. But as someone who is running multiple sites, I don’t necessarily have time to write the content for all the pages on my own.
That’s where my skills and knowledge can complement my need to outsource of content marketing work.
As a writer and SEO specialist myself, I know how to suss out underqualified applicants who claim to know how to produce search-optimized content.
This came in super handy when I was building up the content for an online marketing magazine I’m working on. Someone actually tried to use her content writing experience at a local lifestyle publication to charge me $150 for each 1,000-word article.
But after looking through her content, I was left disappointed by her poor on-page SEO practices. As much as possible, try to outsource tasks you’re good at but have no time to do on your own.
I managed to outsource the writing of my blog articles to freelancers, which has considerably increased the output of content (which I consider to be the most important priority for any blog) and has made posting more consistent.
Paul Posea
I managed to outsource the writing of my blog articles to freelancers, which has considerably increased the output of content (which I consider to be the most important priority for any blog) and has made posting more consistent.
In terms of graphics for my business, I loved working with a good graphic design on demand company that can provide anything from infographics to blog post graphics quickly and with consistent branding whenever I need it.
I believe having a good relationship with a hand full of talented people and companies long-term can make things much easier than constantly changing freelancers. In my experience how your brand and website looks are more important than you think for establishing relationships, so make sure to outsource the graphic creation to a team or individual that knows what they’re doing.
Chhavi, work from home expert – Mrs Daaku Studio
It is important that we focus on spending our time on result-oriented activities and outsource anything that we aren’t good at.
I’m a blogger and a YouTuber who creates content around the best work from home jobs. I’ve a tonne of tasks that are always pending on my lists and can be easily outsourced.
So, the a few items that I’ve gotten around outsourcing are:
Content Writing – I’m a blogger and creating content regularly is not possible if I were the only one writing it. So, I work with 2-4 freelance writers who help me publish regular content on my blogs.
Social Media – This is another time saver. Since the time I have outsourced pin creation and instagram graphics, I’ve been able to focus on growth strategies for these platforms
Video Editing – This is NOT my jam. So, I have outsourced all video editing work for my YouTube channel to a pro.
I’ve a few other items on the list and will be outsourcing them by the end of this year.
Dennis Schlegel Jr. – Emeritus Wealth Group
Often times we find ourselves doing non-revenue generating tasks and simply don’t realize it or we underestimate the time it takes to complete said task. We only grow our business through doing tasks that are revenue positive.
For example, a microtask such as managing my calendar and booking meetings was, in hindsight, a great task for me to outsource.
Between reviewing my calendar, suggesting times/dates for a meeting, and playing email tag to nail it down, it could amount to as much as 30 minutes of my time to book a single meeting.
Multiply that out by the number of meetings I was booking and my per hour loss for not generating revenue, and we come up with a dollar figure that is staggering.
For a nominal cost, I was able to outsource this task to a calendar management software company (Calendly) that provided me a link I could email to prospects and clients that allowed them to book a meeting with me directly on my calendar.
I am able to dictate the times I am available and get a notification when a new meeting is booked. Outsourcing this microtask saves me hundreds of dollars a month.
Gabriella Sannino – Level343
One task we often outsource is the graphics and videos for our website. We started outsourcing this particular task because we were slammed and needed the extra hand.
After finding out how expedient it was, as well as cost/time effective, we continued outsourcing our graphics and videos even when we weren’t slammed.
This frees us up to focus on building our business in other ways and giving our clients our full attention.
Now when there is graphics work to be done on our site as well as a client’s site, we can confidently outsource the design elements of our site, leaving us room to focus entirely on the client’s design elements.
Nikola Roza
As a control freak and a perfectionist I feel a constant strong urge to do everything by my own two hands. If I didn’t do it personally, it ‘s not good enough and will not bring me the results I want.
That used to be my dominant way of thinking.
But as an owner of a thriving business, one that still has huge space to grow into, I understand that outsourcing work to others and delegation is key for growth.
As a responsible business owner I need to be working on a business, and not in it.
So. begrudgingly I started to outsource the most tedious parts of running my business, and for me that is landing page creation.
I use Unbounce to create landing pages for my site. And though they turn out decent, it takes me way too much time and it’s simply not worth it when there are other more important things I should be doing.
Hiring a VA has helped me tremendously as now I get stuff done while other things get accomplished as well.
I was lucky too, the VA I hired from my home town has an eye for design and a veritable aesthetic flair to her style, so my landing pages are now even better than I could have imagined them in my mind 🙂
It is a win-win situation for me and the point I want to make is that, as a business owner you will have to start outsourcing work to others, and it’s better to do it sooner rather than later so your business doesn’t suffocate and die.
David Sorauer – Evolocity
Content Marketing
This includes content production (such as blog posts & copywriting for new/refreshed websites for clients).
When I first started my business, I performed all tasks myself, including copywriting.
Although this initially resulted in higher profit margins for my business, I was delivering copy that wasn’t my core strength/passion. I had no expertise in the particular industry my clients operated in.
Outsourcing this work to industry-specific expert writers resulted in a significantly better result and enabled me to scale my business to handle more clients.
Bookkeeping
Initially, all the bookkeeping tasks such as tracking invoices/payments/expenses were done only by me.
These tasks are extremely important for a small business to get right, as they serve as input to lodgement of taxes (and who wants a tax audit?!).
When I would send my “books” to the accountant, he would often find errors, which would cost a significant amount of money to re-work and correct.
I decided to outsource my bookkeeping to an expert and the quality improved substantially and reduced my accounting fees due to re-work, so I saved money (and time) by hiring a
part-time bookkeeper.
JONATHAN PRICHARD – MATTRESS INSIDER
I outsource microtasks that require expertise that I don’t have as well as tasks that others can perform more efficiently so my time is spent on revenue-generating activities. In other words, it’s not just busy work or administrative tasks that can be moved off of your plate. For example, I outsource things like link building, content writing, copywriting, creating content briefs, editing photos, 3D animation and design, email scraping, videography, and more. Together, all of these tasks can take a lot of time, but when I outsource them to the right people, the collective result is higher productivity and ROI for me, my team, and my business.
TOMMY VEKHAYN
One of the best microtasks I ever outsourced was internal linking. No matter what business you run, having a website that beats your competitors in the search engine is always a plus to drive free traffic to your company. One of the best ways to boost your rankings with minimal work is actually having a strong “internal linking” profile. Internal linking is basically where you link from one article to another when they are related to each other. Search engines like this, and reward you for doing it. That’s not to mention that your audience will keep reading more and more of your content-generating you more revenue and trust in you as they read. But, there’s one problem. Nobody wants to spend their time doing internal linking. While it takes minimal work, it’s super tedious and annoying. You have to spend a ton of time matching articles like it’s some game, and then you have to find a good spot within the articles to link from. While that sounds easy at first glance, when your website potentially has hundreds to thousands to even tens of thousands of pages- it’s just something you’d rather not do. I outsourced my internal linking as a simple microtask and it positively impacted the way I ran my business. All of my rankings went up across the board. In fact, a case study done recently showed how they brought an article from position #18 in Google to the #3 spot with just 8 simple internal links. Now, picture you run a company with a lot of competition. Nobody is going to find your business on the bottom of the 2nd page or even the third page of Google. But, when you’re sitting at that #3 spot- it’s a whole different ball game. Suddenly, your name is everywhere. I personally just looked around on LinkedIn and found someone that was asking for a fairly decent wage with a decent work ethic and gave him the job. It didn’t cost me that much, took little of my time, but had a huge return on investment. The money I spent was quickly gained back in the traffic I got back within months.
Cyrus Yung – Ascelade
The microtask that makes the difference in my business is when I outsourced someone to follow up on sales inquiries.
I have a few local business websites, and there are constantly leads coming in daily. So I hired a part-time to respond to those leads.
She was working for 3 to 4 hours daily at home, where she needs to check the emails at 10 am, 1 pm, and 5.30 pm.
I was able to free myself to work on bringing in more leads while someone follows up.
Jeremy Skillings – You Can Be Found
Getting help with microtasks is a fundamental part of a consultant growing into a full business. It is often the most challenging thing for a business owner.
Trusting someone else to do some of that work can be difficult for an entrepreneur, but it is imperative if you are going to grow and have the time for that growth.
Finding the right people to step in and help you and/or assign the right tasks to the right people is important.
It was helpful to start with organizing types of tasks and product management to stay on top of the many projects and keep them organized and the right information handy when it is needed.
Having administrative help for organizing client information is really helpful.
Outsourcing pieces of a process can be really helpful as well. I will often run audits or analyses of a client or prospect issue or use tools for regular maintenance type work.
Having someone you can teach to do those repetitive tasks, knowing what red flags or issues to look for, and report back can be extremely useful to open up your calendar of the higher-level focus.
Just opening up a document that has all the info right there for you to interpret and add your skill to rather than having to spend all of your valuable time building and formatting and putting it all together.
It helps you spend your time the most efficiently on the things that most need your focus and expertise to help you stand out and differentiate yourself.
The processes and tedious work that can be repeated can all be outsourced as long as you are organized enough to keep on top of the process.
Ali Pourvasei – LAD Solutions
At LAD Solutions, we primarily focus on three main services; search engine optimization, google ads management and web design & development.
The first two services, we keep in-house with proven and tested strategies to ensure our clients receive great services that achieve great results.
In the past couple of years, however, we began micro-tasking graphic design work to a trusted partner who is very skilled and reliable. This is helped grow the web development side of our business a lot.
We have streamlined a process where we are able to provide beautifully and uniquely designed websites and logos for our clients and very affordable rates. The graphic design team that we outsource works closely with us to design exactly what our clients want, and often, exceeds their expectations.
Once designs are created and approved by our clients, we then take over the projects and develop websites that match the designs provided to us. The end result is a modern, unique, user-friendly website that is responsive and brilliantly designed for all viewing devices including tablets, laptops, desktops, and cellphones.
Our decision to outsource graphic design has not only helped us grow that department but also allowed us to produce better-designed websites for our clients while still keeping our costs very affordable.
Paige Arnof-Fenn – Mavens & Moguls
I started a global branding and digital marketing firm 19 years ago.
My advice especially for small businesses is to outsource anything that is not a core competency so that you can focus all your resources on what you do best.
I outsource legal, payroll, and accounting services for that very reason and put all my energy into building my brand and scaling my business.
I tell my clients that unless PR is a core competency it almost always makes sense to outsource PR because relationships with media outlets matter a lot and small businesses can rarely justify the overhead and expense of someone pitching the media on a full-time basis.
A PR resource with a great reputation and rolodex can be very effective with a small budget.
To avoid problems, give your outsource partners the goals to achieve then get out of the way. This is their area of expertise so let them find the path, do not micromanage them it will only lead to frustration.
Outsourcing does not solve all of your growth problems but it sure frees up a lot of time and energy that can be better spent on things I enjoy doing and can get paid well for.
As a mentor of mine once said, any problem that can be solved with money is not a problem if you have the money. Great advice indeed.
Vanessa Perry – Impeccable Credit Services
We specialize in credit repair. We do not always have time to do the back end such as web design and SEO management. We are credit experts, not web experts.
With help from Microtask we can focus on what we know and what we are good at, and they are able to prioritize our client’s needs. We can still put our clients first while our Internet needs are satisfied.
Some companies outsource their general workload. Rather than outsourcing our workload, we outsource our Internet needs to optimize our full potential as a company.
By outsourcing where we do not specialize, we save time, and we are able to make more money where we do thrive.
By being able to help others with their credit needs we can focus on credit while Microtask helps us with our company growth. Marketing is our second priority, but it is Microtask’s goal to help us reach our fullest potential.
Johnny Baskin – Nomadic Advertising
There are many microtasks that our business outsources in order to make us more productive and ensure our team can focus on the big picture items. I will mention a few in this response.
I would say one of the most important tasks to outsource is content creation, in today’s world everyone is doing their research and finding companies online.
If you are not putting good content out there on a continual basis then you have no visibility online. Ideally, you should have a blog as well as an active social media page for your business.
The next item every business should outsource, once you have a few customers, is bookkeeping/accounting.
Pay someone to keep your books in order each month. If you don’t have many customers this shouldn’t cost you too much and will give you visibility over your business and how you can improve things.
Once you are producing great content, have your books in order, and are looking for how to grow I recommend you start a marketing campaign. This will amplify the content you are already creating.
You will likely want to go with either Google Ads or Facebook Ads. If you are looking for a lower-risk option, these are the biggest players. You should hire someone experienced to set up and manage these campaigns for you to get the best results.
Hope these three tips help you take your business to the next level.
Steven Jaenke – Digimark
At Digimark, we discovered early on two things that have vastly changed the way we fulfill our marketing services. Clients don’t care about the how, and half of our job is research and data collection.
That’s why we started to outsource. We’ve outsourced almost all of our research and data collection jobs, allowing us to be more efficient, saving on resources, and most importantly, delivering a positive result for our clients quicker.
The important thing to keep in mind when outsourcing is that you still need to manage the task. You need to give your outsource partner as much information about the task as possible, especially how you want it done.
We’ve created standard operating procedures to help with this. Since implementing this, we are much happier with the result and the task gets completed with minimal input from our end.
Marcus Miller – Bowler Hat
I have run a digital marketing and SEO agency for almost 20 years now, so the amount of “outsource your SEO” to us emails we receive each day is just off the chart.
Unsurprisingly, we don’t tend to respond to this kind of emails, and I am proud of the fact that we don’t just take on a job and outsource it like many in this industry do.
That is not to say of course, that even in an agency like ours, where we never want to relinquish control, that we can’t outsource any of the more mundane and procedural SEO tasks – particularly if we continue to drive the strategy and implement tight quality control.
An example would be citation work. This can be a grind. Particularly for multi-location businesses.
But, if we specify what needs doing, and carefully monitor the work, then we can easily outsource this kind of microtask and free up more studio time at Bowler Hat for strategy and all of the other SEO tasks baying for our attention.
Another area can be link building. Whilst again, we do a lot of this in-house, there are some situations where we can buy a link in a more cost-effective way than we can get actually get it placed ourselves.
I also like the fact that there are folks out there that specialize in specific link-building tactics so we have people we can outsource a single job to like broken link building or PR.
This means we always use best-of-class experts for every task and push these smaller jobs out the door to free up more time in-house.
The positive here is that this tackles an age-old business problem of scaling up and scaling down dynamically. If we suddenly get busy, we know that certain tasks can be outsourced to give us more scale.
If things get quieter, we will just then take these tasks in-house. Additionally, where certain tasks are outsourced at a better price than we can do in-house, we can pass on these cost savings to our customers.
Brogan Renshaw – Firewire Digital
Businesses thrive on a myriad of small, yet time-consuming tasks (also known as microtasks), being done seamlessly and efficiently. Outsourcing these tasks is an extremely underrated method for achieving this.
For example, as a small business owner, it has been up to me for a long time to keep the inner ‘business’ workings ticking along, which took away from higher-order thinking tasks like business development, team leadership and relationship building/management.
Outsourcing tasks such as file management, scheduling tasks once delegated, and other such project-related administrative tasks has positively impacted the way I run my business by giving me back hours to actually spend time being the leader in my business!
Rather than spending hours upon hours on small, repetitive but crucial tasks, I can spend more time on leading my team and developing the business.
Bibi Lauri Raven – Bibi Buzz
When I first started my link-building service, it was just me doing everything.
And while my business grew, I quickly became the biggest bottleneck when it came to delivering results. I had to do something or else things would fall apart real quick.
One of the first things I handed over was research and data entry, to people I hired from the Philippines. Fairly simple, repeatable tasks that ate up a lot of my time.
Then after that, I realized there were a lot of great copy editors available in the Philippines, as well. I hired more, and they were able to take over more creative tasks, such as content ideation and email templates.
And now, these are the folks running several teams within my business, and doing a way better job than I ever did!
So if I hadn’t started handing off those really simple, small tasks, I would have never learned the true potential of outsourcing. And my agency would be nowhere near the level it’s today.
Floyd Buenavente – Wise Marketing Secrets
Doing Digital Marketing takes a lot of grunt work especially when it comes to cleaning toxic backlinks of a website.
Sure, there’s a lot of automation involved when I use paid tools. Still, another good pair of eyes can go a long way in making sure that a toxic backlink will not be left unnoticed.
And we are talking about thousands of backlinks to check, so I usually outsource the task of checking each link while I tinker at the backend of the website along with finding new links to lift the website up in the rankings and recover from the toxicity.
Lauren Hamilton – Digital Narrative
This year, I began outsourcing work on my own website to a freelance web developer I have worked with in the past.
Because I’m capable of updating and improving my website, I’ve always thought it was a waste of budget to pay someone else to add blogs, update and tweak content and plugins, etc, but it has made a big difference to my SEO already.
While in theory, I can do it, I never have the time, and always put working on my own site at the bottom of my priority list.
Paying someone I trust to make it her priority means I’ve added new blogs and images more frequently, fixed some niggling navigation and link errors, and cleaned up a lot of obsolete aspects.
Dmitriy Shelepin – Miromind
As a rapidly developing SEO agency Miromind has lots of monotonous tasks such as citations. Citations are an online reference to a business that lists the business’ name, address, and contact information that makes it more trusted and perceptible for a search engine.
They are considered to be an important aspect of local SEO but can take a lot of time and effort and that’s why the most reasonable way to perform it is to transfer it.
When our specialists started seeking assistance from other companies it helped to save a lot of time and significantly decreased the outcome.
The right vendors can assist to reach the reasonable level of cost-effectiveness in the business’ workflow.
It shows great results that’s why we think the best option for these microtasks is to be outsourced.
Christina Nicholson – Media Maven
The microtask that I have outsourced most recently is writing blog posts for my lifestyle blog ChristinaAllDay.com. I made the decision in 2021 to focus on bringing more traffic to my lifestyle blog.
To do that, I need to post three to four articles a week that are about 2,000 words each. It’s a lot to research and a lot to write.
So, I have hired writers to handle the meat and potatoes of the article. Then, I go back through and I make edits and add personalization so that it is written in my voice.
Even though it takes me about an hour or two to do some editing and rewriting, it is extremely helpful to put this task onto another person to start the process. If not, it would take me a lot longer to do everything by myself from scratch.
As a result, I am posting many more blogs and I can spend my time doing more SEO keyword research and more blog promotion. Those are both things that I enjoy doing more than actually writing the posts.
It’s helpful to work as a team to get more done, and hopefully, by the end of this year, I’ll achieve my goal of 30,000 unique viewers a month to my lifestyle blog.
Minuca Elena
I create expert roundups, like this one. Although I usually work alone, there are still some tasks that I outsource when I am overwhelmed with work. One of those tasks is compiling lists of experts.
In new niches in which I’ve never made a roundup, it can take me a lot of time to identify and find the contact details of the experts to which I will reach out.
I’ve tried using tools but I got so many bad results that it took me almost the same amount of time checking each of them as it would have taken me to create the list from scratch.
So I hired someone from Fiver to make the lists for me. I wasn’t happy with the work of the first guy I hired but the second guy did a good job in a difficult niche.
The task itself is not very difficult, just to find the names, websites, and email addresses of experts from a certain field, but after the first 50 people, it can be very time-consuming to find new relevant experts.
Delegating this microtask saved me a lot of time.
Janet Zaretsky
I outsource my social media content marketing. We all know it is important to have a robust content marketing strategy, however, it is a time consuming activity.
Outsourcing this activity was a great business decision. I found someone with an ability to read both what I write and what others write and make comments and ask questions in my ‘voice’.
Finding someone who gets my point of view and speaks in my voice has been very impactful, leading to new client acquisition, more exposure and requests for other media coverage.
Harris Brown – HFB Advertising
By outsourcing the simpler things lets us focus on the business more successfully.
The tasks like making posts to social media, virtual receptionist, server management, and blog writing.
By freeing up more time gave us the focus we needed to accomplish bigger projects for our clients that we needed to work on and the main purpose of our business.
A lot of these tasks are easier to outsource instead of hiring someone part-time or full-time.
We have much more flexibility in our team schedules when we took away unimportant tasks for the business and saw our clients much happier with the customer service we are providing.
Justin Morgan – Dental Marketing Guy
I outsource the following microtasks frequently;
- Travel Arrangements (booking flights and hotels)
- Paying bills for various business tools.
- E-Signing documents.
- Boilerplate responses to FAQs via email.
I outsource this work because it saves my time as well as money which I can use for something more important like making decisions.
It also helps me as I don’t get distracted by smaller problems and I can focus on much bigger things which help me build my brand as well as more sales.
Karina Tama – Senior Care Clicks
I am the CEO of Senior Care Clicks, a boutique agency that focuses on senior care marketing. We outsource several tasks because it is more cost-efficient. We work with companies that are really good at what they do.
We outsourced the following tasks:
Local Citations:
We work with Brighlocal for reputation management and reporting but we outsource the local citations creation to a third-party company that only does citations. They are great.
We collect from Brihglocal the citations our clients are missing and we send a list to create the citation on these sites.
We also create a document with all the details to create the citations. They take 5-10 days and it depends on how many citations we order per client.
After they deliver, our Project manager uploads in bulk the citations on Brihklocal to update the system. This will reflect at the end of the month for reporting.
In addition, we provide to the client the file of all his/her citations with users and passwords. This works great for us.
Graphic Design
We work with a graphic designer for several years. He is great and gets things right from the beginning.
As we focus on one industry, we already have examples of what we do every month for our clients, such as white papers, ebooks, etc.
Therefore, he just works based on the new client’s brand colors. We provide the content. For us, this is also cost and time-efficient.
The rest of the things we do in-house because we like to have control over our deliverables. The only way that a task can be outsourced successfully is by having a system in place which is easy to follow and replicate. We have that!
Elliot Olson – Studio Anansi
Outsourcing microtasks is absolutely essential for small teams! As a solopreneur, I used to be overwhelmed by the tasks I needed to accomplish each day.
Since I started outsourcing, my days are much easier. Here are three of those tasks:
Copywriting. I recently expanded my team to include a contracted copywriter, and it’s been a gamechanger! Prior to working with her, I wrote copy for clients.
This meant I had less time for my favorite work — website design and development. Now that I have someone who can do the writing for me, it’s much more efficient.
Custom plugins. When I have complex features for a site, I like to check if there’s a developer who can help with a custom solution.
It can be expensive to outsource custom development, but it saves me tons of time and makes my clients happy to see special features on their websites.
Social media management. To be honest, I haven’t outsourced this task yet!
But I’m looking forward to adding a social media contractor to my team, so I can delegate content creation and channel management.
Keeping up with new social content isn’t my favorite activity, and I can’t wait to get these hours back.
Ashley J. Saunders – AJS Digital Group
I know this sounds weird but food shopping. As a business owner, my time is limited, so being able to order food online and having someone else pick, pack and deliver it makes my life far easier!
I’m also a big believer in hiring people to do tasks that you could do but will take you a long time to complete. For example, I could write a press release or create a logo or print ad but it’s far easier to hire a professional.
They’ll complete the task faster and better than me, freeing me to work on tasks that I can add significant value maximising the return on my time. Never forget, you can make more money but your time is finite!
Julian B. Morris – Concierge Wealth Management
I have outsourced my calendar so that clients and prospective clients can schedule meetings with me on demand.
At the end of every client meeting, I automatically schedule their next appointment, knowing they have control over rescheduling if needed in the future.
Implementing this software has been invaluable as it has allowed for my days to be more organized with defined times for meetings while clients and prospects have kept their meetings t a significantly higher rate.
Time saved by sending a link to my calendar rather than going back and forth with phone calls or emails is about 3 hours a week. Over the course of an entire year, that is about 2 weeks of extra time I can devote to working directly with clients.
Dimitar Karamarinov – Advanced Firewall Solutions
Communication
One daily chore we outsource is reading through an overwhelming pile of incoming emails. We just had to stop dealing with the inbox folder.
We get a ton of random emails and browsing through the entire load is just a time we better spend elsewhere. That’s why we hired and trained an assistant to weed out what we should attend and what we shouldn’t.
It takes a bit to calibrate what, why, and how, but once you onboard and educate on what really matters, things now run smoothly. Ask your personal assistant to create a “For you” tag in your inbox.
Categorize everything that needs your attention there. Voila, no time wasted on sorting emails and reading through things that do not matter. I allow myself to check my emails for 20 minutes in the morning, but before I get to the office.
Accounting and financial services.
Small business owners rarely have the time or resources to handle all in-house accounting work myself. Not to mention that a proper setup of the financial side of a business is a must to create the base for growth.
Do it for a little bit while you get the business off the ground, but it’s vital to hire and outsource this part of your business to a reputable accounting firm as soon as you can’t find the time to sit down and handle invoicing and accounting work.
Business offers
Every agency owner knows that the more companies you pitch the more clients you’ll get. There’s one thing that all agency owners underestimate – the time it takes to create a personalized offer.
Eric Ang – One Search Pro
I’ve been in the marketing industry for over 10 years. I’m now heading an advertising agency in Malaysia, which specializes in growing businesses through effective digital marketing.
Here’s what I have to say about outsourcing microtasks.
My agency outsources repetitive microtasks such as content writing and data entry. Overall, outsourcing these tasks enables us to quickly scale up our SEO work.
We also find it easier to focus on work that matters most (and usually cannot be outsourced) such as marketing strategy, topic research and on-page auditing.
This arrangement has enabled us to grow our business to twice its initial size within the span of a year.
Content writing is the microtask that we regularly outsource. Outsourcing costs less than hiring full-time writers.
As long as we provide a clear direction and open a channel of communication, we find that freelancers are able to produce high-quality work quickly and efficiently. This positively impacts our publishing rate.
Outsourcing to different writers also guarantees diversity in writing tone, giving us fresh content for our business.
Sergey Shvets – Founder & CEO at Gepard
Working on the edge of service and product industries is challenging. And challenges both include analytical tasks in areas where you have no expertise yet or it’s a repeated task that you know how to handle very well but you need to be capable of rapid upscale by a demand.
Both patterns I try to recognize in our operations and these are subject to outsourcing. Why? Very outspoken.
When we feel we are lacking expertise in certain areas it’s a sign we have to look for a trusted expert in a domain. Mostly that comes to delegating analysis or solution design in areas where we don’t feel confident but we want to grow. So we collaborate with subject experts but set it under our standard governance. Such collaborations provide us with the needed expertise and we can win new territories. Needless to say, we are super cautious and demanding in choosing experts.
Another scenario for us to outsource is when we are handling the operations that we feel we can control so much that it becomes a routine task for us and we need to upscale temporarily. This one is a good case to outsource too. But mind taking some preparation here:
- Define the specifications and requirements for the process & output in a more formal way.
- Build quality control metrics to assess the implementation by the outsourcing party. Preferably bring in automation here.
A good example when we followed this principle was the outsourcing of connections implementation between marketplaces and our Gepard PIM. We created the SDK for connection development and the appropriate acceptance tests. That enabled us to apply to freelancers or external contractors to develop connection implementations following the pre-defined design patterns and conforming to our quality requirements. So we are enabled for the scale-up very easily and without compromising the quality.
Jessica Taylor – Lead Nerds
One of the Microtasks that we have outsourced that have positively impacted our business is the transcription of videos.
When someone on our team thinks about a topic, they would like to have a blog or video written on they can record a screenshare video using loom to get their point across.
After this we can have the video transcribed via Rev or other transcription service and then outsource the transcription to be made into bullet points.
Then we can either turn these bullet points into a blog or break them up into multiple blogs, video, and social media content.
The best way to outsource a microtask is to make sure you have full documentation on how the task should be completed this way all the VA or service needs to do is follow your instructions.
It is important to make sure no creative liberties are taken.
Blake Smith
I recently outsourced the scheduling of posts on social media. I found someone online who is familiar with my preferred scheduling platform Buffer, and had them source content for me that is relevant to the audience I was trying to target.
The nice part about this was that I could focus on adding commentary to the content, rather than finding and scheduling it.
My typical process was:
1) Find content
2) Schedule it
3) Add my comments
But now that I have someone doing the first 2 parts for me, I’ve found that the quality of my posts has also improved and I am getting my engagement on social media. So it has been a very positive experience for me!
Stephen Hockman – SEO Chatter
There are several microtasks I have outsourced that have positively impacted my business, including WordPress maintenance, blog post formatting, Pinterest management, email marketing setup, and Google Ad creation.
While these microtasks are important to the growth of my business, they’re not the best use of my time and expertise.
As an SEO specialist and course creator, my time is better spent on tasks related to search engine optimization for my websites and creating content for my SEO training courses.
An example I like to share about the benefit of hiring microtask workers was when I needed to convert around 200 pages on a WordPress site from the Classic Editor to Gutenberg blocks.
Each page had a lot of custom code and DIV tags with stylized content so the conversion couldn’t be done easily. Each page had to be updated manually to keep everything looking the same after the change.
This conversion task in WordPress took 10 days to complete with microworkers and was worth every penny.
If I had done that work myself, it probably would have taken one month or more to finish because I would have had to fit the work in each day between my other daily business tasks.
Jackie Au
Running a reno company, most of my work are pretty hands on unlike most entrepreneurs. Most of my limitation consist of being able to be physically there – which is what i outsource the most. We host company leisure events biweekly to help employees cope with stress.
Having someone to source ideas & feedback from our staff, gather who’s attending & knowing what to order is what we outsource.
Different strokes for different folks, sometimes we’l have wine tasting parties, others days craft beer of sorts. Having outsource this to someone who knows their craft has brought a lot of space for the rest of the company.
Chris Labbate – SEO Bank
Outsourcing microtasks can turn an entire project into a simple process. When a project is broken down into easy to handle chunks, there’s no more repetitive tasks that require your entire time to accomplish.
Now you can put your attention on your businesses with more time to work on it, without the stress of distractions.
Owning a digital agency, there are a few things I like to task out to talented virtual assistants.
Things like setting up new social media accounts, building citations or even doing valuable keyword research can all be outsourced to qualified workers.
Our team loves using microworkers for those kinds of tasks that would be otherwise tedious for us to get done.
No one wants to spend hours manually setting up social media accounts or creating links to sites. Give yourself the time and get qualified help.
Advancing your business with outsourcing will help scale your business faster, at less of a cost than hiring a new employee.
The general rule of thumb is, if the task is below your hourly wadge then what you can outsource it for, do it!
You’ll have to think more creatively to outsource microtasks if you want to take your business to the next level. Make your staff happier and increase productivity by outsourcing your small tasks today!
Natalie Alleblas
A microtask I’ve outsourced that has changed the way that I do business is my website performance analysis.
To keep track of how my website is performing, I hired a VA to set up reports in Google Analytics and Google Search Console and to monitor these each month and report back to me as a summary via email.
As my business is growing, I’m spending more time working in my business than on it. Having a VA track my performance and put together the information I need to know in an easy and quick way saves me hours each month.
Although I know how to do these tasks myself, outsourcing microtasks like this helps free up more time in my business so that I can focus on the tasks that generate revenue in my business- my client work.
Outsourcing is a worthy investment. What I pay to outsource is much less than what I charge for my services, so it makes financial sense to outsource as much as I can so that I can continue working with my clients.
My VA has allowed me to keep track of my website performance so that I can make better business and marketing decisions.
Knowing exactly how my website performs allows me to decide whether more time needs to be spent on content creation, updating existing content, performing keyword research, or link building.
Aaron Hatton – Cyber Research + Innovation
Some of the microtasks which have been outsourced include graphic design and video animation.
It helps considerably to ensure you have the right talent to help execute your vision on specific marketing campaigns, without having to overwhelm in-house resources.
Isaac Mashman – Mashman Ventures
I have delegated much of my media work pertaining to my personal and company brand to our team.
For example, as a podcast host, I use it to promote our services, however, audio has never been my strongest area.
Instead of taking the time to get really good at it, I’d rather let our Head of Audio do it instead.
It’s made my life so much less stressful and my podcast that much more professional.
James Idayi – Cloudzat
Outsourcing microtasks can have incredibly positive impacts on a business. In my affiliate business, I decided to outsource two tasks:
- Finding the best paying affiliate programs.
- Listing the 3 top-ranking titles/lists/reviews covering those affiliate programs.
Paying only 20 cents for each item for the first task and 30 cents for each item in the next task, I had a list of 100 affiliate programs and 300 topics to cover for my business. All I had to do was spend 110 USD and wait for a day.
It took off the research load from my team and they could quickly come up with better content ideas compared to my top three competitors and even completed their assigned tasks.
If I asked my team to do the same tasks I outsourced, they could have never achieved the target set by the content calendar that lays down the road map for new reviews, updating old ones, creating guest posts, and so on.
This could have a snowball effect with pending tasks and massive workloads, eventually forcing me to hire new team members, thereby increasing my operational costs significantly.
Just paying 110 dollars I avoided all that and have my content calendar filled up for the next two months.
Grant Wydeven
To help grow my personal finance blog and YouTube channel I knew I needed to build a network. A strong network of prominent people in my niche to share ideas and content with.
What I quickly found out was just how time-consuming it was to find other businesses to work with, let alone get in contact with the right people.
I decided to outsource this seemingly small task of network research, and the results have been incredible for my business.
I now receive an email from my assistant once a week with a completed list of prospects that are most susceptible to some form of collaboration, whether that be a partnership, guest appearance or content sharing.
To make things even better, the list includes the name, phone number, and email for the point of contact along with a brief description of their business and all their social accounts I can interact with.
I took the large goal of building a strong network and broke down the most time-consuming parts into microtasks for easy outsourcing.
Nikolay Krastev – Agile Digital Agency
It is important to have an excellent website and product pages in order to attract eyeballs and gain recognition for your future plans.
Your company will benefit immensely from having a virtual assistant with experience in SEO and digital marketing. With the right SEO and digital marketing techniques and strategies, a VA can boost web traffic, sales, and brand awareness.
A digital marketing assistant can help you will all of the following:
- Developing, updating, and optimizing SEO and web marketing strategies.
- Analysis of blogs and keyword research for websites.
- Create landing pages and set them up.
- Analyze competitors’ target keywords, ranked content, and search rankings (SEMRush)..
- Submit sitemaps to webmasters and manage them.
- Start a link-building campaign and obtain a sufficient number of backlinks.
- The off-page optimization strategy includes blogging, participating in forums and message boards, and commenting on news websites and YouTube videos.
- Analyze Google Analytics reports weekly and monthly; observe traffic on the site.
- Find appropriate, high-traffic websites to place advertisements (banners, side panel graphics, etc.).
- Creating email lists for newsletters, composing promotional content, and handling email marketing responsibilities.
- Update email follow-ups and autoresponders based on response rates.
- Invest in branded content from a content marketing firm or copywriting firm.
- Reach out to journalists and influencers to gain a publisher’s attention.
Danny Veiga
I have my whole content writing team outsourced and working remotely with me. Most of them are from the Philippines.
Personally, outsourcing is an excellent way for companies to improve their bottom-line by attracting highly talented and skilled workers who are open to working less desirable shifts.
Outsourced employees work with such high levels of focus and dedication, it’s often hard not only to meet but even exceeding expectations – all while improving the productivity of business operations.
Outsourcing allows me to save money and time by hiring professionals when they are needed. I have avoided the need for continuous employment, which saves my company from having to invest in training.
Outsourcing companies have a more established process of finding candidates that will be successful with little effort on their part- saving both them and your precious resources.
Eduard Klein
Outsourcing can be the best option for businesses in handling their specialized tasks.
As an entrepreneur, I witnessed how outsourcing can be beneficial in a business whether it is a big or small business. There are some tasks that any outsourcing company can do for your business.
Outsourcing is popular for a variety of reasons. Its service providers can provide new ideas, equipment, and unique, cutting-edge alternatives that would otherwise be unavailable.
Managing IT operations in-house can be exceedingly costly. The average company’s ability and understanding to manage all of its IT requirements is limited.
It is a great move if businesses outsource IT operations that can benefit in terms of costs and skills. Outsourcing marketing tasks can be a practical choice.
It can help for various reasons like it is perfect in skills, experts about contents, updated software that can be used and new ideas to give.
Investing in this kind of investment is practical because it helps the business a lot to work efficiently and effectively.
Zachary Colman – Creatitive
I outsourced bookkeeping tasks, compliance tasks, and payroll to a payroll service.
I work on revenue optimization by running A/B tests on different websites and landing pages from Google.
I hire freelancers to attend events that we sponsor to represent the company or promote our product – these have proven successful in that they allow me to provide those gifts for the event without expending too much of my time or money away from what’s most important: creating new websites, developing software updates, customer onboarding, and overall business development.
Outsourcing has been incredibly beneficial for our business as it enables us to focus on the things we love while saving tons of time doing other things we don’t enjoy so much like bookkeeping.
Abby Herman – Snap Agency
The best microtasks to outsource deal with data entry. This type of work requires a ton of labor but can be completed by basically anyone with an internet connection.
Digital marketing is becoming ever more reliant on consumer data to create hyper-personalized marketing strategies, and part of this requires having someone enter, sort, and format all of these datasets.
Paying someone in-house to perform these types of tasks means more labor costs associated with verifying the data, not to mention a huge time burden.
Digital marketing agencies can benefit from outsourcing microtasks that have to deal with verifying marketing assets and tracking their placement, freeing up more time to commit to more valuable work like content development and client acquisition.
Imśen Monroe – saltedcaramelgirl.com
Outsourcing blog content can be a great way for bloggers to save time, but it also has its own set of challenges. Blogs are not just about writing – they’re about photography, videography, and social media too. In our business (food blogging) we usually tend to outsource some micro-tasks such as photo editing, logo design, and sometimes recipe development.
Jessica Bailey – Anyreasonvegans – A Vegan Recipe Blog
When running my business gets busy sometimes I turn to fiverr to find a tech expert. For example when I find my website has an error like an AMP issue and I need to get it fixed immediately.
Mykola Haichenko – Visme
To be effective at work, everyone should do the job they have a talent for.
Being a content strategist, I must admit I’m not a wordsmith by nature. That’s why outsourcing content production to skilled writers comes to help occasionally.
But here’s the thing.
I don’t just send them a list of blog post ideas I have in mind and call it a day. While I’m not very good at copywriting, they aren’t as experienced in my industry as I am.
The title of the topic I want to publish on my blog isn’t the only thing I add to the task.
I also list the main talking points for each post, explain how everything works, and back it up with research findings I discovered in my practice. And only then, writers start shaping it all into a beautiful and easy-to-read copy.
My point is you can’t delegate a task to someone in two sentences and hope for the best outcome possible. Give them as many details as they need to understand your brand culture and present it in its best form, as if they sit in your office rather than many miles away.
Thank you so much to all the experts that have contributed to this expert roundup! Please share this post with your friends and followers on social media.
