Internet marketers often outsource different tasks to virtual assistants. Even if you run a small company, with only a few employees, or if you are a solopreneur, as you expand your activity and grow, you will need someone to help you.
A VA can handle tasks that are time-consuming despite being cheap to delegate. This allows you to focus on the most important parts of your work.
Internet marketers often outsource different tasks to virtual assistants. It can be anything from writing ad copy to creating pitch decks.
We contacted 40 entrepreneurs and asked them the following question:
What are some microtasks you outsourced that changed the way you run your business?
Many of them spoke about how outsourcing tasks positively impacted their work. Keep reading to see what each person had to say.
Kent Wong – MySingaporeKitchen
As a private chef in Singapore, there are certain microtasks that I can delegate and outsource to make more time for myself to focus on the things that truly matter. For example, I can hire someone to do the grocery shopping and ingredient prep for me. This will allow me to focus more on creating delicious and unique menus for my clients, rather than spending time at the grocery store or chopping vegetables.
Another task that I can outsource is the cleaning and maintenance of my kitchen. While it’s important to keep my workspace clean and organized, it can be time-consuming to do it myself. By hiring a professional cleaning service, I can ensure that my kitchen is always clean and ready for the next meal prep session.
Additionally, I can delegate tasks such as menu planning and scheduling to an assistant or virtual assistant. This will help me stay on top of my busy schedule and ensure that I am always prepared for my next client.
Overall, by delegating and outsourcing these microtasks, I can make more time for myself to focus on the things that truly matter as a private chef – creating delicious and unique culinary experiences for my private dining Clients in Singapore.
MySingaporekitchen also provides F&B consultancy services in Singapore – we also work closely with other aspiring business owners especially in the F&B industry to help them grow their profitability.
Dawn Taylor – The Taylor Way
The first thing I recommend doing? Look at your business and ask yourself what parts you hate doing.
When I looked at my business and was honest with myself, I saw a few things I could outsource. They included bookkeeping, the setup of my processes and procedures, and filing!
While these are tasks that I am more than capable of doing, I despised them! Since I despised doing them, they took not only extra time away from my already full schedule, but they took extra mental energy as well.
By outsourcing these tasks, I have been able to focus on what I do best and keep my headspace in a better place. Find the people who love to do what you don’t love.
Them doing it with passion is better than you doing it begrudgingly every single time.
Ruthie Bowles – Defy The Status Quo
Some of the most important microtasks I’ve outsourced for my business relate to content publication and distribution.
Content creation can be a hard task to hand off and includes things like blog post writing and video recording.
However, once that content is made, a business owner can easily outsource things like graphics creation and content drafting, publishing, and scheduling.
All of these microtasks can take time, especially if you create a lot of content, but are fairly easy to outsource.
Nikola Roza
Hiring a virtual assistant transformed my business and helped me scale much faster. And it made things much faster as I’m able to focus on what I like doing and am good at it, while still getting other necessary stuff done.
My virtual assistant is from my home town of Boljevac, while I travel the world as a digital nomad. I have my virtual assistant do the tasks where she can do an optimal job with minimum training and marketing knowledge.
For example, I have Link Whisper plugin installed on my site (read my Link Whisper review here). It’s an internal linking automation plugin that automates internal linking and makes it 50x faster than manually.
After a new article is published on my site, she goes into the WordPress editor and uses Link Whisper to add relevant and contextual internal links throughout my site. Works like a charm.
Second, I’m big into updating content. I believe content updates are the key to sustaining and improving Google rankings over time.
But the key with updates is that you don’t want to change too much with each update because there’s a real risk you’ll deoptimize your page and make it less relevant for the search query you’re targeting.
So, to keep things simple my assistant updates content by rewording 1-2 paragraphs per post, while being careful not to touch important keywords.
She rewords with Quillbot, which is a premium paraphrasing tool. That way the output is 100% original, means exactly the same, and SEO is preserved.
I recommend to anyone who’s able to afford it to get a virtual assistant. They pay for themselves in a matter of days and the value they bring to your business just grows as your assistant learns to work better with you, and you with them.
Melissa Eboli
I have outsourced a handful of tasks, and each has definitely helped to free up my time to run my business more smoothly and efficiently.
One way I’ve outsourced is by using a graphic designer. He was able to design a cover for my cookbook, as well as the overall layout, theme, and flow from a design perspective.
This has saved me many hours from not having to do this daunting task myself.
Plus, his professional eye and expertise in this area are far superior to mine would have been having I tackled it on my own. I’m so glad I went in that direction.
Another outsource I have utilized is using a professional photographer for food photos for my cookbook.
Again, I could have done this on my own as the iPhone has many great editing features, but the quality and outcome of using a professional in their respective field make outsourcing all worthwhile.
I was once told when it comes to running a business to do what you know you are a pro at, but leave what isn’t in your forte for the professionals themselves.
Nigel Seah – Writing Wildly
No one is great at everything and it’s ok to admit that.
We all need a little help sometimes.
As a freelance tech content writer, I can safely say that I’m great at what I do. But when it comes to building a website for my writing business, I can also safely tell you that I’m not great at it.
That’s where microtasking comes in handy.
I outsourced the design of my Writing Wildly website to a professional designer. This freed up so much time for me to work on bigger tasks. These include branding marketing, SEO keyword research.
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.
Summer Yule
My recipe and nutrition site SummerYule.com is run (almost) entirely by me, so I needed to outsource a few microtasks because there are only so many hours in a day!
One of the things I do is run my email list using an automated sequence and RSS feeds. People are placed on a list to receive a weekly digest of one of my feeds when they subscribe and indicate their recipe preferences.
I also use a paid theme for the website that is regularly updated by the designer.
In addition, I have future plans to outsource additional microtasks. One thing I’m planning on doing is having a virtual assistant handle the social media marketing for a few of the platforms I don’t enjoy as much.
Outsourcing gives me more time to do the thing I love most- creating new content for the site. The costs involved ultimately save me more money in the end.
Shana Bull
I was a solo entrepreneur for 7 years before I outsourced my first task. As I took on more writing projects, I dreaded the editing part because I would try to write and edit on the same day (always a bad idea).
I hired a part-time contract editor to take a final look at my assignments for clients, and my own blog posts, and I became more excited to take on new projects and write more on my own blog.
Delegating this task led to long-term benefits for both myself and my business. The mental energy I wasted over stressing about editing my blog posts and articles used to stop me from wanting to write more.
I love writing, and I don’t mind editing others’ content, but I don’t like editing my own work.
If you are looking to hire help with your workload, first identify what you are truly great at (and only YOU can do), and which parts of your work you dread (or may take too long to learn). Start small, with part-time help, and scale up if you need to.
Focus on what you are good at, and that excitement will help you grow your business.
Laura Rike
As a former virtual assistant, I definitely see the value in outsourcing! One of the things I’ve outsourced that has helped a lot is the editing of my interviews and blog posts.
The reason this can be so impactful is that I am able to use voice-to-text to dictate my ideas and answers to interview questions, and pass them along to someone on my team to make sure there aren’t any errors.
This enables me to create great writing on the go, which is so helpful as a work-from-home mom!
Another is my HARO pitches! I have a team member who watches the queries for things in my areas of expertise, and who is trained to submit for me, freeing me up to focus on things that only I can do!
Karen Gross Education
I think leaders need to be honest about what they do well and what tasks are better performed by others. In a world of scarce resources, how we spend our time matters.
So it is my view that it is best to spend our time on what we do well and outsource other tasks to organizations and individuals we trust.
Finding outsourced talent is not frictionless. One needs to find the right people: otherwise, one is redoing the work and always being anxious.
I have an amazing team but it has always been key to find those people who get me snd get the work I do. So early conversations pre-outsourcing matter.
For me, web development and maintenance are something I outsource.
Yes, I could learn WordPress or Canva. Yes, I could do regular updating.
But, others can do it vastly better and faster; they know key applications to install on the website to facilitate its utility by the users. I have outsourced both of my work websites.
I also outsource presentation flyers and other outreach documents. There are key designers who can produce remarkable and appealing materials — far better than anything I could produce.
Yes, I provide sample content and perhaps some images. But, my PR team did the design. And I am grateful.
I delegate the preparation of my tax returns and schedule C. Sure, I could do it but experts can do it better and faster and they know what to look for and include and what key items are needed.
Yes, I ask questions and review things, as I do with websites, but I trust others to do what I can’t do easily, efficiently, and well.
In the pre-Covid era, I outsourced my business travel arrangements; flights, hotels, rental cars. Then the itinerary was neatly laid out and organized.
All the confirmations were labeled and in folders as were my speeches and notes and PowerPoints and auxiliary items.
Yes, they made choices for me but at the end of the day, they planned ably for me and allowed me to arrive at the meeting site and talks with ease and comfort.
I outsourced some but not all media outreach to radio tv, podcasts, and print. My pr professionals knew people, knew key topics, knew key sites; their expertise helped and still helps me.
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.
Jake Peterson – Atiba
We recently launched a new website and we outsourced a large number of pages for copywriting.
All of these pages had more or less the same format and style and we just needed the words, call-to-actions, and titles added with a bit of variance.
This would’ve slowed down our website process greatly but we were able to focus on bigger issues instead of nitty-gritty copywriting.
It was money well spent and we’d definitely do it again in the event we needed to create a large amount of copy.
Ryan Biddulph – Blogging From Paradise
The biggest microtask I outsourced is the cumulative bunch of actions related to web development and design.
Handing off all the plug-in stuff, coding, theme stuff, heck, all tech stuff on the backend, allowed me to better help my readers with my blog content.
I solved their problems because I did not waste hours trying to solve my blogging problems with back-office stuff.
Even better?
All headaches, wasted time and energy, and heartache dissolved for me into addressing the headaches, wasted time and energy, and heartache suffered by my readers.
Alexandra Tran – Schimiggy
I currently outsource my content and social media posting to a VA.
This allows me to be more strategic and creative with new tasks that include creating videos and taking photos of my travel and product reviews.
Having a part-time (15 hours a week) VA allows me to free up a lot of my time to do and learn other tasks that are important to the growth of my business (blog and brick-and-mortar salon).
I found my VA by posting job opportunities in blogger and virtual admin Facebook groups.
Brady Kirkpatrick – Gun Made
Many of the microtasks that I outsource are tasks that involve no judgment but they can be a time suck so I delegate them to my team.
These include calendar management, cloud document organization, and the biggest one being my personal affairs.
Maybe I have to deal with scheduling an appointment, buying gifts/flowers, returning a piece of clothing I bought, or maybe booking a flight for vacation.
All of these are low judgment activities that can reduce the amount of time I have to focus on my business so I try to delegate as much work as I can to my team of virtual assistants.
The more time you can free up in your day-to-day activities, the more you can focus on high-level activities that generate the most revenue.
You shouldn’t be spending time on low judgment activities that can easily be outsourced or delegated.
Beth Bridges – The Networking Motivator
I started outsourcing simple tasks like transferring blog posts into Google Docs, researching, and updating contact info.
It changed my perspective on leverage and the highest and best use of my time which includes communicating with clients, developing strategy, and creating content.
Now, I am looking at many more microtasks in my business to see if it can’t be done more effectively by someone else so that I can focus on my best talents.
Adam Shlomi – SoFlo Tutors
I use Zapier to automate almost our entire backend.
For example, when reaching out to customers to fills out a registration form we automatically add their contacts to our database, email them a diagnostic test, and add their billing information to Quickbooks.
Using Zapier I’ve been able to save thousands of tedious hours which can be better spent growing my business.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus – Impact Parents
As a CEO, I’ve learned to play to my strengths and outsource all the things that aren’t in my zone of excellence or genius!
The first outsource was to hire a bookkeeper, who can do a much better job than I can in half the time!
Beyond that, I get help selecting images for the blog and posting them, writing social media and posting them, adding SEO for blog posts, and updating older articles to make sure they’re fresh and current.
I’ve used Fiver and similar platforms to find people to revise logos and create .pdfs for lead generators, and I’ve found copy-writers in the Cult of Copy FB group to draft sales pages.
Probably the most important task has been finding someone who can manage my calendar, including scheduling, re-scheduling, and making sure I have time to eat and breathe!
I try hard to make sure I’m making the best and highest use of my time, which ultimately helps the bottom line!
Jinan Banna
I have outsourced microtasks related to website management and social media.
For example, I prepare a blog post with all the required information, including text, images, captions for social media, and then outsource the posting of the blog on my website using WordPress and sharing on social media.
There are many other things that need to be done on my website that I outsource, such as checking for broken links, monitoring comments posted to my blog, adding content, and including affiliate links from programs like Amazon Associates.
It has been easier for me not to handle activities on WordPress myself.
It’s also useful to outsource posting on social media, as it’s necessary to include relevant hashtags and icons to make the post attractive and available to the most people possible.
This way, I am able to focus more on the creation of content and less on the stuff that goes on behind the scenes.
Oskar Nowik – Epos Now
As part of our marketing strategy, we currently produce around 10-12 blogs a week and upload this onto our website’s resources page to improve SEO and rank higher on search engines.
Although we have an in-house content team who, along with other tasks, work to produce these articles, we have recently begun outsourcing and taking on freelancers to write some of these articles.
We source our freelancers from the popular site, Upwork, ensuring to select writers who use a good understanding of SEO and a good portfolio of written work.
Outsourcing these blogs to freelancers has really benefitted the business as we are now able to produce more blogs and content, therefore increasing our ranking on search engines.
Our in-house content team can also dedicate more of their time to other tasks that will benefit the business such as managing a guest post campaign or securing backlinks for the site.
Dara Connolly
As a 15-year entrepreneur, I have learned (the hard way…) that the best way to run an efficient business is to outsource micro-tasks.
Most entrepreneurs fall into the trap of trying to do everything themselves– this only leaves you feeling exhausted and is less efficient in the long run.
Here are two questions to ask yourself:
If I spend time on this project is it taking my time away from talking or selling to a customer?
Is there someone more qualified to do this task than me?
If the answer is yes, do not hesitate to hire help! There are a virtual-assistants who can manage these tasks for you and allow you the flexibility to focus on lead-generating business.
As a speaker, author, and confidence coach, I can spend all day tweaking my website, answering emails, or posting to social media– but that wouldn’t be a good use of my time. It’s better to outsource these tasks to experts and use my time for my expertise.
Here are three micro-tasks I outsource:
- Website Manager
- Social Media Manager
- Email Manager
Remember, it’s important to hire experts in their fields and do the work that you are an expert at.
Sarah Yasukochi – House Collective
Online audits are an important part of our digital marketing agency’s client onboarding process.
Outsourcing micro tasks within this larger project has positively impacted our business.
We outsource activities such as client asset reviews, competitive research, website data collection, social media information, digital listings and industry news.
Outsourcing these repetitive, time-consuming and sometimes tedious tasks, means that our digital marketing team can dedicate our time and focus to client strategy, fulfilment, analytics and optimization.
Rosemary King – Heart-Led Concierge
I’ve taken time to review how having a bookkeeper can positively impact my business by taking care of a process in my own business that I don’t enjoy nor completely understand.
My bookkeeper is also my tax advisor, so I receive advice on how to track my business expenses properly so, at the end of the year, all my tax notes are ready for the new tax season.
This is helpful because I’m not stressing out over having to gather all my information, it’s all located in one place and is accessible to those that need it.
Finally, having a bookkeeper who also acts as my tax advisor helps me take advantage of all the allowable deductions for a business like mine.
Without those provisions in place, I could be losing hundreds of dollars a year for simple mistakes in tracking my expenses and tax deductions.
The peace of mind of having this type of support in my corner is invaluable. I can spend more time with clients rather than trying to figure out the nuances of tax law and financial transactions for my business.
Catherine Nguyen
I outsource HDR photo processing as well as select high-end retouching requests. I also outsource some of my social media: three posts per week plus stories and 1 blog per month.
Lastly, I outsource some of my administrative tasks such as scheduling, bookkeeping, and workflow tasks such as uploading RAW files for retouching.
As my business has grown, it has become increasingly clear that there is a bottleneck – me.
I needed to open this bottleneck up by outsourcing micro tasks so that I could spend my time doing what people hire me to do: take photos!
Erica Tan – Best in Singapore
I am an entrepreneur and one of the biggest factors behind the success of my company ‘Best in Singapore’ is the outsourcing of the various services which we admit not having any specialization in.
Outsourcing allows us to have flexibility while reducing costs and improving the quality of the output.
One important factor to consider while outsourcing, which a lot of enterprises tend to omit, is the work culture and time differences.
I always look out for vendors from countries that have comparatively cheaper labour and overlapping hours.
It is very important to stay in sync and discuss progress and issues in real-time and it should not be compromised for the sake of a few bucks.
One of the mistakes that I regret to date is outsourcing my customer services and sales.
Although it may not look like a risky proposition at first, it greatly reduces your control over the customer experience that can cost you your brand image and consecutively, sales.
Seth Price – Price Benowitz
Before we started our digital agency and even before we used a CRM system, we outsourced data consolidation services in order to help us deliver improved advertising for our law firm.
Consolidating data can be a tedious process (which is why so many people pay for technology these days to do it for them), and being able to get a trusted company to manage this task was quite beneficial in the early days of our firm.
After completing this task, we quickly realized that we were going to need to look into the use of a CRM. It saved us so much time and gave us much better results than when we took the tedious route ourselves.
That was a big step for our firm, as it pushed us towards the direction of client-centric and personalized marketing (which does extremely well for us today).
Bianca Grover
As an entrepreneur, I find myself constantly strapped for time and always looking for the best way to do business.
By identifying microtasks that I am less qualified – or interested – in executing, I can spend more time training my clients and advancing my business.
Most creative marketing services like website design, business card design and social media design have been outsourced to a marketing professional I work with. This provides me with a professional look with a fraction of the time investment.
This also ensures that the in-depth variables such as SEO, branding and mobile optimization are all taken care of. I also outsource my accounting to keep things such as revenue reporting and taxes in order.
By doing this, I avoid headaches and can focus on what I do best. Not to mention, it empowers me to invest in my business with hard numbers to justify it.
Simon Brisk – Click Intelligence
Every day, I cherish my decision to outsource the outreach task to a virtual assistant. She has excellent skills in marketing and does a great job connecting new clients to the business.
Previously, I would attend dozens of seminars each week to reach out to potential clients and spread awareness on digital marketing.
The commute and preparations were unnerving as they were time-consuming. This barely left me any time to work on a business project. All work was subordinated to project teams.
Now with the virtual assistant, I just have to meet with people that need to discuss the final steps before they hire our services. This opens up a major part of my schedule for work and family.
Surprisingly, my constant availability and active participation in company projects have led to a reduction of almost 15% in project completion time.
Umair Hussain – Cloudways
One of the productive tasks that we often outsource is that we leverage micro-influencers.
You can not only make your profiles or business pages on different social media platforms but can also reach out to micro-influencers that would be keen enough to publish or promote your product on their posts, stories, or status.
As per their followers, the micro-influencers might ask for some payments while others would want a set of free products from your business site.
Another thing that we count on in the outsourcing microtask is to support the YouTube Channels that promote our brand with thousands of subscribers.
With creative video content and selecting the Channel that matches your brand niche, you always get astounding growth and leads on your brand.
For outsourcing the tasks, you can always count on your Digital Marketing experts as they know and have excellent leads, resulting in getting a productive impact for your brand and product.
Andrew Latham – Super Money
I have had great results outsourcing microtasks to virtual assistants that specialize in data entry and online research.
The secret to outsourcing microtasks is taking the time to document the tasks clearly and breaking them down into easy to follow steps.
Our team was able to 10x productivity when creating new product profiles and auditing our existing verticals.
Using virtual assistants to search for potential partners that could benefit from our free shopping comparison tools also freed up a lot of time.
Time the team could dedicate to our business core focus, which is improving our tools and creating quality content for our users.
Evan Albert – Seamless Chex
The type of tasks that outsourcing best serves are those that are consistent, time-consuming, and that lie outside the parameters of your or your company’s expertise.
These are tasks that take time and effort to perfect but are not necessarily in line with your company’s core goals or values. For instance, we recently outsourced our social media management.
As a financial institution, we just didn’t have anyone in-house who could comfortably inherit the responsibilities required for social media management. And it worked!
Since outsourcing social media management, we have seen improved customer and partner engagement across the social media platforms that are most important to us: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
We’re enjoying substantial social growth while also managing to keep all financial hands on the proverbial deck.
It’s allowed us to expand in an area that is important to us without distracting us from our core goals or the industrial passion that inspired us to go into business in the first place.
Catherine Valega – Green Bee Advisory
I have many calls with clients and prospective clients – on a daily basis. Using my scheduling app (ScheduleOnce) – I can create different types of appointments – both content, duration, and format.
I can also choose how many appointments in a week, a day, etc.
Gone are the days of emailing back and forth ‘What days/times work for you?’ – now I share the link – Schedule time with me here! – and my interactions can be scheduled based on clients’ own availability.
There are many apps out there – Calendly, Accuity, etc – but I’m beholden to ScheduleOnce as it is the only one approved by my firm.
The other time-saving part of a scheduling app is that you can choose how often to send reminders – for example, I may remind the appointment-holder one day prior, and one hour prior.
They also have the ability to change/reschedule/cancel without my handholding. Major time-saver, I can’t live without.
Joy Corkery – Latana
We outsourced the task of finding influencers that we could potentially work with.
We asked that the person come up with a list of 100 and links to the influencer’s social media accounts, plus follower numbers.
By outsourcing this task, we freed up time in-house, while still getting valuable information that would help kickstart our influencer strategy.
Sean Douglas – TheSuccess Corps
The task I decided to outsource was mainly video. I was doing all videos in house but became too much and bogged us down.
We ended up hiring a videographer to take over a bulk of the promo videos we run for clients during their launches. Once we did that, it freed us up to concentrate on our DPAs, Dollar Producing Activities.
We also outsourced to a graphic designer all of our book cover designs and graphics.
Once we found someone to take over these aspects, our team could onboard more clients and concentrate on launch sequences, marketing, and positioning, while delivering great quality.
What we learned was to capitalize on strengths and what we do best. This allowed us to grow exponentially!
Erez Dror – Genda
As part of our daily job, we are very busy building relationships with clients.
In the last year, we have realized that there are microtasks we can outsource in order to facilitate our work process and improve it.
As part of this, we decided to outsource the process of creating the initial reaching out to customers, and also the microtask of creating a list of companies that are our potential customers.
These two allowed us to increase our pipeline relatively quickly.
Without the need to invest a lot of resources.
Vincent Phamvan – Teal
As a CMO, there are two main categories of work that are often outsourced. The first is work that is highly repeatable and easy to train. This can often include online research or data entry.
We often partner with outside organizations and companies for joint marketing campaigns.
Researching other companies and building an spreadsheet of contact information may be an example of a microtask to outsource.
The second category of work to outsource is work where our company may not have the internal expertise in this area.
Advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work is an example of an area that can be highly technical and often can make sense to work with a contractor who is an expert in this area.
Sam Shepler – Testimonial Hero
Although our work primarily revolves around video editing, we often pick up random work on the side, such as “Can you create an animation to explain my business?”.
I always say yes and use People Per Hour or equivalent to find someone to do it. I pay generous tips and try to always work with the same people if I get similar jobs in the future to keep the quality high.
I do have to put in a bit of work to explain the project and brainstorm with whoever we hire to do it but it’s usually a few hours.
We do this rather than doing it in-house because these jobs are so random that we would have to hire a lot and seriously expand our business to fulfill them in-house.
One of the criteria we use for outsourcing is skill set. If we feel highly confident that we can do the work ourselves, then we do it.
If we know there are others more highly skilled in a particular area, we outsource that task and focus on our core competency.
We know we can bring in the work and do the core, but let others do the specialized work we’re not willing to take the time to learn.
John Jonas – Online Jobs
One microtask that I outsource is having my virtual assistant screen my emails.
She get rids of the spam. She unsubscribes me to newsletters I don’t need. She deletes duplicate emails.
I know I can do these tasks myself.
But not seeing them in my inbox makes it easier for me to focus because I’m not distracted by the things I need to get rid of.
Maya Levi – Return Go
In my experience as marketing manager, the one microtask that I outsourced which changed the way I work for the better would be generating leads.
Instead of spending hours doing outreach to get leads as part of our marketing plan, outsourcing lead generation gave me more time and freedom to focus more on devising marketing strategies to build client relationships better.
I can craft effective marketing scripts for the sales department rather than spend time sending out cold emails to potential prospects who may or may not reply.
Ann Martin – Credit Donkey
One microtask that my business outsources is making and sending our weekly email newsletter. Even though it only represents about two hours of work per week, putting it together requires a high level of attention to detail.
It’s also time-sensitive since we try to have it sent out at a particular day and time each week to increase our open and clickthrough rates.
For these reasons, it’s difficult for our full-time staff to complete the newsletter while managing their other responsibilities. Outsourcing it to a freelancer has been game-changing.
Now, all we have to do is send a quick email to the freelancer listing the content from our site that we want to promote. They build the email newsletter around it, choose images to include, and send a test to us.
Once we approve it, our freelancer sends it out.
The work done is well worth the hourly rate we pay to the freelancer because we’re able to maintain good marketing campaigns without the stress of throwing together new content every single week.
Teresha Aird – Offices.net
The primary microtask that we outsource at Offices.net is the creation of title tags and meta descriptions for our office pages.
As an online brokerage that services the entire United States, we have a large portfolio of office spaces that is constantly added to as new offerings come to market.
Each of our office spaces has their own individual page on our website that requires its own title tag and meta description to aid our overall SEO efforts.
This task, whilst extremely important, can be very time-consuming and laborious for our in-house team.
After much discussion, we decided to outsource this task to trusted freelancers to provide our team with more time to pursue link-building opportunities, potential partnerships, content creation, and technical SEO improvements.
The benefits we saw from this change were immediate, and we are extremely happy with the way in which outsourcing has improved our productivity.
Some other microtasks that we source include the creation of infographics to support the content posted on our blog, as well as occasional keyword research and analysis.
Paul Gomes – Energy Rates
Any work which is not confidential and repeatable, we try to outsource.
Tasks like collecting leads, managing websites, graphic designs, and live chat are outsourced by us.
It helps us to stay focused on our primary goal and perform productive hours.
Our business has grown exponentially since we started outsourcing.
Caleb Sim – The Genia
I run an SEO Agency and one of my main client acquisition channel is video advertising on Facebook and Youtube.
Videos are especially effective for social media platforms but are time consuming to produce.
I take the videos myself on my handphone and outsource the editing work to freelancers for very affordable rates. They do a much better job than I ever can and save me a ton of time!
Surya Biswas
As a blogger, I find myself constantly strapped for time but unable to progress further without bottlenecks.
By outsourcing microtasks, I can do this easily. This is a huge difference between amateur blogging vs doing it as a business.
Most creative marketing services like website design, business card design, and social media design have been outsourced to a marketing professional I work with.
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.
