6 Tasks That Every Internet Marketer Should Outsource

In the book “The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It”, author Michael Gerber says every small business can group its tasks into one of the following three categories.

• Technician– which involves customer service, writing sales copy and so on
• Manager– which involves recruiting, monitoring performance of employees
• Entrepreneur- which involves setting business strategy, finding new opportunities and so on

What Gerber says in his book is that in order to become successful as a small business owner, you must shift as much time as possible from the Technician and Manager roles to the Entrepreneur role. As an internet marketer, you should function solely as an entrepreneur and outsource any task that does not require your direct input to freelancers or other contractors.

Keeping this in mind, here are the 6 tasks that every internet marketer should outsource.

#1 Social Media & Content Management

Content creation and the management of social media accounts are important to any online business. As an internet marketer, you should work hard to build a base of loyal customers, readers or buyers who love your content. However, should you be involved in the content production, scheduling content, researching for the content, keyword research, engaging with the audience on the social media, and so on? You might as well outsource these tasks to freelancers on sites such as Elance.com and Freelancer.com and focus on your core responsibilities.

#2 Keyword Research

For sure, there are some parts of the keyword research process that you should handle yourself. You should definitely handle the high level strategy. But you can certainly outsource the keyword research for your articles or blog posts to an SEO firm. There’s no need to do this yourself.

#3 Handling Emails and Organizing Tasks

As an internet marketer, you will receive hundreds of emails each day. The last thing you want to do is to filter through them one by one – that would take up so much of your time. Wouldn’t it be better to hire a virtual assistant to handle your emails for you? You can allot the following tasks to your virtual assistant: Replying to or unsubscribing from emails and categorizing them, calendar management, monitoring Google Alerts for certain keywords, scheduling appointments, collating the appropriate content to be read by you, creating a to do list and so on. This would save you a whole lot of time and money over the long run.

#4 Managing the Email Lists

There are so many things you shouldn’t do as an internet marketer, such as managing your email lists. There’s no reason for you to write replies to customer requests, handle list hygiene and list segmentation, schedule auto responders, analyze subject lines and so on All of these things should be handled by a virtual assistant.

 #5 Customer Service

Customer service is the most important task for any internet marketer. You must take care to provide customer experience of the highest quality. But since you are so busy, it would be hard to do it all by yourself. Instead, outsource the customer service duties to freelance customer support representatives on the internet. Provide them with a working procedure to follow and monitor their performance from time to time.

 #6 Recruiting & Managing Freelancers

One of the most time-consuming tasks for an internet marketer is recruiting and managing freelancers. This is something that is better done by someone else – a manager. Outsource the recruitment and management of your virtual team members or freelancers to a virtual assistant and put them in charge of advertising vacancies, conducting interviews, communicating with freelancers and so on.  This would free up a lot of time for you which is better spent on strategizing for faster business growth.