I don’t know this guy Soren personally, and I’ve never been to his blog before today. In the interest of disclosure, I will NOT make ANY money by telling you about this post. He probably will, but I’m too tired today to turn this into money for me.

He made an excellent post about outsourcing, and I’ll be frank, there’s an affiliate link in his post, for a product I think is a must-have. If I had gotten any sleep Thursday night before watching the twins (during my mastermind call!) I would probably have gone and signed up as an affiliate myself.

The sales page linked from his page alone is that good of a lesson. But this post isn’t about that.

The reason I’m telling you about the post, even if you don’t even click on the link to the sales page is that Outsourcing Saved My Ass. And by extension, my business. (Yes, I have that much junk in my trunk. lol. This is why people need sleep. Silliness like this.)

I was your classic, can’t afford to outsource case. I thought I was saving money by doing everything myself, and saving time by not teaching anyone what I know so that THEY could do it. Of course, I could have also hired someone who already knew how to do what I needed done, but in retrospect, at the time it didn’t make sense. if I did that, what would I do? What was my value?

Duh. I could do anything from “nothing but cash checks” to “build my brand”, to “focus on marketing” to “do the top-level, big-picture stuff that makes my prices worth it to my clients, and different from the next guy”.

Then I got sicker than I ever have been before and almost lost my business.

Twice. In four months.

I am STILL trying to pay for the mistakes I made then, and the only way I’m moving forward now is outsourcing, because of course, health care takes up 80% of anything I take home (another post).

But if my money goes to keeping the business open, paying for the ramifications of that time, and the cost of the projects I’m doing now, how can I pay for outsourcing?

At first, I was paying the people I outsource with on commission, training, and JV leverage. Now, with the profits having them makes me. I have more time free to make more products. When I make more products, I make more money.

I have more time free to create content to market myself. When I make more content, and use it to market myself, I make more money.

I have more free time to coach and train. When I coach and train a handful of carefully selected people, they make more money, and when they make more money, they stay clients longer. When they stay clients longer, I make more money.

So yes, this time last year I would have been one of the people who said “my job isn’t outsourcable”. The truth was, I thought that if it was possible to get rid of most of the work I had to do that I was useless. And I had all these ideas in my head about how making money has to be so hard.

And I learned that not only is that not the case, if you don’t outsource, hire employees or virtual teams, the thing to think about is that you’re not outsourcing to get rid of yourself, you’re outsourcing to FREE yourself. Whether it’s to have more time for family, to market yourself, or to have time to do the things that make your company money, outsource, create a job or virtual assistant for EVERY function that doesn’t fall into the core dream that you painted for yourself, AND every thing in the core dream that’s not the best use of your time.

And don’t forget things that you just hate to do to start with.

You can always add things back in. You always have that option later.

So yeah, your personal talent and touch may not be outsourceable. But if you think about it, that’s probably 1% IF THAT of what you’re doing. It may be the most important 1%, but it’s only 1%.

If you think about it, every major company in the world is just an outsourcing outfit. There were what, a couple of guys who started eBay? As they grew, they realized, hey, I can’t do all this crap myself.

You want to be a bigger firm? You want to create opportunities for your business? You want to expand your market? You want to make more money? You want to be a big brand someday — maybe even a household name?

Go and read Soren’s post about Outsourcing. Take the first step, and consider outsourcing.

It’s the number one topic on everyone’s mind at some point: what will happen to my business during hard times?

It doesn’t seem to matter what business you’re in, or whether the news says it’s getting a little better or a little worse.

Every business owner’s mind drifts to the recession at some point.

We wonder: are we headed for another Great Depression? Or will we just be tightening our belts to ride out the latest storm?

Wish I had the answer to that but I have no clue. I’m a website promotion specialist. How
would I know?

What I do know is that I’m not participating in the recession — I’m too busy and I haven’t got a *thing* to wear!

I say that with tongue in cheek, but due to an expensive health problem I’ve had since 1992, I really don’t know what it is to have an adult life where you can consistently indulge in extras — mine always went to meds or physical therapy, or back-pay on doctors’ bills. So for me, it’s Always a recession.

But I believe you can turn just about any circumstance into a positive, and sure enough, it puts me in a unique position to tell you how to get your business to prosper in a time when it feels like the economy is in a tail spin for some indefinite amount of time.

The answer to recession for me?

Market harder, and market better.

Doing better, faster and more creative marketing has always helped me move my business forward, even when I was having a hard time — even now when it seems like Everyone is having a hard time.

I was no genius when I started thinking this way, so don’t think that just because website promotion and marketing is my business, this strategy can’t work for you.

So what does marketing harder mean? Or marketing better, for that matter?

I’m not saying that if you were spending $2000 a month on advertising that you should now spend $3000. Nor am I saying cut back. There are basically two steps.

First, spend your advertising money *smarter* –make it go as far as it possibly can. Really look more closely at what is working the best to bring your business leads, sales and in the case of the web, traffic, and focus your money and attention there.

Reduce or eliminate everything else. If it makes you feel better, put it on hold and resume it when you have more in your pocket.

In other words, if ezine ads have always set your sales on fire, but pay per click has always been iffy, move more of your ad budget into ezine ads until the economic storm passes. Once your company is in better financial health, you’ll be able to afford to hire an expert to tweak your pay per click if you need it.

Some sites seem to be made for pay per click, but get hit and miss results with press releases. In that case it would be better to reduce, but not end, press release campaigns, and shift that money to PPC until you have more profit to risk.

The second step would be to append that advertising with more cost-effective marketing, especially in whatever area you’re not doing now. If it will only cost you a few hundred dollars in the short term to implement a tested technique that will get you results for years to come, investing the time is a wise move.

Let’s say you’re doing article marketing by posting to hundreds of directory-style sites.

Awesome.

Now get those same articles distributed directly to ezine publishers that have better
reach, and are more exclusive about who they accept. Need to test them out first? Run a classified or top sponsor ad.

And don’t stop there. Once your name gains recognition among your peers, take your expertise marketing to the next level and do some interviews.

Find ten people with targeted audiences and do 10 interviews. You can even cut those ten people in on the profits by offering their audience a special offer and paying them a percentage per sale as a referral fee.

There’s all kinds of creative marketing you can do that you can start with quickly, from blogging, article marketing or social media to organic search strategies. And of course ther are also all kinds of twists you can put on whatever you’re already doing.

How do you find them? For at least 30 minutes today, sit down and write marketing ideas. I learned a tip from a brilliant man named Allen says that after your mind has been working on something for 30 minutes, it just keeps coming up with more ideas on autopilot.

I’ve found that the longer I go, the better my ideas get. So even if you have to stop after 30 minutes, take that pad and paper with you.

And no matter how silly any idea seems, write it down. It may inspire something else later.

When you’re done, pick the best one and go do it, or assign it to your marketing team if you have one. Research who does something similar, and follow their successes.

It’s the ultimate recipe for getting a business through hard times — market harder, market more creatively, and do it in addition to, not instead of, advertising. Some marketing takes a little time to work.

The people are still out there. Your business still helps people. A recession or hard times just means you have to work a little smarter for the same amount of money.

You can do it. Don’t abandon hope just yet.

Last week, we were talking about one of the reasons business blogging growth is slowing.

Part of the reason growth is slowing is that the instant fame model of blogging is proving to be hollow. You can’t be an instant success blogger. It just doesn’t happen.

It may look like this blogger was an overnight success or that company got instant social media attention. But there’s always a huge amount of work coupled with a huge amount of work behind it.

And yet. There is a way that business blogging can greatly enhance your visibility day after day, if you’re willing to forgo the Hyper-Viral model.

What if I told you that there is a way to get the same overall effects and the same amount of traffic as being on the front page of Digg, with better results? Would you want to know how to do that?

What if you saw the results over a couple of weeks or months, instead of days — BUT you could make it keep happening over and over again with a regularity that you just can’t guarantee with Digg?

Some people are saying yes, what’s the difference when I get the traffic and publicity as long as I get it? Especially if I can repeat it?

But some people are thinking, no, I want a big burst of success.

So I’ll present another part of the reality. Let’s say you have a choice between these two scenarios.

I can get you on front page result with Digg, and in time and labor, it would cost you $4000, but I could only pull it off once a year. In that one time, you still have to pay me whether you’re on the page for five minutes or 15 hours. And I can’t sell you votes or any of that stuff — you have to do the work involved, and know that after many, many times, it will eventually happen, but not be sure when, and not really be able to control it.

OR.

I can get you the same amount of traffic, the same amount of links, from the same number of weeks or months of work but over the time you’ll be working.

In other words, that traffic will be spread out over several weeks or months, starting in a few weeks.

Your internal time and labor costs are around $1000., then there’s $2000 in set up and fees. BUT. Once you learn how to do it this one time, you can do it over and again, as often as you like.

Now. It’s front page of Digg, one time shot, take whatever results you get for $4000. Or spend $3000 and get the same results, but over, say, a month’s time, then repeat that result as many times as you like for free after that.

Option Two looks better now, doesn’t it? In the days to come, we’ll be talking about letting go of that shortcut mentality of getting one quick Digg front page vs spreading your traffic — and risk — out over multiple social media properties, including your own blog.