Outsourcing question...

The most important point about outsourcing is that you have to be able to specify the work as carefully as humanly possible. The less you leave to chance/guessing, the more profitable your operation will be.

I would invest in online advertisement too for getting more business. If you are to outsource work, make sure it is more reliable and stable centre.

Now a days online marketing is the best way to promote your business.Just focus on target customers.

I can tell you one of my affiliate marketing systems...

Beginners often look at affiliate websites as "passion projects." They throw their heart and soul into an affiliate blog, hammering out quality content, ranking it, syndicating it, hurling media buys in the right direction, and the successful ones do all of this and develop a consistent ROI. All well and good. But "not all" affiliate websites should be viewed as passion projects. Instead - view them as cash cows.

This is the basic approach. Devote yourself to optimizing your affiliate site for profitability, and once you've done so, put together some operational manuals. Each manual should deal with a separate area of operations. Combined, the manuals constitute complete running of your affiliate business, as it relates to this one website alone. Make the manuals easy to follow, literally step by step, and keep the language basic, simple syntax.

Once you've done this, farm out operations by assigning a single VA to each manual. This way, no one person learns the ins-and-outs of your entire system, and since you've broken down the manuals into simple steps, you can hire less-experienced workers who are less likely to steal ideas and more likely to appreciate the work and do the job for a relatively low level of pay.

Rinse and repeat this process for as many affiliate sites as you can get into the right levels of profitability.

Tom

I would first make it a point to define my business goals to myself within a time limit. Then start with the things I have to outsource to complete or run the project (business). In fact, divide this into two types - one that you have to outsource one-time off and some long term tasks to outsource. I would then divide my budget into 2 parts - one that I can spend small amount on and the other that I will focus more on to get to my goal.

By far, my experience is that you should spend 80percent on marketing and 20 percent on others. So now I would draw a marketing strategy or outsource this part too and get the best strategy to grow my business and implement it.

As an email marketer I will answer this question based on an email marketing perspective.

If I were to start a brand new online business with that kind of budget, then I would:

1. Set up a squeeze page/opt in page.

2. Look for a high converting product which will benefit my visitors and email list subscribers.

3. Set up my email Autoresponder sequence with messages highlighting the benefits of that product, with affiliate links.

4. Find my EPC(earnings per click)- this is done by buying small solo ads (100 clicks each) and finding a good solo ad seller who can give me a great EPC.

I personally look for EPC's of $1.00 and above.

EPC=Earnings/Total number of clicks.

5. Once I have found an EPC I like, then it's all a matter of scaling my budget with the right solo ads sellers who are giving me quality clicks and conversions.

To do this I would find my Cost Per Click (CPC). CPC=Total spent on solo ad/Number of clicks to my website.

If my CPC is less than my earnings per click then I would scale up my budget. For example If my EPC is $1.00 and my CPC is $0.50 then I would scale it up.

Hope that helps

Without knowing what "online business" exactly you're going into, it's hard to tell what steps you should follow and or what expectations to have...

That $5k could be blown within a just a month on advertising or that could barely be enough to set up an e-commerce website.

I think what you need to do is be more specific with what type of business online you would like to get involved with and then based on that do more research on the costs involved, etc.

Also outsourcing-wise, it can get very expensive, when you don't want to do anything yourself. If you want quality work, then expect to pay a top dollar for that, because cheap work from Philippines or India, for example, is not always the high-standard you expect.