What Would Be The FIRST Thing You Outsource?

Backlink building is the first thing I outsource.

It's a real pain and very time consuming.. it's also hard to find a decent backlinking service to outsource to.

If by "outsource" you mean the Warrior definition of the term (stop doing it yourself and have someone else do it), then the first thing is obvious... management of the rest of your outsourcing. Business owners are investors. If they also serve as the CEO, they also have a vision and sometimes make the larger decisions toward attaining that vision. Whenever either one takes on roles better fit for non-business owners, they are costing themselves money.

If by "outsource" you mean the common English business use of the term (to have another company do the task, especially an offshore vendor vs. having an employee do the task), then you have to ask yourself what advantages you wish to attain by outsourcing.

It is usually cost related, but is sometimes regulatory or political. If it is cost related, it is a simple matter to calculate your ROI for each potential candidate process for outsourcing. You start with the one that has the highest ROI.

If you need to outsource for a regulatory or political reason, then it is really a reverse ROI decision. Calculate your risk of having a problem with the new regulatory or political situation and turn it into an estimated cost. Then you can do an ROI analysis on moving it to another jurisdiction.

Most online businesses use the term "outsource" very differently than it is used here.

The term originated with offline businesses in the 70s when American labor became prohibitively expensive. In general, it simply means to "source" from "outside" the company. The goal was to get cheaper labor.

So the term evolved to mean specifically outsourcing to countries that have cheaper labor. Even though the term simply means "source" from "outside" the company, it has come to mean "source" from outside the "country."

The political situation in both England and the U.S. in the 70s and beyond made a lot of "outsourcing" decisions change from simply being the search for cheaper labor to being the search for jurisdictions that weren't so hostile for business.

I'm not sure of the history of the use of the term on the Warrior forum, but I suspect it goes back to the release of John Reese's bonus CD for Traffic Secrets 1 which was entitled "Outsourcing Secrets" and detailed how to use Camtasia to document processes so that you could have someone else do those tasks.

Technically that isn't "outsourcing" if you are having someone within your company do those tasks. It is just management. But now we have two very different definitions for the term. Be careful when you ask or answer a question about outsourcing since we have the exact same community using the term in two very different ways.

I was actually thinking a lot about outsourcing the link building, would you do this on like odesk?

I would outsource the submission of the articles, and probably the writing of the articles. I'd pick that first because it doesn't take too much skill to submit articles, writing articles is boring and fairly simple, and you're not outsourcing something that you want to have control over (like which articles link to which, or what keywords to utilize).

I'm pretty good with writing articles but the link building is extremely tedious. Plus I don't really know how many is appropriate, especially with guys like Terry Kyle selling 400 a month packets telling you you have to have that many to rank, and then I turn around and other people are telling me no no, just get a few high quality links, and others say "just make sure your sources are varied, web 2.0's, articles, profiles..." but I digress...

Building links is a pain so seems like a good thing to get off your list as soon as possible.

I can't really recommend someone to do that, I ended up getting someone full time to do it for me. Terry Kyle's back link challenge post had some suggestions there but it takes some digging to find them..

For me it was a case of looking at what parts of the business were not the creative cogs, for example, writing articles, web 2.o properties, press releases etc as I wanted full control over what was written.

I looked at mainly the backlinking and submission tasks, and outsourced the task that took the most time from my schedule first.

From that point you can think about outsourcing other things that take the most time from you. Of course make sure you fully research the person or company doing the work for you so you know you'll be getting a good service.

Many good providers on here for when you're ready.