It doesn’t matter whether they’re offline or online, the most successful entrepreneurs have one thing in common – they didn’t get there on their own. They may well have started out as a lone voice, but over time they’ve engaged the services of other people to help get them to where they are now.

If you don’t want the hassle of employing someone, or don’t think that you have enough work to justify employing someone, even on a part time basis, don’t worry. Outsource your work instead.

What is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is the process of paying someone else to do tasks for you. The beauty of it is that

• No job is too small to outsource
• You don’t need to make any long term commitment to the contractor
• You can always hire an expert because you can outsource each individual task to a different outsource worker
• The administrative burden of employment is avoided

What Should I Outsource?

There are two types of work that are ripe for outsourcing, work you don’t have the skills to do yourself, and low value work which is time consuming but also cheap to outsource. That said, that doesn’t mean you should outsource them, at least not immediately.

While many people can turn their hand to many things, there are some things that perhaps we’ve just never had to do before, require a high degree of skill, or have such a prominent role in front of the customer that getting the pros in from day one makes sense. The type of activities likely to fall into these categories include graphics and copy writing.

Other activities such as backlinking, article writing and tweeting are things that while you might ultimately consider them to be outsourcing jobs, you may find beneficial to do yourself first. Why? A number of reasons really.

1. When you first start out you’ll want to keep cost low, at least until you start seeing money coming in.
2. By doing the work yourself, you’ll learn what’s involved. This will give you an idea of how long it should take someone else to do the job. It also might help you put a value on how much you’d be prepared to pay someone else to do it.
3. When you know how to do something yourself, you’ll not only be in a better position to explain what you want done, but also to instruct someone on how to do it.
4. If you need to do something quickly, you’ll be in a position to do it yourself. You won’t miss an opportunity because of the delays involved with outsourcing.

Learn how to do it, get some income coming in, and then focus on outsourcing it.

Where Can I Find Outsource Workers?

You’ve finally reached the point where it makes sense to outsource. You’ve mastered the basic skills yourself, it’s more cost effective for someone else to do it, and you want to focus more on building your business rather than working in it. But where do you find outsource workers?

Fortunately there’s a wealth of outsourcing sites available to choose from. If you’re just looking for small or perhaps off beat jobs sites like Fiverr, Gigbucks and Goferr could be ideal. If the job is more substantial you might want to look at sites such as,

• Odesk. Here you can find a huge number of  workers covering a multitude of disciplines. You can agree both hourly rates or fixed fees and the site offers some project management software.
• Elance. Similar to Odesk, this is a very popular site from which you can hire great talent with skills ranging from programmers and writers to marketers and accountants.
• Rent a Coder. This site specialises in programming and design services.

If you’re really not too sure who to use, just pop on to a couple of internet marketing forums such as Warrior Forum or Wicked Fire and ask for feedback from others.

Over To You: Do you outsource work? What made you decide to do it? What sites do you use?

Comments welcome.