As we know, we have got limited time to work in a day – we have to give at least 6 hours for our natural needs, some relaxing, some eating etc. If we may try to use up these hours too in our work, we may break down after a few days. Our body requires something to convert into energy and without energy, nothing can be operated well. This is the reason why time is the most valuable in our life and we need to manage the available time the most prudently. In the earlier posts, I had submitted some suggestions. This is in continuation thereto.
Outsourcing: How to Get More Done in Less .
Time is really equal to money. If you are an internet entrepreneur, you need to ask yourself what the best use of your time really is because it is your time that equals money. The health of your bottom line is directly affected by the way that you choose to allot your working hours.
First let’s discuss what your job really is as an internet entrepreneur. Your job is to grow your business. Your job is to make those contacts that will make you money. Your job is to conceive ideas and bring them to fruition. Your job is to close that deal! You do agree with that description of your job duties as an internet entrepreneur, don’t you?
Okay! Now let’s discuss what your job as an internet entrepreneur is not. Being an internet entrepreneur does not qualify you as an accountant, an advertising guru or a writer. You aren’t qualified to be an event planner or a travel agent. When you decide to become an internet entrepreneur, your intention does not automatically make you a ‘master-of-all-trades’. You need to learn intricacies of the trade you are going to opt. If it is not possible, you must outsource the knowledge – that will be cheaper in terms of time.
You should not waste a lot of your valuable time on tasks that you can not plan because of your resources, environment and caliber. It is your job to make your business grow and you’ll be good at that provided that is where you use your time and direct your energies.
If you insist upon doing everything yourself, whether you are good at it or not, you will use up all of your thoughts and energy and have nothing left to do the things that only you can do to make your business grow.
• For your accounts, hire an accountant or accounting services provider.
Every business must keep a record of its day to day financial transactions and even the smallest of transactions add up to big tax deductions over the period of a year. You can’t simply file everything under ‘miscellaneous’ and you can’t spend an hour or so every day taking care of just mundane bookkeeping duties either. Bookkeepers and accountants only charge for the time that they actually spend working for you. Usually they have many clients.
If they spend one hour working on your records then you will only be charged for that one hour. YOU aren’t a bookkeeper or an accountant and you would have likely spent three or four hours doing the same tasks and then with questionable results. Hire an accountant or a bookkeeping service! It will save your time and in turn, your money you might have lost due to investment of more time than a qualified accountant does and the money you may pay him/her.
• Hire a VA (Virtual Assistant)
A virtual assistant can save you hours and hours of time on the mundane tasks that are required to be accomplished in order to run a successful internet business.
A VA can check your email and send only the emails that you need to personally deal with to you. Internet entrepreneurs get more junk mail than anybody! A good VA can also act as a travel agent and make airline and hotel reservations for you. He can program your visits and meetings etc. in advance so that you may have a smooth working in your office as well as out of your office/town. Hire a VA!
• Use ghost writers and article submission services.
Writing articles and E-books is always a big part of all internet marketing no matter what the niche might be. You will need to have website content and you will also need to submit articles and E-books to banks and repositories for others to use along with your resource box in order to build up your online credibility.
Ghost writers will post to blogs and forums for you above your own signature file that includes your name and website. Some ghost writers will also submit articles and E-books to banks and repositories for you. If the ghost writer that you employ does not, then you can seek an articles submission company to do that time consuming task for you as well.
• Use an advertising agency
Now advertising agencies don’t work cheap so you will need to be very, very specific about what you want them to do for your business. You can likely get PPC advertisements written rather reasonably and even that will be a huge help to you in terms of time. There are only just so many hours in a day and you can only spend just so many of those hours working at making your online business successful. There is still life outside of business.
You have friends and family that do require some measure of your time. That makes it even more vital that you use your time to make your business grow and not waste your time by spending doing the everyday tasks that can take so much of your valuable time.
Think outsourcing!
Guerrilla Methods to save money and spend less than your competitors
The formula for determining profit is a really simple one and the one that all budgets are based upon. Income – Expenses = Profit. It isn’t complicated. There are two ways to improve your profit; (1) increase income or (2) decrease expenses. If you are able to figure out both simultaneously, it will be a splendid task you will accomplish. I say, if you are able to increase your income even by keeping your expenses on the same level, it means that you are able to enhance your margin. But unfortunately increasing income is much harder than decreasing expenses when it comes to improving your bottom line.
Fortunately, working at home comes with some built in savings right up front. You don’t have to buy that expensive gasoline to get to and from work. You don’t have to keep your working wardrobe up to date. You can eat a sandwich for lunch in your own kitchen. And all of these are good money-saving things when you work at home.
There are, however, some other measures that you can take to help decrease your work at home expenses. I may make some money saving suggestions:
• Don’t buy every piece of software that comes to your knowledge.
Most of us who work at home are software junkies. We love software….all kinds of software…and before we know it we have software on top of software and more software than we need or even can use.
• Don’t buy bigger programs than you need.
Often programs that help us accomplish the necessary tasks are offered in various sizes. You might be planning on having a hundred employees next year but you don’t need software to manage a hundred employees this year. You can always upgrade when the time comes. Today you need to save the bucks and go with only what you need today.
• Don’t spend unnecessary funds on your advertising campaign.
So many times new entrepreneurs will start out running advertising without making out the forecasts. They will choose every single key word and phrase possible and then let the advertisements continuously. This is a huge waste of advertising funds. You need to learn to read the statistics that are provided to you by search engines and gear your advertisements to only appear in search results under very controlled circumstances and only during specific hours. It isn’t hard to run up huge bills in a very short period of time and not make a single sale in the process.
• Take full advantage of free advertising to build your business and your credibility.
There are free ways to advertise that are almost as effective as paid-for advertising in E-zines and newsletters. Some of these free advertising methods are:
• Write E-books and articles and submit them to E-book repositories and article banks for others to use free of charge.
These articles and E-books are accompanied by your resource box and include your name and your website address.
• Post to blogs and forums that are related to the products and services that you sell.
You post above a signature that includes your name and your website address.
• A banner exchange with another website owner who promotes products and services which are complimentary to the products and services you sell.
It is yet another method of free advertising.
• Build a long and impressive opt-in list.
Email advertising is free but you need the recipient’s permission to send advertising emails.
• Learn to make your email advertisements viral.
There are a great many techniques that can be used to encourage the recipients of your advertising emails to share them with friends and family.
• Sign up with a good flat-rate long distance telephone service.
The internet is a worldwide place of business and it isn’t hard to run up a long distance bill of big amounts of money pretty quickly. A flat-rate long distance telephone service can save you a lot of money over time.
The above list is not exhaustive – you can make additions at your end but remember the formula for determining profit: Income – Expenses = Profit.
It’s great to increase income when you can but you can always find ways to decrease expenses if you look for them. When you spend less, you make more and that will blow your competitors away!
Be Happy – Enhance Your Income by Working At Home.
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