As you may have noticed, it’s been about three weeks since I last made a post here on No-BS-Marketing. Although my main “dot-com” businesses (UltimateFatBurner.com & Real-Customer-Comments.com) are always my #1 priority, I really hoped I would be more consistent posting material to this site. But sometimes, running a successful Internet business gets in the way.
And that’s the topic of today’s ramblings. 
If you’ve just begun your Internet business in the quest to make money online, you’ll understand what I say when I tell you that as an Internet marketer, you have to wear many hats. At least, you have to wear many hats until you’re profitable enough to start outsourcing some of your tasks. For example, you need to…
- Create reams and reams of well researched, authoritative content.
- Perform basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tasks, such as on-page optimizing and link building.
- Investigate monetization options like ads from Chitika or Adsense, and relevant affiliate programs.
- Set up and write a bi-monthly/weekly informative newsletter (and a series of autoresponder messages).
- Investigate and evaluate new marketing options as they arise (i.e., video marketing).
- Seek out and approach joint venture partners.
- Daily tasks; moderating comments, updating RSS feeds, etc, etc.
And so on and so on and so on.
That’s a LOT of hats.
And there are two major problems with this.
First, it’s not uncommon to get paralyzed by the magnitude and sheer number of jobs in front of you. It’s easy to find yourself dividing your time up between umpteen different, yet equally important tasks on a daily basis. In the end, you make very little progress on anything.
The solution to this is simple; prioritize your tasks on a daily basis, and do not focus your energies on any more than one or two tasks per work session.
For example, on one day you may decide to focus only on content creation. On the next, some on-page optimization and link building. And the day after, a newsletter and a new message for your autoresponder. The key is to have your tasks set out the night before, so you know exactly what you are doing the following day.
A word about prioritizing your tasks; obviously, your priorities will vary according to the state of your online business. For example, if your site is new, you are wasting your time if you’re investigating monetization options, affiliate programs or linking opportunities. All your efforts need to be focused on creating enough quality content to…
- Address the needs of your visitors
- Drive “organic” traffic from the Search Engines
- Warrant a link from a quality directory or resource
Until this is done, everything else you do is a waste of your time (if you have no traffic, for instance, then the investigating of monetization options is pointless, since you have no visitors to monetize).
Once your online business is established, you can take a breather from creating content and focus more on marketing-related tasks. As an example…
For me, the creation of new content becomes a major priority every two weeks prior to the mailing of a newsletter (the newsletter provides updates on new material – without new material, there’s no point in sending it!). In the time between newsletters, I can focus on other tasks.
The other problem with wearing too many hats is that there will come a time when no amount of prioritizing of tasks and efficient work management strategies will help you grow your business at a timely manner.
And that’s where I am at the moment.
My main site, UltimateFatBurner.com, contains a thousand pages of content or more. It receives 5-figure traffic numbers daily. It continues to grow day by day, week by week, year by year. But it is growing s… l… o… w… l…y (there are, after all, only two of us whose main priority is the site). And, the larger a web site becomes, the more difficult it is to make dramatic changes to traffic numbers, in-pointing links, etc.
It’s certainly no longer possible for me to wear all my hats, work efficiently and move the site forward. I can’t research and write content, moderate comments, investigate JVs, create videos and pod/blogcasts, obtain in-pointing links, plus the 8 zillion other things on my “to do”.
The only way to continue to move forward is for me to take off some of my hats, by outsourcing some of my jobs to third parties. The question for me then becomes…
What tasks CAN I outsource to third parties?
Obviously, I am not willing to compromise the quality and integrity of UltimateFatBurner.com. And, since the foundation of those things lie with the high quality, well-researched content found on the site, clearly that is something I will need to continue to do myself. But things like video creation, blog/podcast creation, SEO… these are things I can outsource. After all, this is simply a re-packaging and leveraging of existing content.
I am going to talk about the outsourcing process more a little later – the point of this discussion is recognizing the number of hats you must wear as an Internet Marketer, and how that can seriously affect your productivity. What drew my attention to this over the last few weeks was the fact that I never seemed to be able to “deliver on my deliverables.” When I really did some hard thinking on this, it was easy to see the problem.
To address the issue, I spent some time clearly defining my role – specifically listing all the tasks I do week by week. Then I divided those tasks into those I could outsource, and those I could not. It’s been an illuminating experience, and one I hope will vastly improve my efficiency and the growth of my web sites.
Sometimes, you need to take off one or more of your hats in order to grow.
For those of you not ready to outsource yet, clearly defining your tasks on a day to day basis – according to the state of your web site – is a priority.
Give it a try. I think you’ll be pleased with the results.
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