Do you find you have less time for marketing as your business grows? You’re busy helping people but struggle to find the time to help yourself build your business further. It’s time to build a team so you can focus on the important tasks. Here’s how to outsource in order to market yourself better.
Why should you outsource?
As a business owner, you cannot do everything on your own. I know lots of people try to do it but ultimately you have to accept that there are only so many hours in the day. You’re also probably doing time-consuming things that you’re not necessarily good at. I get my coaching clients to do a little self-awareness test.
Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side, you put down all the things you’re great at doing and on the other side, you write what I call your ‘let’s be real’ list. The things you’re not good at. Your potential outsourcing tasks. If you don’t enjoy something or it’s taking your focus away from something more important, then you should look at outsourcing it.
Content marketing may or may not be the type of task you’re not so good at but I bet it takes up a huge amount of your time. It’s also a task which can lead you down rabbit holes, whether you’re looking at the numbers to see what’s working, researching what your customers are interested in or on social media. This means it takes even more time! By outsourcing certain business tasks to somebody else, who will be focused on what needs to be done, you free up your time so you can work on your core business.
What content marketing tasks can you outsource?
There isn’t much you can’t outsource when it comes to content marketing. Even if you record a podcast or videos where you’re talking to camera or write from a personal perspective, you can employ a virtual assistant to optimize, upload, repurpose and market that content saving you time and money.
Think about all the things you do when you create a new piece of content: you research the idea, you plan it out, then you write or record it. After that you come up with an attention-grabbing title, if it’s a blog you will put in subheadings as well and find images to go with it.
If you have a podcast you’ll write show notes. Then you need to upload it and distribute it. You’ll send it out to your email list and put it on social media. If you’re on several platforms you need to tailor your post for each one. And if it’s evergreen content you’ll want to schedule it to go out multiple times.
How much of that process do you personally need to be doing? You can outsource:
- Keyword research
- Website management, including uploading blog posts
- Optimizing your content for search
- Social media campaigns
- Writing show notes and other data entry
- Repurposing content for other platforms
- Graphic design for your podcast, Youtube channel, social media posts, cover images, and more
- Infographics
- Creating landing pages
- Designing ebooks
A VA can also help with competitor analysis and drawing up regular reports on your analytics. These will help you create more of the content your audience wants to see from you.
By outsourcing your marketing you can make your content work harder and create more of it, increasing your visibility and widening your audience, all while giving yourself the freedom to work on other things.
By outsourcing your marketing you can make your content work harder and create more of it, increasing your visibility and widening your audience, all while giving yourself the freedom to work on other things. #Youpreneur Click To TweetTools to help you outsource effectively
You might be sitting there thinking but no-one will be able to do it like you do. Well that’s what I call superhero syndrome. It is your business but that doesn’t mean you have to do everything. Once you start handing tasks over to someone who does this work all day every day and you get back to what you’re meant to be doing (or enjoy not having to work so many hours) you will see the huge long term benefits to you and your business.
There are plenty of tools out there to help you manage a virtual team effectively and enable you to do it without giving someone the keys to the castle. For instance, I use LastPass so my team can access accounts without having the password.
We use SmarterQueue for social media management. A member of my team uploads a series of posts and all I have to do is go in and approve them. If I don’t like it, it doesn’t get sent out. A quick check-over takes minutes compared with the time it would take me to put all that together myself. In case you’re wondering, I do manage my own personal social media.
We use Trello for project management so everyone can see things at a glance and Slack to keep in touch, with regular meetings on Zoom. Everything is set out so we all know who does what, where, and can keep things on track despite my team being global.
I don’t spend my time on things I don’t need to do so I have the time to focus on what people need from me and develop my ideas, knowing that the marketing side of the business is being taken care of. It doesn’t mean I’m not involved. I just don’t get involved in the things I don’t need to be part of.
Outsourcing is the smart way to take your content marketing to the next level and grow your business. After all, I wrote the book on it and run my own outsourcing company so I know a thing or two about it.
Chris founded Youpreneur® in 2015. He is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker and author of the bestselling books “Virtual Freedom” and “Rise of the Youpreneur”. He hosts our podcast, live events and coaches our clients inside the Youpreneur Incubator. Chris is based in Cambridge, UK.
