If you have a growing business there comes a time when you need to outsource tasks in order to maintain growth.

In fact, there are some activities which necessitate being outsourced because you may not have the skills required.

What we’re trying to figure out is when to begin outsourcing.

If you begin outsourcing at the wrong time, it could hinder  your growth and cause more problems.

A lot of people make the mistake of waiting too long to outsource.

By waiting too long to outsource, you could lose the motivation to work on your business. If you have to do everything yourself, it gets pretty easy to become bored and complacent.

If you find yourself doing the same activities over and over again then you must figure a way to systematize your activities and then hand it over to a qualified freelancer.

By creating a system to optimize your work flow, you will reduce your outsourcing costs. An optimized method of doing things will speed up the production of your outsourced project. If you’re paying by the hour for a virtual assistant you could greatly reduce your costs.

Something else to consider before you outsource is your profit margin
and the value of your time.

While outsourcing can cut into your profits, it can greatly increase your productivity, allowing you to scale your business.

Let’s say that you can consistently make a profit of $200 while working on an activity for 4 hours. Let’s say that number is an average profit for 4 hours of work.

When calculated, you’re making $50 an hour. If you can pay someone to duplicate your process for under $50 an hour then you’re making a
profit.

Of course, when you’re first teaching your process to someone it will
take them some time to learn at first. Once they learn the process,
they can complete it faster and increase your profit margin.

Let’s recap what we’ve discussed thus far.

Before you begin outsourcing, you should optimize your work flow by creating a system that is duplicatable by someone who has little to no knowledge of your system.

You should also write down the amount you make per hour doing things yourself. This way you know how much to pay freelancers to take over your work.

By outsourcing at the right time, you will substantially increase your volume of work and not lose motivation in your business.

Right now if you join Facebook and install the following application, they will send you an email with a code that you can use to redeem $100 credit with Facebook advertising.

Here’s the link to the application which is free to install:
Visa Business Network Application

I tried advertising with Facebook before without success. My ads did not generate a high CTR so they were disabled after generating just a few clicks.

I think your first hurdle is to get a high enough CTR so that your ad not only sticks but your CPC will decrease.

You can generate a high CTR by having a relevant ad to the target market you’re trying to reach. FB allows you to target your ads via keywords and/or demographics.

Next is to make sure that your ad uses keywords which are relevant to the target market.

Third is to use an image which attracts attention but doesn’t scream advertisement.

From hearing other people’s experiences with FB advertising, I can tell you that they are very inconsistent in the way they approve ads. If your ads don’t get approved for whatever reason, try submitting it again as a different time.

Types of offers which work best with FB:

I have no experience with which offers best work with FB. Look through the CPA networks and find giveaways which pays per email or zip submit. Try financial aid offers, paid surveys, dating, acne.

Make sure to know your target audience and speak to them in your advertising. Remember that relevancy rules.

Now that I have the $100 in free credits, here’s what I’m going to try.

I am going to look at celebrity gossip sites and look at hot/controversial topics. Then I’m going to create a simple yes/no poll and advertise it on FB.

For example, I could ask something like: Is ‘x’ celebrity a good match for ‘x’ celebrity.
Vote yes or no. On the landing page, they would have a button for yes and one for no. Whichever they click on would be an affiliate link for a zip code submit offer.

On FB I will target people who are interested in the celebrity names.

On the ad title I would put for example: “Rihanna Controversial Poll?”
I would have a picture of Rihanna and text which says:
Is Rihanna a good match with Chris? Vote and win a MacBook Air Now!

Moving beyond FB advertising, you could use Google’s content network and place your advertising on celebrity related sites.

You can either create your polls by hand or use this software which I use:
Poll Factory

It’s very simple to use and you can create many high quality polls at once for split testing purposes.

I hope you take this idea and run with it. You may find another nice little income stream.

Last week I ran into an old friend from college via Facebook. He and I chatted for a while and I found out that he was also involved in internet marketing.

I was intrigued so I asked him how he was doing with it. He said that a few months ago he set up a website selling an ebook and now he’s making close to $3,000/k on autopilot.

Now I’m not going to tell you his niche of course, but it’s a niche that my friend is very familiar with. He created the product and webpage himself.

It’s a rather obscure niche also. My friend is generating traffic via free search engines (mostly Yahoo and MSN). All he did was create videos and posted them on YouTube.

His sales page is not your typical direct response salesletter with bullet points and such. His site does however have a video above the fold which does very well at converting visitors into buyers.

I’m telling you this story because I thought it was interesting how someone turned their hobby into a profitable business without really much thinking about it.

There are probably tons of people out there who create websites just for fun and are making nice sums of money. I think the key factor to their success is that they provide really good content. Everything else works itself out.

You probably have a passion but your passion may not be in a niche where people are buyers. If that’s your case, the best route is to find a hot niche, hire someone who is passionate in that niche to work for you. You pay them to do something that they already enjoy doing.

You can find these passionate people in forums. Did you know there’s a forum for just about everything online? My brother is a member of a fashion forum, a shoe forum, a photography forum and a computer overclocking forum. There’s even a forum for flashlight lovers, lol.

Go find these people in  the forums, strike up conversation with them and then hire them to create content for you.