Something we should realize as business owners is that truly time really does equal money. You are an internet entrepreneur and 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?
Photo credit Decadis
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 decided to become an internet entrepreneur that did not automatically make you a ‘jack-of-all-trades’.
You can waste a lot of your valuable time on tasks that you just plain aren’t very good at. You are the idea man/woman. 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.
Step 1 Hire an accountant or a bookkeeping service.
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!
Photo credit Rob Wallace
Step 2 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. She can submit your articles to all the venues, take trouble calls, load your auto-responder service, and so much more that eats away at your time. If she writes well she can handle your pay per click advertising campaigns for you.
Step 3 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 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. I recommend http://www.submityourarticle.com.
Step 4 Use software designed to help reach many people at one time.
Part of online business is reaching as many people as possible with your message. This may be through social networks and online newsletter publishing. Be sure to utilize the services out there to make the content you write to be submitted with just a few clicks of a mouse.
For the newsletter use a good auto-responder service. This is a place where you can collect your email addresses and add them to a newsletter (ezine) list and then write your newsletters. The auto-responder sends the broadcast to all your subscribers at once. It also stores all the information on a site outside of your computer. If you have ever had a hard drive failure you understand how valuable this is.
Use plug ins for your blogs, Twitter and Facebook. If you write on one site the plug in broadcasts the content or a teaser to all the social media sites you are subscribed to.
If you insist upon doing everything yourself, whether you are good at it or not, you will use up all of your thought and energy and have nothing left to do the things that only YOU can do to make your business grow.
Photo credit Matt Hamm
I invite you to sign up for a course which is offered by my online mentor who teaches people how to outsource regularly. It’s only $10 for the first month. I know you’ll find the resources in the site well worth the money. Skip a couple Starbuck’s lattes and invest in YOU. http://www.OutsourcingSweetie.com
