When you start outsourcing regularly to extend the capabilities of your business, you’ll be amazed at the variety of tasks that can be delegated to an assistant or contractor. This will rescue your time and allow your business to accomplish more. What’s been really crucial to my businesses is that with the help of outsourcing, I’m no longer limited by the amount of time and energy I personally have. Outsourcing has opened up a lot of new possibilities and allowed me to move my business in the direction I want to go.

I want to talk about the kinds of things that people are successfully outsourcing. I hope this will encourage you to think about your own business and the tasks you commonly perform. Ask yourself: could I train someone to do this? Your answer might be something like: “Yeah maybe I could delegate this, but I could do it better myself, and it wouldn’t cost me anything.” That may be true, but don’t lose sight of the big picture. Your ultimate goal is probably not to handle this task perfectly and cheaply; your big goal, if you’re like me, is to spend more time doing the things you like, and less time doing the things you don’t. To get there, you need to be comfortable delegating and letting other people work for you.

On EasyOutsource you’ll find hundreds of talented job seekers who are hoping you’ll hire them to help you with your work. Here are some things you might consider:

• Market research – Want to collect information about your competitors’ marketing activities? Need a report on market trends over the last 3 years? How about a list of businesses in your area that could use your product or service but don’t currently have it? Hire an assistant to do the research and produce a nice report.
• Data entry – Have you ever needed a bunch of information reorganized or put into a spreadsheet? Don’t spend your whole morning on it — hire a data entry assistant and do something more impactful.
• Accounting – Hire a trained, experienced assistant to manage the books. You can even find CPAs on EasyOutsource who are completely familiar with American accounting practices.
• Writing – Blog posts, website content, reports, emails, sales materials — almost any kind of writing you need can be done by an outsourced writer.
• Personal assistants – Hire a personal assistant is like cloning yourself. Sort of. It’ll change your world.
• Lots of little things like document editing, transcription, email filtering, QA testing – All these things could eat your day, but could be more efficiently handled by letting a subcontractor do them at a good rate.
• Answering phones – Set your assistant up with Skype, Google Voice, or VOIP account, and let her answer calls for you. Many of our job seekers have been trained in Western call centers, and are probably better on the phones than you.
• Appointment setting – This can be time consuming and frustrating. Share your calendar with your assistant, and let him book your meetings.
• Sales calls and emails – You can show your assistant how to find leads and make contact over the phone and email. Give him some time to get the hang of it, and pretty soon he’ll be generating usable leads and maybe even some sales.
• Responding to customer inquiries – Yeah, I know you like to keep a finger on the pulse of your customer base. But odds are you could do your customers a lot better by spending your time improving your product or service, rather than personally responding to their every query.
• Website management – Updates, upgrades, moderation, content creation — all this is the perfect type of stuff for your assistant to take off your hands.
• Order processing – Does your website take orders, process payments, and handle shipments and delivery? Get your assistant involved to handle the routine work and smooth out kinks before they become problems.
• SEO – You know you’d make more money if your website came up in the top of search results. But you don’t have the time to figure it out, and you don’t have the cash to hire a full-blown SEO agency. Good news: it ain’t that hard. Get an assistant with some SEO experience on the job.
• Link building – The most tedious and time consuming part of SEO. You don’t have 4 hours a day to spend trying to get other websites to link to yours. But there are job seekers who are good at this and would love to help.
• Adwords campaign management – With Adwords, you pay by the click for people who have searched terms related to your business. It can be lucrative, but it takes some time to set up and monitor.
• Web design – I’m a web developer myself, and I don’t do the web design. I hire great designers in the Philippines.
• Web programming – Is your website not quite doing what you need it to? Have you thought of a cool widget or function you could put on your website to help your customer base fall in love with you? Hire a programmer.
• Progress reporting and client updating – Your clients will wax affectionate when you’re sending them handsome monthly reports showing all the progress you’re making with their money.

Those are just some common examples. Take a look at your business, and think of it this way: would you rather do this task every time it comes up now and in the future, or would you rather show someone else how to do it, so that every time it needs to be done in the future you don’t have to do it?