Let’s face it…
The internet is a busy place. And with more and more people entering the internet marketing arena, more and more people are trying to compete for the attention of the same audience. That means it is becoming harder and harder to establish yourself online and earn an income.
Fortunately, all is not lost.
Instead of working harder, choose to work smarter. Instead of relying solely on your own capabilities, you should – wherever possible – try to leverage other people’s time, effort and resources.
Here are 4 ways in which you can apply leverage – and get more done without working exponentially harder:
1. Viral mechanisms:
There are several viral mechanisms you can employ in order to ue the efforts of your existing audience to reach more people.
a. You can use a professional viral list building service like iRefer – at irefer.io. Their service allows you to offer people one or more (consecutive) incentives (freebies or discounts) in exchange for referring others to your mailing list. It is a professional system which includes different landing page options, and plenty of flexibility in the design department – not to mention detailed statistics and different autoresponder integrations.
b. You can use a WordPress plugin like List Eruption – which does the same job, and allows you to use any autoresponder service along with it. It does have a few niggles and quirks, but all in all it is a great tool.
c. Use a “share to get it” (content locker) WordPress plugin. There are several free (and paid) options available. Your visitors have to share a page of your choice on Facebook or Twitter before they can access your freebie. The logical thing to do would be to add your optin offer to the “locked” content area – so once they get the freebie, they will also see the optin offer. Some of those who were curious enough to share the page to get the freebie will be curious enough to want the second freebie as well.
2. Guest posting on high profile blogs:
When you do a guest post on a high profile blog – like say, Problogger.com – three things happen…
a. You get traffic from it. And if you do some basic SEO on your blog post, you will be able to get traffic from that post for quite a while, thanks to the authority of the blog you publish it on.
b. Your association with the high profile blog elevates public perception of your capabilities – so it gives your credibility a boost.
c. If the blog uses “do-follow” on its outbound links, you will gain a powerful backlink to your own website or blog, which is worth its weight in gold.
3. Joint ventures:
Regardless of what the percentage split is, doing a joint venture allows you to access someone else’s audience. Fair enough, it takes some time (and your own product/s) to break into this level, and you have to work your way up the ladder. But once you start doing this, you will be able to apply immense leverage – especially if you are selling high ticket items.
4. Outsourcing:
Outsourcing is the logical way to increase the amount of work you get done. In offline businesses, people hire employees – and freelancers – to help them to achieve more. As an internet marketer, you run a business, so you need to think like a business owner.
Fair enough, doing it right from the start might not make financial sense to everyone. And once you do get there, you will need to decide which tasks can be entrusted to others. If you take a look at the 80/20 principle…
It means that you spend 20% of your time doing work that produces 80% of your results. The other 80% only yields 20% of your results.
And THAT 80% should be outsourced – because if you do, you can (in principle) quadruple your income.
In conclusion:
At the end of the day, using leverage is the way to grow any business. In many businesses, people even apply the leverage of other people’s money by attracting investors. In internet marketing, however, that may not always be the best option.
But…
Leveraging other people’s time, effort and resources – especially if you can do it at little or no out-of-pocket cost to you – is the logical way to go. And the more you do it, the more your online business will grow – exponentially.
