I took a moment to practice what I preach and outsourced 20 articles yesterday. What did it cost? Well…

While I could just give a simple dollar amount, that wouldn’t cover the actual investment aspect of this equation so, I’ll make you read for it

Let me first start by saying that total, I have a whopping 16 articles that I’ve managed to muster the motivation to write over the past 2 years. Not too impressive. I’ve found that it’s just something that I won’t do. I hate doing it, it takes me all of about 10 minutes to do one, but it’s the most miserable 10 minutes of my day… So, I don’t do it.

Problem with that is, a huge portion of my business counts on me doing a few things:

• Spreading my seed – “brand awareness” if you will. I don’t make any money if people can’t find me.
• Targeting my customer – focused content provides targeted demographics, just the kind of thing I need in order to find people that might be interested in a particular niche product or service
• SEO crap – backlinks, site credibility, etc. All of that needs to be done

There are a few ways to accomplish those tasks, but articles seem to be the easiest and least expensive way to do it all while leveraging the traffic of a larger site than yours (article directories).

Adwords, and the like, can be quite costly and often there is so much competition that your profit margin takes a dump… and no one likes working for free (or if you do, let me know because I have lots of work for you).

So, back to the issue of cost. A more pertinent question would be, how much is it COSTING me to NOT do articles? How much is an article worth?

Well, like I outlined yesterday, each article is worth about $20 bucks to my business model. So, for every article I DON’T write, the opportunity cost is roughly $20 to my bottom line. OUCH! I could have been rich by now!

But, part of being a successful entrepreneur is knowing your weaknesses.. and NOT improving on those, but paying someone else to do them for you!

So, since I won’t get off my lazy ass and write them, I outsourced 20 of them on a test phase. I want to make sure the content is quality enough for me to publish without looking like a fool. Total dollar amount that came out of my pocket? $100.00

Most of you might be saying: “Holy crap, you wasted $100 bucks because you’re too lazy.”

And to those of you that thought that, I’d say this:

Yes, I’m lazy when it comes to medial tasks that are so low level and boring that they take the enjoyment out of my day. Part of working for yourself is being able to enjoy what you do, right? Also, no I didn’t waste my money. The bottom line is that it wasn’t going to get done. If every article I write is worth $20 to my business model, and I just outsourced them for $100, THEORETICALLY I will see a 400% ROI in dollar value, not to mention the value of them actually getting done, and the value of my TIME to put towards tasks that are more important.

This might be the best $100 I’ve ever spent.

My point being, you can teach tasks to people and have them do it for a fee, you can’t buy more time (or maybe you can, by outsourcing) to spend time on high level tasks like brainstorming, directional positioning, and business decision skills. Spend your time doing what matters, spend your money paying others to do what doesn’t. You’ll be a whole lot more successful in the long run.