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small business outsourcing

If you’re a small business owner like myself, you already know how important it is manage your (and your employees) time effectively.

There never seems to be enough time to complete all the special tasks and one-time projects that you’d like to, even if you know that they would provide a positive benefit to your small business and sales.

As such, one area that has become increasingly popular with small business owners is that of outsourcing tasks, projects, and in many cases, entire job roles to less expensive contracted providers in different locations around the world.

If you’re not familiar with outsourcing, its basically the process of “farming out” different time-consuming tasks or one time special projects to an outside provider, in a location and at a pay-rate that provides the maximum benefit to the small business owner.

There are a multitude of benefits to outsourcing, and here are several “high-return” projects that you can do, starting today:

Article/Content Writing

You will find that article/content writing is one of the primary items that you need to accomplish to build up traffic in search engines, and to build incoming links to your website. It’s very useful for a variety of things. In addition to rewriting product descriptions, it’s writing short articles, writing blog posts, writing content for your site, and then writing longer articles for posting at the various article directories.

Virtual Assistants

Virtual Assistants are invaluable. They do anything that you ask them to do and are typically very organized. They can do a variety of tasks, and it’s incredible the load they will lift off you.

Customer Service

Over time as your gain additional eCommerce training and your sites grow, customer service becomes a burden – Where’s my tracking number? Why is this product broken? Etc. – All those questions take a lot of human bandwidth. And, even though there’s some automation in place, it still takes a tremendous amount of time to deal with those.

If you’ve ever done customer service for a company, you know that many times it doesn’t allow you to do too much else. It’s a time consuming process. So, that’s one thing that I outsource. Now I don’t have to worry about all the day-to-day customer service calls and emails.

Research

Research is where outsourcing really shines, because it’s easy to provide a very detailed script as to what they’re looking for and the exact format that you want it provided in. If you have specific information that you need to have somebody search on Google for and categorize into a spreadsheet, where it’s more usable outsourcing’s the best way to get it done.

Time Intensive Tasks

One time intensive task is adding products, another might be editing products, another might be link building, and the list goes on. Anything that takes a large amount of time and bandwidth are excellent, either one time, or ongoing tasks, for outsourcers.

Repetitive Tasks

If you are into video marketing at all, you know that there are many video sites where you can submit product videos, or any type of video. You add a title, keywords, a description, you upload the file and then you move onto the next one.

To outsource you just need to create the account, give your outsourcer the videos through an FTP program, and they do it for you. It’s an excellent task for outsourcing.

Using outsourcing in your business can provide a huge ROI, and can many times, be the key component in differentiating your business from your competitors…

Finally, the only way to ensure that you’re receiving the maximum benefits from your outsourcing system is to become educated on small business outsourcing from a reputable outsourcing training institute like EcommerceSiteOwners.com…

Kyle Grant runs http://www.eCommerceSiteOwners.com where he offers in-depth articles, downloads, templates, expert audio interviews, and “how to” video training specifically to help online store owners grow your sales and profits…today!

Claim your Risk-Free, 7 Day Trial at http://www.ecommercesiteowners.com/join

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Poor customer service can result in lower sales, a bad reputation within the particular business sector and can therefore lead to a hit on profits. In the most damaging of situations it can even bring a company down to where they can no longer exist in business. Excellent customer service is without doubt an extremely important part of any company as is the effective role of communication within it.

I am involved with customer service on a daily basis as I offer a freelance website design service and a stuttering therapy course. I also work with a company that offers people the opportunity of obtaining cheap calls.

So what would be classed as excellent customer service? What would be classed as very good customer service communication skills? The top executives and management hierarchy of each organisation are need of learning the answers to these questions. I will give my opinions in the following paragraphs.

A typical example and a very common mistake:

Just think for a moment and ask yourself the following question, if you don’t mind! How many times have you been promised by a customer services adviser that they will call you back before the end of the day, only to be let down? I am fairly sure that the majority of people will have experienced this annoyance. You end up having to chase up the company by telephoning them back. There is always an excuse of course – I was going to phone you back however I was just waiting for a colleague to get back to me. Sorry but that just is not good enough, the customer services worker could and should have phoned me on that day, the day they had said that they would, to inform me that they were still awaiting for information from their colleague. If they had done this I would have classed them as having excellent communication skills.

I, being the type of person that I am, will then relay how badly I have been treated at the hands of this company to my family and friends. They then in turn are likely to continue to spread the word as to how poor this business is in the ever essential role of communication. It is fairly obvious that productivity could well be effected if the communication skills are not up to scratch.

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