Bottom Line: How do you leverage your internet business to increase your productive hourly income each day? For the answer think about this...



When you realistically have two productive hours five days a week (520 hours a year) to make $ 260,000 a year, then you need to produce $ 500 an hour of productive time.

PRODUCTIVE AND NON-PRODUCTIVE TIME SPENT

Productive time is spent creating products, marketing products, improving your marketing process, managing money making projects, setting up joint venture deals and creating leverage in your business. Non-productive time is everything else, including answering emails, phones, day to day tasks running the business, etc.

Now your thinking changes to assess what activities you should personally be spending your time on and which activities you should be having others do for you. The trick is to consistently focus on those activities that can raise your hourly productive rate. Have others do what needs to be done when it costs you less than the hourly rate you need to generate.

You isolate activities that generate more income than it costs to get it done. Many people mistakenly think missing knowledge is what keeps them from making their target hourly productive rate.

You increase one or more of the variables of any of the profit producing formulas.

You develop and implement a business plan that creates leverage through a tight focus and the proper strategy.

ONE NICHE MENTALITY

You get your business to serve you by sticking to one niche, developing a full funnel of products, instituting cross-sell, upsells, and-back-ends to your audience. By working that niche, every successive product becomes more profitable. This means that each new product can be sold to your existing customers. It is much less expensive to sell to past customers than to find and sell new customers. This is where you increase your leverage by decreasing your cost of selling to customers.

OUTSOURCING VERSUS OUT-TASKING

The difference between outsourcing and out-tasking is that outsourcing is developing a trusted repeatable source and out-tasking is constantly searching for the cheapest source each time. This is time consuming and offsets any supposed savings, along with not knowing if the job will be done satisfactorily because you have never dealt with this source before.

Don't make the mistake of thinking where or how can I get this done the cheapest? It's basic that you get what you pay for. Usually when you pay a little more you get a lot more productivity and is the best choice. When you outsource, you want to let go and simply monitor the results, not be involved in micro managing the activity.

Some people have found it is very efficient to offer a 25% bonus if outsourced projects come in on time without help from you.

Pitfalls to avoid include lack of project management skills, lack of a good process for specifying the work and did not have the right metrics for measuring the performance.

SYSTEMS, PROJECTS AND PROCESS MAPS

A system is for day to day activities that are performed routinely for the most part. A project is a one time task that has a beginning and an ending. You must be taught this skill, and Rich Schefren offers such a program.

Use process mapping to describe what you are doing, or you don't know what you are doing. You separate activities and tasks into either a decision or an action. Then you put arrows showing how and where each task flows into the next task. This will likely reveal how to improve this work flow process.

The first time you do anything will not likely end of being the best way. Ninety four percent of any breakdown inside a business is due to a faulty process, not human problems. A process map is crucial to streamlining your current operation.

SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS

When first outsourcing you must have a Service Level Agreement between you and your outsourcer about how performance will be measured and the minimum acceptable levels of service.

Copyright (c) 2007 Dave Mallegg