The answer lies in this one simple fact: nearly all at-home Internet business startups fail within the first year because they fail to make any money. The reason they don't make any money is because either (a) the owner doesn't know what to do, or (b) the owner knows what to do, but doesn't do it.

Outsourcing can solve all of that.

First of all, in a home-based Internet business, there is a lot of work to do. Much of it is technical. You cannot possibly be an expert in all of these areas. If you are expecting to produce a top quality product or service as the output of your business, or an effective website and marketing campaign to promote your business, you need to tap into some expertise that you don't have yourself. You have to.

If you try to do it all yourself, some aspects will suffer.

Perhaps you'll end up with a sub-par product that will fail to impress your customers. Perhaps you'll end up with a marketing campaign that is poorly structured and fails to deliver customers to your door. Either way, you're in trouble.

The key to making your at-home Internet business really fly is knowing how to divide up the work into manageable chunks and outsource it to competent individuals who can do it for you - properly.

This removes the learning curve for you from dozens of technical tasks that you've probably never done before and would have to spend time learning before you could actually use them in your business.

Needless to say, this reduces the drain on your time and increases the speed with which your business can reach the success you're aiming for.

All good, right? Well it gets better.

Suppose you do have expertise in a variety of technical areas. Suppose you are actually capable of doing all the parts of your home-based Internet business. Lucky break?

Not a chance.

It frankly doesn't matter how skilled you are in the dozens of technical jobs required by your Internet business. You shouldn't be doing them. Period.

You are the owner. You need to focus your time on directing your business. Determining new markets to tackle, new products to create, new partners to work with. You need to manage the projects in your business (until you can afford to hire a manager), but you do NOT need to actually "do" the projects.

The work needs to be outsourced. You are the manager.

Why is this so important?

Because you are also the bottleneck. If your Internet business is depending on you to do the work in order to succeed, then your business isn't really a business. It's a job. If you're not there doing the work, the "business" grinds to a halt. And if you do a poor job, or work too slowly, or don't get all the pieces done in time or in the right order, the "business" suffers and dies.

Does this sound like a good plan?

You absolutely, positively need to remove yourself from the day-to-day tasks of your business and put yourself into the driver's seat.

Outsourcing is the way to do that.

It's fast, easy and cheap. And you can get started right now from the comfort of your chair. You don't need to pick up a phone. You don't need to speak to anyone.

All you need to do is come up with the list of tasks your at-home Internet business requires of you, and post them as projects on any one of the several good outsourcing websites on the Internet -- such as elance, rentacoder or scriptlance. There are thousands of competent workers on these sites who will be happy to do the work for you.

Remember, the reason most home-based Internet businesses fail is that the owners either don't know what to do, or they simply don't do it. You can avoid the "learning curve" and the "time bottleneck" altogether by hiring out.

It's not just a good idea. It is essential to the success of your business.