It’s very likely that your entire conception of “outsourcing” is off-base and in need of serious re-thinking.

Yes, you. And me too. I’ve made more than my fair share of mistakes trying to offload work to other people.

The wild part about building an online business is that it’s more or less the exact same thing as building a “real” business. Newsflash…a business is a business. 

An online business abides by the same general rules as “normal” business. The difference is that your options are much broader online.

Which brings us to outsourcing. In the real world, this is called hiring. Try looking at it through that lens and I guarantee most of your problems around outsourcing will melt away.

What Should You Outsource?

First, read my article on how to grow a website. My process for determining what to outsource is simple:

1. Write down a list of EVERYTHING you do for your business on a daily, weekly and monthly basis
2. Evaluate how essential you are to each task on a 1-10 scale
3. Narrow the list down to the tasks with a 1-5 rating
4. Delete or delegate (outsource) these tasks

All you’re doing here is evaluating where you’re most valuable in your business. Your value to your own business changes often.

For example, when I started building out my website, I was 100% valuable to every part of it. I had no revenue, no growth, and my brainpower and effort was needed in every aspect of the business.

As traffic and revenue grew, some tasks became worse uses of my time:

• Development work
• Writing every article for the site
• Editing videos, podcasts, etc.
• Hunting down brand deals

One way to think about your role in your business is to be the Alpha and the Omega, but nothing in-between. I am the strategic brain behind my business, and I am also the reactor to market feedback to my business.

To bring this into practical terms:

• I create the content strategy and listen to how my audience reacts, but I do not necessarily create all of the content myself
• I record videos for my YouTube channel and respond to 100% of comments, but I do not edit my videos
• I record podcasts with myself or guests and field questions about episodes, but I do not edit them or schedule interviews myself

See how it works?

I am not saying that you need to copy my strategy. You have to evaluate where you are most valuable and what your most irreplaceable talents are, and then hire out the rest of the work.

You might be an incredible writer, so you should never give that aspect of the business up. But hiring an editor, social media coordinator, outreach specialist, etc. could all be great choices.

When To Start Outsourcing

My rule of thumb is “as soon as you realize your time is better spent elsewhere.” In a perfect world, I would insta-hire someone to take something off of my plate the microsecond that it wasn’t valuable for me to do anymore.

Of course, that’s not realistic, but it’s a good heuristic for how to think about when to outsource if you’re trying to scale up quickly.

The sooner you remove low-value work from your plate, the more high-value work you do. And the more high-value work you do, the higher value you output. The higher value you output, the more your business grows and the more value you can capture if you so choose.

Simple, right?

Once you internalize these models for outsourcing work, then you can get into the practical elements of outsourcing, which I’m more than happy to write about. Leave me a comment or drop me an email and I can put together a more practical guide.

Keep growing,

Kevin

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.

www.kevinespiritu.com

Kevin Espiritu -

In continuance of the last post, I’m going to talk strategically about what would normally be a tactical article: hiring a writer for your website.

Most of the advice surrounding this topic is a vestige of the older eras of the internet and internet businesses. Back then, many website owners straight up did not care about their user base at all.

Traffic was a top-line number, one that was wholly separate from the hundreds of thousands of individual human beings that were actually comprising that number. After all, pleasing the Almighty Google was what mattered to do well back then – not pleasing your readers.

Since many of our actions as human beings are a result of the incentives that we’re faced with, old school website owners did one of a few things:

1. Stole content
2. Ran content through ‘spinners’ that mish-mashed it into unintelligible (but “unique”) content
3. Hired bottom-barrel writers who were effectively human article spinners

All of these tactics have one thing in common: they’re optimizing for the short term.

They also disrespect the user, but that’s a topic for another article.

Back to hiring a writer.

Hiring is Extrinsic and Intrinsic

People do things because they want something (money, freedom, etc.) or because it’s part of their identity. Writers are no different than anyone else, but too many people treat them like workhorses that only care about $ and churning out words.

Come at the hiring process with that mindset and you’ll only be able to see those writers. The reticular formation inside your brain is a powerful thing…learn to use it wisely.

When hiring a writer (or anyone else, really), create a job for them that satisfies both their extrinsic and intrinsic motivators.

Here are some examples of both motivators in the context of a writer…

Extrinsic

• Enough money
• A consistent supply of work
• Write on their own time
• Don’t have to do much editing, research, formatting, etc.

Intrinsic

• Creative freedom
• Genuine interest in topic
• Takes great pleasure in creating a good piece of writing
• Has a general curiosity about life and likes to satisfy that curiosity

Think of these motivating factors as weights on a scale. You can add more on either side depending on your own unique situation.

If you’re running a website or business that’s in a generally dull topic, you might need to weight the extrinsic motivators a bit heavier and find someone that has a personality type that can handle long stretches of writing about dry topics.

If you’re in an fun, exciting, B2C industry, you can often find hobbyists with real experience in the field who are also solid writers. These people are usually ecstatic to get paid anything to write about something they love. Add in a few other key personality traits (love of research, a perfectionist personality) and you have a recipe for someone who can write amazing pieces of content for you.

Hiring on Personality Traits

You might be wondering, “Wait, you’re really not going to talk about where to find a writer?” No, I’m not. If you understood the section above, you’d know exactly where to find a writer for your business (hint: it’s probably not on a freelancer hiring platform).

After you’ve got a solid queue of potential writers and they’ve passed the most basic “can write and follow instructions” test, it’s time to move to personality traits.

These are the ones I’ve found most indicative of a high-quality writer, and why they matter:

Loves the industry you’re in.

They’ll go the extra mile because it gives them internal joy.

Geeks out on researching the topic.

They’ll make sure information is accurate and add context that other writers cannot

Is detail-oriented.

Will follow briefs and not miss simple-but-important details like formatting, structure, and tone

Can think for themselves.

Isn’t a keyboard-pressing automaton, will actively make suggestions and improvements to your content and processes over time

There are more qualities to look out for, but if you can find someone with 3/4 of these or more, you’ve got an absolutely rockstar of a writer on your hands.

Make Their Job As Easy As Possible

You wouldn’t hire a plumber to also redo the tile in your bathroom, yet so many website operators expect their writer to also be an editor-in-chief, formatter, uploader, and social media marketer.

This is disrespecting the position you just hired for, and disrespecting the expertise of the person you hired.

Your job as the owner of your website or business is to hire people who are uniquely best at a particular thing, and then clear the path for them to execute on that thing and that thing only.

You can read my scaling content creation article for a few hints at how to do this, but that article is woefully out of date as far as process and tools go.

In my time at Book in a Box / Scribe Media, one of the things that made our initial product so successful is the fact that we broke book creation down into a linear process and then installed the best operators for each part of that process. The core realization that spawned that company was the fact that an author is often not the best person to create a book from start to finish.

It’s the same with your website or your content strategy. Your writers are SEAL Team 6 operators, uniquely good one thing – make sure you let them do it.

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.

www.kevinespiritu.com

Kevin Espiritu -

First off, this is not going to be a tactical article.

You will not walk away with “5 simple tips for scaling your website the next level!”

No, instead this piece is what I wish I read years ago. It would have saved years of floundering in nonsensical faux-action.

Hopefully it can do the same for you.

So, if it’s not a tactical article, what will it be?

The goal here is to teach you how to think about growing a website. But…this advice can be used to grow anything that grows.

Why should you listen to me?

You probably shouldn’t, at least not without any doubts. I always say that life coaching is a scam and the only people who should mentor you are those who have done exactly what you are trying to do.

With that said, I have:

• Failed to build at least 4 website-based businesses
• Floundered in building my current business
• Gone all-in on building said business for around two years now

Doesn’t sound great, right?

Well, this is where I am today:

• The business gets hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month
• My social platforms are all in the mid to high five figures
• I’m working with large brands on the regular
• I landed a book deal as a result of my website

Even still, this isn’t that impressive. These are basically vanity metrics – they don’t matter unless they meaningfully contribute to the metrics we actually care about – time, money, and meaning.

I won’t speak about exact figures anymore (see my article on copycats as to why), but here’s a rough picture of where I’m at:

1. Business earns multiple five figures / mo net 
2. I only spend as much time as I want to spend on it
3. Millions of people in 100+ countries use my website to better their lives

Fortunately for me, I love the business, so I spend a fair bit of time on it. I feel it’s doing good in the world and it’s a great way for me to balance time behind a computer with time out in nature.

Please realize, I’m not saying any of the above to brag. I write it so you have an accurate understanding of what I’ve accomplished, so you can decide if you want to read the rest of this article and listen to what I have to say.

1. You must do the right things, in the right order

A friend recently asked me if more action was always good. The answer is a resounding no. First of all, action isn’t even that important…but right action is VITAL.

Here is a hierarchy of action to wrap your head around (worst to best):

1. Unfocused Action – Your energy is diffuse, going in many directions and not making much progress in any of them. Avoid at all costs.
2. Focused Action – Your energy is honed in on one thing, but you may not being making much progress despite this. Slightly better, but still pretty bad.
3. Right Action – Your energy is targeted to the set of actions that have the highest probability of moving the needle in your business. This is hard to get to for most people, because it’s simply hard to identify what these actions are.
4. Scaled Right Action – You employ the energy of technology and other human beings, making sure they’re all focused on the small action set that will move the needle in a meaningful way. This is the Holy Grail for most small businesses.

I firmly believe that knowing what to do is FAR less important than knowing when to do it.

Information acquisition is no longer a problem. The problem is in acquiring too much and having NO CLUE how to apply it.

2. You must be able to zoom in and out of complexity effortlessly

If you’ve bought into the concept of action I laid out above, then the next question is how to identify what set of actions is “right” at any given time.

The way I do this is by “zooming.”

Let’s pretend you’re a photographer. You have to store your photos somehow, so you created a nested folder structure:

• Photos
  • Travel
  • Weddings
    • Chad & Stacy
      • Camera Raw Files
      • Edited

And so on. Your business can be viewed the exact same way:

• Your Business
  • Operations
  • Finances
  • Marketing
    • Social Media
    • SEO
      • Content Creation
      • Content Promotion

In a business, there’s always one section of the business acting as a constraint. Your job as the owner is to zoom in and out of each layer of complexity and determine if the constraint lies in that section.

Once you identify it, you can then move to the strategy and tactics that people love to over-focus on.

Unfocused Action -> Focused Action

For example, when I left Book in a Box (now called Scribe Media), I was in a phase of Unfocused Action. I was testing multiple different business ideas to see which one had a bit of traction.

I found one that seemed to work, and decided to commit to it 100%.

At this point, I’ve gone from Unfocused Action -> Focused Action.

My next problem was figuring out what to do with my days. I needed to go from Focused Action -> Right Action.

Focused Action -> Right Action

I wrote down all of the components of building a website-based business:

• Content
  • Creation
  • Promotion
• Operations
  • Administrative
• Marketing
  • Social Media
  • Etc.

This is far from a complete list. I just want you to have a sense of the structure to illustrate the next step.

I analyzed these components through the lens of what I most wanted: income. That was the needle I was trying to move at the time, because I’d just quit a job. I had a bunch of money saved, but no one wants to draw down on savings forever.

So I needed to make this business pay me. And a website that’s built off of the back of content can’t pay you if there’s isn’t a whole lot of content on the site.

Boom. The most pressing problem was instantly apparent to me: create more content.

Now I’d moved from Focused Action -> Right Action.

Right Action -> Scaled Right Action

I holed myself away behind the computer and researched, wrote, took photos, edited, re-edited, and published. For months. Eventually, I woke up and realized that creating more content wasn’t my most pressing problem anymore. I had enough, at least for the time being.

My problem was now promoting that content, building an audience, and traffic to the site.

BUT…

It would be stupid to stop writing content completely. After all, it was a component of the business that was essential, it just wasn’t the most essential in that moment.

When you get to this point, there are only two options:

1. Hire and train someone to do it for you.
2. Automate it via technology.

For me, this meant hiring and intensely training a full-time writer for the website. I knew I was a good writer, but I also knew that my time is always better spent on the most pressing problem for the business, which is ever-changing.

So I hired her, and moved on to learning how to build an audience, promote my content, and so on.

Once you’ve reached the level of Scaled Right Action, you are now free to scale up as much as you’d like to, depending on your goals for the business and its own natural constraints.

Your role is that of a heat-seeking missile towards the issue in the business that is inhibiting growth the most, which is almost always a new and unique problem. After all, if it wasn’t, either you or the team of people and technology you’ve employed would have solved it already.

Now you can see why tactics and techniques are all irrelevant – they do not address the fundamental issue with growing a website, which is simply knowing what the most important thing to do is at the time.

Once you know what it is, it’s trivial to develop or research a tactic that will solve it. That’s the part everyone else has already solved.

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.

www.kevinespiritu.com

Kevin Espiritu -

Back again.

As promised in my article on copycats, I won’t be talking about in-depth strategies for any specific business that I own. And that’s not a ranty piece, BTW. It’s something I wrote almost to my younger self, who was incapable of thinking on his own and constantly looked to the external for “what to do” and “how to do it.”

Today we’re talking about the fragility of the authority website business model, and what to do about it. But these principles are universal, and can be applied both to other business models as well as to your own life.

The two sources of fragility in an authority website are:

1. Traffic
2. Revenue

If you have a basic understanding of the Pareto Principle, you’ll know that one source will dominate both 1 and 2 above. That is, most of your traffic will come from one source, and most of your revenue will come from one stream.

If you allow this to happen, you’ve basically put yourself back in the scenario that someone working a classic 9-5 job lives in 24/7.

One income stream, one source of opportunity.

Not good.

The solution is to ‘explode’ these out into their constituent parts and look at which you can strengthen.

Take traffic, for example. It might look something like this:

1. Organic traffic
2. Social
3. Referral
4. Direct

Organic traffic is the end-all-be-all king of traffic. No questions asked. Consider it the permaculture version of traffic. You put in work upfront to set it up, and it pays you for a lifetime.

But, that doesn’t mean it’s OK for it to be 80%+ of your traffic. That’s fragile. One weird issue with your SEO and you’re in dire straits.

The solution is simple: use your strongest sources to develop your weakest sources.

For example:

1. You use your organic traffic to build social channels, say Pinterest.
2. Within the Pinterest ecosystem, this increased growth leads to increased reach.
3. The increased reach pays you back by sending more traffic back to your site.
4. You’ve increased the % social traffic you get and decreased the % organic traffic you get.
5. You are in a more balanced state of traffic sources and therefore less fragile to major losses.

The same thing applies to revenue, and I would argue it’s exponentially more important.

Most authority sites run on this model, in this order:

1. Affiliate income
2. Advertising income
3. Product / service sales
4. Brand partnerships

If you’re a “blogger” first, it probably looks like this:

1. Advertising income
2. Brand partnerships
3. Product / service sales
4. Affiliate income

Either way, #1 will make up 50%+ of most people’s revenue. Not a bad thing, but also not good, ESPECIALLY if #1 is advertising or affiliate income.

Why?

Because you do not have ultimate control over those sources.

One change in an affiliate program’s commission tiers can cut income by five figures a month.

One slow month of traffic means a drastic swing in your monthly income.

The solution is similar to the traffic solution. Use the revenue you generate from your dominant streams to either build new streams, or further develop existing streams.

This could mean:

1. Acquiring other websites
2. Bolting on an ecommerce arm to the business
3. Developing your own products and services
4. Creating a media kit and brand sponsorship package
5. Writing a book
6. Being on TV
7. Doing speaking

The list really is endless, and the permutations of ways you can combine all of these things are even more endless.

In short, if you do not use the assets (traffic and revenue) you’ve worked so hard to gain to protect and build a robust future for your business, you’re delusional.

Everything can and will come to an end at some point. Business models crumble due to changing times, and times are changing faster than they ever have in human history.

Don’t be dumb.

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.

www.kevinespiritu.com

Kevin Espiritu -

First and foremost, Q3 2017 is over and…I haven’t written an authority site update.

Guess what? I’m not going to.

Suffice it to say that Q3 was much better than Q2 for the authority site and I could go into all of the reasons why, but I won’t — I have something more important to say. Something that, while esoteric, I believe will help you even more when it comes to starting and building a business.

Why Does Everyone Copy Everyone Else?

All businesses have barriers to entry, the costs or obstacles associated with getting into a particular business. Online businesses typically have lower barriers to entry than brick and mortar businesses, although this is not always true.

In the particular business model I operate, a content-based authority website, the barriers to entry are particularly low. All you need to start a website like mine is:

• A domain
• A hosting provider
• Some time to get content up on the site

Or so it seems. While those are the only true barriers to entry, there are many more that are unseen to new entrants:

• Knowledge of SEO
• Time for your website to “season” in the eyes of Google
• Systems-based marketing skills
• Ability to create content that people actually want to consume
• Ability to know what to do and in what order to do it (pareto-optimization of tasks)
• …and so on

These are the hidden barriers to entry that cause many people to fail in this type of business. They think that all they need to start a website is the first set of bullet points, but they aren’t even aware of the second set (of which I only scratched the surface).

This leads them to commit the cardinal sin of business (and life): they do not know how to think for themselves, so they mimic.

The Tragedy of the Marketing Commons

If you’re unfamiliar with the tragedy of the commons concept, it means that people acting in their self-interest will deplete a resource that’s shared by the community, thus hurting them in the long run. This concept is typically applied to physical resources, but can easily be translated into the world of marketing and online business.

Take a look at LinkedIn right now. Chances are your feed is filled with updates like this:

Sidenote: Nothing against Noah. He’s a great guy who’s hilarious to talk to.

These types of posts are getting incredible reach and clickthroughs on LinkedIn and people are fleeing other platforms that give shitty organic reach (Facebook, Twitter).

However, because the strategy is so effective, it’s quickly becoming saturated (see Andrew Chen’s articles on this for a better understanding of growth saturation).

Everyone is acting in their own individual self-interest and taking as much as they can from what they perceive to be a limitless resource: digital status updates on LinkedIn.

What they don’t see is that the resource they’re depleting is attention, and it’s the most scarce resource on Earth right now.

In search of growth, marketers and business owners are depleting the effectiveness of the growth channels that do work at an ever-increasing rate.

What Does This Have To Do With Authority Websites?

The business model behind authority websites is well-understood by a small but growing segment of people who are looking to work for themselves.

However, with all things that become better-understood, there comes a codifying of the strategies and tactics behind them, thus making them less effective. What was once hard to figure out and execute becomes easy and automated, decreasing effectiveness.

For example, certain methods of email outreach to build links are currently being run into the ground by website owners with a serious lack of creativity. Spamming website owners with stock email templates in broken English is not only a bad strategy for the individual employing it, but it also slowly spoils the pool of opportunity for those who are more ethical / creative in their approach.

The same goes for website content. As content becomes easier and easier to create, it becomes less and less valuable. The barrier to entry to creating content is effectively zero, so you must do something special to stand out.

There are many ways to do this, if you sit down and think about it for half a second:

• Stack media types – create video, podcasts, etc.
• Continually update your posts – a “wiki” approach
• …and so on

Why I’m No Longer Posting Income Reports and Updates

I love helping people and writing about my business experiences.

However, the sheer amount of people who are unwilling to sit and think for themselves has caused 10-20 direct copycats of my site. I’m not overly worried by this, as most of them are motivated by money only and are not topic experts in the space. I expect ~75% of them to drop out within a year, and I can scoop up their sites at a low cost.

That said, I see no further value in sharing techniques and tactics that have come to me after a heavy investment of time, money, and trial and error. All I’m doing is exposing them to the tragedy of the commons phenomenon sooner than I’d like.

The takeaway here is clear: THINK FOR YOURSELF.

Copying others can only ever be a short-term strategy at best. By definition, you’re already behind those you’re copying, and if copying is your only strategy, it is logically impossible for you to come out ahead barring certain improbable circumstances.

That said, I will still be writing on this blog, but I will not be discussing direct tactics and strategies I’ve used to grow my site.

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.

www.kevinespiritu.com

Kevin Espiritu -