How I Outsource to Save Time and Money

This year, I faced some challenges when I increased my work hours and started juggling blogging, working full-time, freelancing and being a parent and running a household. It hasn’t always been easy, but I still feel like I want and need to develop a decent work-life balance for my own health and sanity.

I realized that I couldn’t do it all by myself a long time ago. I’m no ‘super mom’. The big ‘secret’ is that I started outsourcing some elements of my life and my blog to others to lighten my load and increase my productivity.

Here’s when you know you need to start outsourcing:

You are Starting to Get Burnt Out

Back when I first started blogging, I read a really good book about how to monetize your blog and turn it into a business because yes, I’ve always considered my blog a business. It’s a hobby as well and I love sharing details about my financial journey, but I also intended for it to be a thriving side business from the jump.

The book was great but after reading it, I had a headache. There is sooooooo much involved with managing and growing a blog that it is literally is a JOB.

You have to write, edit, promote, work out the technical kinks, grow your traffic, determine your visual brand and a number of other things. It’s very easy to get very overwhelmed and burnt out after a while.

You Have BIG Goals That Will Require a lot of Time and Energy

When you set large goals, you must realize that while your efforts may play a large role in working to achieve them, you will still need help from others.
If your time and energy is heavily focused in one area of your life, you will need help to balance the other areas that you can’t pay much attention to. If you don’t, you’ll risk getting stressed out and frustrated.

You’ve Reached a Time Cap

There are only so many hours in a day and so many responsibilities one person can take on. You must know your limit. For me, working 60 hours per week is it. There are only 168 hours in a week and I can’t work every waking minute.

I need time for my family, sleep, and other parts of my life.

When I realized that I was working the maximum amount of hours I could handle and didn’t want to slow down, I knew I had to start outsourcing if I wanted to keep moving closer to my end result and making more money.

 

Tips For Outsourcing and How I Outsource

I’m a super control freak so it was hard for me to give up the reigns on certain things to someone else, but I’ve felt much better and more relaxed as a result of outsourcing. Here are some things I’ve realized:

You Don’t Always Have to Worry About Money

Most peoples’ excuse for not outsourcing is that they don’t have the money to pay someone else to do it. I’m all for DIY, but I realize that sometimes you have to spend a little money in order to make more money.

I agree that you should wait until you are financially able to comfortably pay someone for a service before you outsource, but if you are working your way up to one or more of the three limits mentioned above, you should get strategic about how you want to earn money and when you’ll be able to outsource.

I was passionate about starting a blog almost a year ago and I knew my main goal was paying off debt this year, but I didn’t necessarily have the money to pay anyone for anything right off the bat. So instead, I focused half of my time on blogging (which doesn’t earn you diddly squat in the beginning stages) and the other half of my time on freelance writing (which helps you earn an active income quickly). Pretty soon, I was making a nice amount of extra cash that I could use to help accelerate my debt payments and invest back into my blog and freelance writing business.

Sometimes you can outsource certain areas of your life without spending a dime. I often rely on my family and fiancé to help lighten the load for my daily responsibilities so I can have time for other things. Coming home after a long day of work and cooking and cleaning for two hours was not going to cut it.

I taught my fiancé how to cook some of our favorite dinners so we could both split the responsibility of cooking and taking care of other tasks around the house. It’s definitely a partnership. That type of outsourcing is absolutely free 🙂

RELATED: How to Start a Blog 

Find the Thing You Like Least and Get Someone Else to do It

When it comes to blogging and freelancing, I love to write (obviously). Writing is where I want to focus most of my time and energy. Even though I work with websites all day at my day job, I still don’t know much about how to fix little things on my blog and make it look perfect.

It takes up way too much of my time trying to troubleshoot so I’ve reached out to Grayson from Debt Roundup a few times to help me with some technical things on the back end of my site.

Grayson helps a lot of other bloggers in my niche and he’s trustworthy, reliable and always does a great job which puts me at ease.

Another part of my blog that I like to outsource is quality photos for Pinterest. Tapping into Pinterest marketing is crucial for bloggers. I just happen to hate it. Outside of manual pinning, I don’t understand the whole group board thing or scheduling pins. I’d just rather write.

Luckily, I enlisted some help from my friend Kristin who creates beautiful photos for my blog and takes care of all the scheduling and Pinterest stuff. I’ve been reading Kristin’s blog, Believe in a Budget, throughout the past year and after reading about her success with Pinterest and her mentioning wanting to offer services to other bloggers in a past post, I decided to reach out to her. Her services are affordable and I started out only with a $30/month package. Overall, her help saves me time and frustration and she rocks!

All in all, outsourcing hasn’t caused me to lose any money but it’s helped me grow my blog and my business and free up some of my time which greatly improves my work-life balance. I’m glad I found a way to work much smarter as opposed to working harder and experiencing burnout.

Do you outsource? If so, what tasks?