How much value do you put on your time? As a business owner, this is a question that you should be asking yourself. Ideally, you should be working on your business rather than in your business. This entails hiring staff to handle the day-to-day operations and outsourcing works well for this purpose. Outsourcing is not easy but it can do good for your e-commerce business.
We’ll take a look at some of the benefits of outsourcing. We’ll also discuss the challenges that come with outsourcing, how you can deal with them, and the tasks that you can outsource.
Benefits of Outsourcing
You may opt for an in-house staff, but why is outsourcing a popular alternative? Here are a couple of reasons.
Getting a WooCommerce Expert to Do the Job
Outsourcing an experienced virtual assistant is made simpler. With some digging, you can find a WooCommerce expert who doesn’t charge exorbitant fees. With the right approach, you can even find someone who will stick with your company for years.
Reduced Costs
Hiring a virtual assistant will cost less than hiring a full-time in-house staff. You won’t need to invest in an office space for the outsourced worker. The outsourced worker will have his/her own computer with internet access. You may however need to provide some online tools and resources specific to your business.
You may have to offer a higher salary (still cheaper than your local rates) or offer some benefits if you want to keep a good virtual assistant. Do some research to find out what benefits are afforded to employees in certain countries. For example, virtual assistants from the Philippines will expect a 13th month bonus. Incentives for good performance are also good.
Challenges with Outsourcing
Outsourcing comes with its share of risks but these risks can be controlled.
The Need for Training
When you delegate work, the outcome may not always meet your expectations. To improve on this, make sure you create systems that the virtual assistant can follow. Provide ample time in training the outsourced worker. Familiarize them with your business processes. This will help in paving the way for a long-term mutually beneficial relationship.
Confidentiality or Security Issues
You want to protect your business and that’s understandable so you might be hesitant in hiring someone from the other side of the world. When hiring a virtual assistant, you will most likely be sharing sensitive company information. On top of that, you will be providing access to your site and other accounts. Before hiring, you can do your research on the person that you are hiring. Check out social media profiles and other mentions on the web. Charles Haines also offers some interview tips for measuring integrity.
During the first few weeks, you can consider providing the outsourced worker limited access to your systems. When you are more comfortable, you can start providing more access.
WooCommerce Tasks You Should Outsource
As you work on growing your business, you may find that you spend a lot of your time on tasks that you can delegate. Outsourced WooCommerce tasks are web design and development, marketing, SEO and other back-office roles.
WooCommerce Tasks
1. Create and Edit Products – Creating and editing WooCommerce products can be time consuming. You need to set up products with different attributes and optimize and upload images for each one. Delegate this task so you can use your business expertise where it is needed.
2. Product Image Editing – Images need to be optimized before being used on your WooCommerce store lest you risk bloating your site and increasing page load times.
3. Improve Product Copy – Writing product descriptions that highlight your product benefits will help you sell. Copy writers and virtual assistant know this. Speak to your target market and convince them to make the purchase. This is one less task to worry about, as professional copy writers can do this for you.
Web Design and Development
4. Update Plugins and Core – It’s important to keep your WooCommerce store protected from the latest known vulnerabilities. A WooCommerce expert can help improve security and site performance by keeping everything updated.
5. Design Tweaks – Improving user experience (UX) is a major factor in the success of your online store. A professional web developer can recommend and apply design changes to your site to optimize UX.
6. Analytics and Webmaster Reports – When optimizing your site to increase conversion or improve user experience, analyzing and interpreting existing data is invaluable. A virtual assistant adept at Google Analytics can analyze and interpret your website data. This can help you make sound decisions.
7. Technical Solutions – Don’t get wrapped up in the technicalities of developing and maintaining your website. An experienced WooCommerce developer can optimize your design and add new functionality in a fraction of the time it takes you to do.
8. Secure Your Site – Apart from WordPress and plugins updates, a WooCommerce expert can help you set up automated backups and set up other security features.
9. Speed Optimization – Keeping your site running at its fastest will improve user experience and will reduce bounce rates. Notably, site speed is also an important ranking factor for SEO. A WooCommerce developer can help you optimize your site speed. This can include optimizing images, optimizing the HTCaccess file, setting up caching, minification, and DNS.
Marketing and SEO
10. Search Engine Optimization – Make it easier for potential customers to find your WooCommerce store by ranking high in organic search results. This is no small feat as SEO can take a lot of time. However, many virtual assistants make a living through SEO so finding an SEO expert is easy. A WooCommerce SEO expert can help optimize your product pages and blog posts to rank better in search engines.
11. Email Opt-in Solutions – To improve your site’s lead generation capabilities, a WooCommerce expert can help you add email opt-in forms in strategic locations on your site.
12. Landing Pages – An effective landing page should help you achieve your site’s goals. A WooCommerce expert can help you optimize your landing pages for this purpose.
Final Notes
Outsourcing a WooCommerce expert can help you save your time so you can focus on other things that need your attention. You now have a better idea of what tasks you can outsource to save your time. A WooCommerce expert can do tasks in a fraction of the time that it would take you. While outsourcing can be a challenge, the tips above should help ease the process.
Do you have any questions? Have you tried outsourcing? Do you have any tips that you can share? Let us know in the comments.
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