Time Management & Online Presence: How Do You Know When To Do The Work Yourself

The title sounds a bit complicated, but so is the subject.  You have a growing business, and you’re already spending a lot of your time brainstorming and planning your goals for the future.  You know that a large portion of those goals involves your online presence.  Without an effective online presence, your company won’t continue to grow in today’s market.   But, you are extremely busy, so how do you know what things you can take care of yourself versus which things you should farm out to another employee, subcontractor, agency, or business?

Here are some things to consider when making the important decisions of time management and online presence:

1. It is better to work smarter and not harder
   I’ve seen companies repeat the same work over and over again rather than once-and-done. For example, if you don’t have a transparent logo— and each time you want to use your logo somewhere, you are spending a couple of minutes “cropping out the white space” around it, that’s not a good use of your time. If it’s a task that can be reused, you may want to consider doing it the right way, so it will save time in the future. As for the logo example, if this means hiring someone to make a transparent logo for you, get it done.
2. Expertise always costs less than doing it yourself
   This seems counterintuitive, but it’s true. If you hire an expert that can knock out the task in a day or less, or perhaps even an hour or less, isn’t that worth far more than the amount of time you’d spend to learn how to do the thing in the first place? You need to consider the value of your time and the amount of time you’ll spend personally on the project. If it’s not something you know exactly how to do, you need to seriously consider hiring someone who knows what they’re doing. You wouldn’t walk into a diner and ask for a lobster, you would go to the seafood restaurant for that. People specialize in certain things for a reason, and everyone wins by allowing each other to showcase their own talents.
3. The experts have tools that you don’t
   It’s important to understand that the experts often have the equipment that you don’t have. If you wanted to make a t-shirt, you probably wouldn’t want to sit at home and color on a shirt with a paint pen, because it wouldn’t look very professional. You may try to sit around at home and figure out how to work a vinyl cutter or computer program to make the shirt, but that may take hours and still yield results that are slightly off-center. The best thing is to go to someone who has a t-shirt press. Just like a t-shirt factory, web experts have valuable design tools, tools for adding captions and logos to videos, post scheduling tools, and so on. It may not be worth it for you to buy the proper tools if you’re only going to use them sporadically. It’s better to let the experts pay for them and use them for all of their clients, and then everyone benefits.

There are still things that you can do yourself, and fortunately, there are some amazing tools that make that task easier for you (we’ve listed a couple examples below), but above all— you know what you can and cannot do effectively.  If your finished project is not going to be something that will wow your potential clients, you need to hire someone who will. And at the end of the day, wowing your customers is worth its weight in gold.

Online Tools to Try to DIY:

• Canva — Graphic Design & GIF Creation — http://www.canva.com  free, $12.99 a month pro subscription
• Magisto — Add your Logo and Caption to Movies, Movie Creation — http://www.magisto.com  $19.99 a month

If you prefer to not DIY, feel free to contact us for the latest and greatest in web design, SEO, and social media services.

For An Extraordinary Web Experience,
Komaya