Have you ever wondered how to decide what to outsource in your online business? It's probably more difficult than doing so for an offline one. That's because so many Internet-based businesses also happen to be one-man-bands and, as a result, you end up doing all of it anyway. But you know as well as I do that you can't do it all. So how do you decide what to do?

Before you can do that, you need to understand the difference between core and non-core business. Core business is what your customers pay you for. It's your expertise. It's what you give them that enables them to solve their particular problem.

Non-core business is everything else. And to the extent possible, you should be doing only core business.

Obviously, that is the ideal, and online entrepreneurs - especially when they first start - seldom have the money to outsource as much as they would like.

Maybe you're in the same boat.

Even so, here are some guidelines that will help you to get started.

The number one activity that you need to do more than anything else is to create your own products. The most successful online entrepreneurs do. It's true that there are some people, called affiliates, who sell other people's products and who do very well at it, but they are few and far between.

Apart from the advantage of keeping all of the profits for yourself, another good reason to create your products is that you have complete control over the quality of the information. Have you ever bought a product that purported to deliver something really valuable, only to discover that it failed to live up to your expectations or that what was promised was blown out of all proportion? I certainly have.

When you create your own products, you can make sure that this doesn't happen to your customers.

There's another activity that you probably ought to do yourself, at least in the short term, and that's marketing. Writing articles for this directory is a case in point. Unless, and until, you've written a lot yourself, you won't really know how to write them in such a way as to make them attractive to your readers.

Once you do have the hang of it, then if you want to, you can create a template and outsource the activity.

The rest of what you do can be left for someone else; but that's a subject for another article.