Are you overworked? I feel your pain! But you can get help. I’ve written before on this topic. See my blog post, “How to get help when you can’t afford it–or even if you can.” I suggest that you read that article if you’re thinking about working with someone else.

But those solutions cost money — except for a student intern. Maybe you think that you can’t afford even 1¢. So here are some ideas for getting help for free. They are ways to outsource or delegate some of your work. Except for the first idea, they are solutions for short-term projects. If you want permanent help, you’ll usually need to pay for it.

Get a partner

You might say, “A partner isn’t free,” but a partner only makes money if the business makes money — just like you — if you’re the owner.

I’ve noticed that businesses with 2 people at the helm can do more. When you choose the right partner, you have complementary skills and feed off each others’ energy. And think how nice it would be not to have to go it alone!

Of course, if you choose the wrong partner it can be pretty horrible, but it’s certainly worthwhile to try.

Barter services

Bartering is the exchange of services. Develop relationships with other skilled professionals and suggest a win-win barter. Try to make the exchange an equal value of services.

A colleague of mine bartered a website branding makeover for social media setup and training. It worked well for both parties and no money changed hands. They can also now use each other for testimonials. Indeed, my colleague’s website is listed on the website branding expert’s testimonial page as a happy customer.

Time Traders Club is an online bartering community that I below to and can highly recommend. You can start off for free.

Join or create a meetup, mastermind or support group

I’ve written about this before in my tip, “Need help? Create a group!” If you haven’t read that post (or forgot about it), go and read it because I list some useful techniques and collaborative tools.

You may be able to find an existing group. Meetup.com lets you join or create local groups based around a topic. There are lots of Internet Marketing Meetup groups.

But you can create your own local group, just by asking around and asking friends to ask their friends.

You don’t need to limit yourself to local in-person meetings. You can go online and ask people if they’d like to join a mastermind or support group. You can make this request in LinkedIn groups, for example.

A word of caution. Some of the people who join will be takers, not givers. Usually, this is not because they don’t want to give, but just because they don’t know much. There will also be people who never get around to taking any action, so that your efforts to help them will be frustrated. Believe me, I speak from experience.

But if you have the strength to weed out those who aren’t contributing or at least moving forward, you can end up with a powerful group that will supercharge everyone in it.

Now, there’s no excuse for not having some help. What has worked for you? Do you have any success or horror stories? Leave a comment!