Francis

February 25, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Smart Online Business Strategies

Reasons To Hire Virtual Assistant Support For Your Internet Business

If you own a website, one of the smartest and most advanced online business strategies is to hire a virtual assistant to assist you with your many online tasks.

A friend, Eric, approached me and wanted some advice about the effectiveness of hiring a virtual assistant for an online business.

I have a Website: How helpful is a virtual assistant for my business?

First of all, if you think that a virtual assistant is not worth it, please reconsider.

The end goal of my virtual assistant’s homepage ideal-helper.com is to teach other that skill.

Get a flexible virtual assistant on Odesk

Hire a Virtual Assistant for Various Online Tasks

On websites like oDesk, you can hire a transcriptionist for prices from about $1 per hour.

Even if you don’t have lots of work for an assistant to do, since oDesk bills you by hourly work, if you don’t have any work and your assistant does not (untruly) bill any work, then you don’t pay anything.

Of course, you need some time to monitor the activities of your VA, especially at the beginning. Working together with a virtual assistant is sort of a skill in itself.

After now four years of working with many virtual assistants, I can honestly say that I am pretty experienced doing this and that is what worth the time and the money learning this skill and adding into my portfolio of online business strategies.

Tasks to outsource if you have an SBI website

Following the advice from Site Build It!, I outsourced almost everything except the core content creation.

Here are some examples of what you could outsource to an assistant:

Research of Flickr pictures from Creative Commons
Placing them with HTML within my web pages
Aligning the pictures with the text
and commenting with a link back under the Flickr picture
as well as following up with the copyright levels of this Creative Commons Flickr picture changes.
Researching stock photos and places to get stock photos for free with promotions codes.
Website testing with Google analytics and other splits testing software
Research of monetization options, like research for an affiliate program and hard good stores
Another main job I outsource all the time is the transcription of voicemails. This speeds up the content creation dramatically!
Building and formatting Ezine newsletters in the Mail Out Manager (MOM) module

Outsource your Newsletter and Social Media

Outsource Your Social Media Marketing to Your VA

Save time and adapt your online business strategies for effective website marketing: outsource it as much as possible!

You can do newsletter creation with Aweber and give your VA access to the Aweber interface!

I didn’t outsource Facebook activities yet, but that would be very easy to do. You could easily have your virtual assistant “like” your Facebook business fan page and turn him into an administrator, so that every update he does looks like you are doing it.

Train your VA thoroughly before giving him access to SBI’s Site Central

I am using the block-builder system and I have taught my virtual assistant every step of the way.

This is also the way to go if you ask yourself this question:

“Do you allow your Asian virtual assistant to access you’re site-central and how do you know you can trust your VA?”

It is a question of trust. Slowly training your business associate should be an integral part of your online business strategies.

I have started out working with my virtual assistant on very simple tasks.
It started with some data entry and simple transcription jobs.
Then, I increased the difficulty of the tasks stepwise and I checked how well the assistant does.

If you have found one virtual assistant that does every task you ask of him with excellence and without fail, then you can challenge your assistant more and more.He will appreciate the challenges and will apply himself with efforts.

Don’t give your Virtual Assistant Access to your Website Admin tools too soon!

One beginner mistake with online business strategies is to pass on too much responsibility to your VA too soon.

I have worked one year with my virtual assistant on tasks did not require him to login to site-central before giving him access to it. And I asked if he was ready for this responsibility. So it’s all a question of communication.

You shouldn’t start out hiring a virtual assistant, giving him access to site-central and saying him to start working immediately.

This will end in a disaster.

Please be extra sure to trust your virtual assistant on a personal level before giving him access to site central.

February 25, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Pros And Cons Of The oDesk Team Application

When you work with providers on oDesk, you’ll profit from it’s free and included Odesk Team Application. It has many uses:

communication center

productivity measuring tool

central place for organizing multiple providers

If you plan on working or hiring with virtual assistants over oDesk, it’s use is mandatory. To help you with the decision, we’ll show you its main advantages and disadvantages.

Pros:

You can keep track on your provider’s work diary.

It automatically generates various reports that can help you analyze the performance and dedication of your provider during a specific period or on a specific task.

You can separate each of your tasks by entering separate “Memos” for all tasks.

The oDesk Team Application records random screenshots of your provider’s computer while he is working.

In addition, it also records the keyboard and mouse activity of your provider. Each time segment corresponds to 10 min worked time.

If there is none to very little activity and no changes between two screenshots, you can dispute the time and not pay, if the provider should be slacking off.

If you want to send audio files to oDesk for transcription, simply use the oDesk message interface.

This has never happened to me, by the way. The only thing that did happen was that the screenshots showed they were doing something else, like idle surfing.

You can remove payments for such time segments, too. And you should consider hiring someone more focused in the future.

You can also use the Odesk Team Room just like a messaging tool and your team can also interact with each other via chat.

Chatting thorough Odesk application with other team members

Cons:

Although Odesk has changed its TOS and team members now are not allowed to review the work diary of your team members (until you set them as an admin), the employer (who is automatically an admin) still has the opportunity to review past work diaries.

Other team members can only see the work diaries of those team members that are working live by clicking on the available screenshot on the Team Room.

Here is how other members can see your work diary

Sometimes you are having a confidential chat or writing a private email to your virtual assistant and you don’t want to disclose the matter to other team members. So here is a possibility that your conversation can be leaked.

In those cases, make sure you communicate with them privately via email only to minimize this risk. If you want to be 100% safe, ask your provider to not log time with the Odesk team application while reading and answering the email. Allow him to log an appropriate amount of offline time instead.

You can’t login to a team when you are off-line. For example, if one of your providers is assigned to a transcription job and his internet shuts down, he will not be able to work, although this is a type of task which could be done off-line.

You cannot set your chat status as “Invisible”. If you are working on a pretty sensitive task that requires 100% of your attention, you can’t set you online chat status as “Invisible” and anybody can disturb you.

In a case like this, make sure to inform your team members not to contact you for a given time frame.

When you are online and logged in to any specific team, you still are open to everyone and everyone can have a chat with you.

As an employer, you will not want that some of your providers chat to a member of another team about an issue that is non-related to the task at hand. You can only enforce discipline by actively and regularly checking the work diaries.

Although there are some shortcomings, the Odesk team application does a good job in reporting, organizing and connecting your virtual online team.

I have not found a better one-in-all-solution for this yet.

Thinking about hiring a provider?

Learn how to best hire a virtual assistant!

Offline Alternative for tracking your virtual assistants’ work

If you hire a VA outside of this service and pay him directly, you might want to use alternative screen recording software. One software with which I had great results in tracking the productivity of a VA from the Philippines that often lost his internet connection is reviewed in the video below.

This service is an even better option if your focus lies in tracking the work of your VA that works offline or loses his internet connection often.

February 24, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

How the oDesk Feedback System Motivates Your Virtual Assistants to Do Great Work

Showing a variety of feedback ratings on Odesk

The oDesk feedback and rating system is the bottom line “carrot and stick” – next to the money paid with either fixed-price jobs or hourly jobs – to make sure the quality of the outsourced work is top notch.

It is very crucial, not only for oDesk but also for many other outsourcing services.

The better you are rated as a provider, the more likely you are hired on the next job and vice versa.

To virtual assistants reading this, but also potential employers…

It’s not only your oDesk feedback that counts but also the feedback of others after the completion of the project.

The oDesk feedback score is like an online reputation

It works just like a job reference or testimonial. If all your testimonials sound really excited and extremely positive than you will impress your future employer and the likelihood of you being hired raises a lot.

This encourages the provider to really give their best. On the other hand, once you have a bad reference in your profile it will not go away so easily.

Employers usually read all references – at least that’s what I do and that’s what I expect everyone who reads the content of this website to do!

But sometimes providers go after sheer numbers as they might have a bad score, instead of gathering solid references, they try to fix their scores with numerous scores by doing really simple and easy small jobs which can be easily finished. This raises their average feedback a bit.

Be careful and read beyond the oDesk Feedback Score

Careful employers read beyond the simple feedback rating system. Smart employers only read the testimonials. Or take note of the missing of testimonials.

Example:

“Comment made private” always sets off my alarm bells for any provider.

The importance of the feedback score from the point of view of a virtual assistant

As always, I asked my virtual assistant for his unbiased opinion. How important is the oDesk feedback score really?

Here is what he shared with me…

For me as a provider obviously feedback is very important, but feedback score is much more important than feedback text. I would not mind if an employer gives me a 5 star rating with a little feedback like “Thanks for your hard work!” is pretty much more than acceptable.

On the flip side if someone writes long feedback praising my work and my work attitude, highly recommending me to others but only gives me 3 stars, I would not prefer it.

Reason:

Many employers usually specify required feedback score within the job post.

So keeping in view this employer’s requirement if I have a feedback score less than 4.50, no matter I have high positive remarks, but still I will not be even shortlisted for this job because the employer will reject my application without reviewing it as I am not fulfilling his job criteria. So in my opinion Numbers are more important than words especially in this case.

Obviously feedback remarks are also important but I don’t think that all employers review it very carefully, normally they judge you with your overall profile and if you have a good feedback score, you are more likely to get hired rather than a person having one or two remarkable feedbacks.

But there is a thing which I rate above both feedback and score is the experience, I think the most important factor of your freelancing profile is your experience and availability. So if you have worked more hours you always have an advantage.

But here employers need to be a bit more careful because some freelancers are also outsourcing their work even further. Since they are so experienced and they have thousands of hours under their profile so they are more likely to get hired by most of the people, but here look at these statistics.

This provider has worked more than 5700 hours in the last 6 months which means he has worked 230+ hours per weeks which is impossible.

How can somebody work without eating or sleeping continuously for 6 months or so?

So I would consider it a spam because he has an experienced profile, therefore he is getting contracts and outsourcing his work to other providers.

February 24, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Insights Into Mechanical Turk As A Cheap Crowdsourcing Service

Learn how to use a crowdsourcing service effectively

Sometimes you need to cooperate with a lot of people for your projects. Mechanical Turk is the perfect service for that. It is called a crowdsourcing service because you literally can hire whole crowds of people from all around the world to outsource your tasks too.

In general tasks – or HITs how they are called on Mechanical Turk – are

very simple,
very fast to finish
and very cheap to pay for.

Just as fast as a job description can be set up in seven steps, your jobs can be completed.

Using the Turk outside of the USA

Normally, Amazon’s service is only usable for users who live in the US. But there is a workaround.

I will show you exactly how to proceed to be a happy Mechanical Turk user if you live outside of the US – within its terms of service.

What can you do with this service?

There are many uses for this crowdsourcing service. If you need many different results, for example for a survey or different feedback to your product, you have a great amount of workers ready to do it for you for a couple of cents each.

Mechanical Turk is undoubtedly the cheapest outsourcing service I know of. To ask for a couple of simple clicks or a very short answer can be done for less than 5 cents.

However you can also crowdsource bigger tasks to the Turk. I have had content written or edited by different workers on this service. Although you pay slightly more for that, you probably will be fine with funds of less than a $1 per job.

Pretty cheap, huh?

Why does it work so well?

The workers from this service come from all walks of life.

Some of them only work on HITs out of boredom.
Others use their free time throughout a day to easily and without any complications make some additional bucks.

Serious full time freelancers who you can hire as virtual assistants will be found on other services like oDesk. The results you will get by working with such a broad mass of people will naturally be very different.

For survey results, this is very useful. The larger the sample of people interviewed, the more unbiased the results will be. For larger tasks like content creation that I have crowdsourced to “the Turk”, results were very different too.

Be careful when crowdsourcing content writing

I tried using “the Turk” for content creation.

If I asked for a personal story from a user about a specific topic, in some cases I got bad writing quality.
On the other end of the spectrum, I got a multiple of the number of words I asked for – for the same price!

These on and off results unfortunately are not so easy to reproduce.

Read more about cheaply outsourcing article writing jobs – for less than one dollar per article!

Avoid the bad guys, profit from the good guys

When you get a bad worker, you can ban him so that he can never apply to your jobs again. Unfortunately there will always be other people in the crowd who might deliver bad quality.

On the positive side, you will always be surprised by the number of workers who will far over deliver on your results.

I have never successfully got a hold of some of these very good workers in order to hire them on a more regular basis. You shouldn’t get attached to any of the workers on amazon Mechanical Turk’s service because it simply not probable that you will see them again and work again with them on a regular note.

Use other outsourcing services to get the same results. Even find a permanent Virtual Assistant on alternative sites like Fiverr or oDesk.

Bottom line:

In my opinion using Mechanical Turk as an outsourcing service is best for tasks that have to be completed quickly:

Repetitive tasks that can be completed by a large crowd of different people like

surveys,
interviews,
feedback,
very simple and repetitive jobs like data entry jobs with Excel-sheets,
picture recognition – which cannot be automated with machines
or other similar or boring tasks.

Controversial discussion about outsourcing on Mechanical Turk

I have read an interesting post on salon.com. The discussion was mainly about if it is human and ethical to allow the service of amazon Mechanical Turk to employ people to do mind numbing tasks for menial pay.

As you know, I have used Mechanical-Turk and always thought that it was a good thing. People who want to, can play around in their free time and make a little bit of money on this site.

But when I read through the discussions which followed in the three pages long comments, some new thoughts and interesting arguments came up.

I wanted to discuss some of those points and my virtual assistant will jump into the discussion where he thinks I didn’t discuss enough. Here are the results:

February 24, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Ask Your Virtual Assistant For Feedback Before Making Hard Decisions

Ask your VA before making hard decisions

It is very useful to have a virtual assistant when you need help making hard decisions. Sometimes,

your close friends cannot give you unbiased feedback.
they don’t want to hurt you.
they are not as deeply involved in a matter as you are.

Your virtual assistant is different. He probably knows the INs and OUTs about you, your business or your project. The next time you have a trouble making hard decisions…

Ask your virtual assistant

Perhaps you will remember the last time your boss asked you for input and feedback. Can you remember how eager you were come up to the best possible ideas to impress your boss?

In principle, it is not much different with your virtual assistant. When things boil down to the basics, you are his boss. You pay him. You provide him with work. It’s in his best interest to come up with the best possible feedback you can hope for.

Make use of that! A lot.

It is very beneficial for both you and your virtual assistant, if you listen to feedback of one another. This will strengthen the bond between you and your virtual assistant. And more importantly, helping you with making hard decisions will make him feel part of the project.

Do you want a real life example?

This very website, www.ideal-helper.com, has a domain name which was very carefully chosen. I had to throw out dozens of interesting alternatives in order not to break any trademark laws. Other domain names were already taken.

Then, I went back into heavy brainstorming mode. While I took some days off to really think of different domain names with pen and paper in hand, I simply asked my virtual assistant if he has any good ideas.

You know what? He provided almost ten great ideas to me. One of his ideas made in the top 2 choices. It was simple, elegant and rememberable.

I would not have come up with this elegant domain name without him. This example is a reminder to you and me to ask your virtual assistant for help.

Four eyes see more than two

He will be a reliable set of pair of eyes to double check on what you might have overlooked.

You can ask him for feedback:

How does my website look like?
What’s your personal opinion on this text?
Do you think that this email is too formal?
Where would you rather make vacations? This or that county? Why?
Can you help me choose a present for the next Mother’s day?

If you have a virtual assistant, or imagine you had one, where would a VA help you making hard decisions?

Combining human feedback with decision making software

When it comes to decision making, my virtual assistant has proved to be a great asset. The final decision to my domain name “ideal-helper.com” was based on three factors.

My personal brainstorming.
The input of my personal assistant.
The impartial decision making software Choose It!, one of the tools provided by sitesell.com which helped me narrow down from the top 6 choices to the final winner, by following 5 easy steps to making a decision.

Get help making decisions right now!

You can test out the Choose It! module right now, if you have trouble making hard decisions!

It works for everything, is logical, impartial and is based on proved theoretical decision making model.

February 24, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Lying On Job Applications – Is This A Good Idea?

No, it isn’t. Lying on job applications will cost you dearly, and I will tell you why.

After you are done reading this, you will be able to look the truth in the eyes with much more courage.

Be honest and direct – this will impress the right people

This article is useful for…

People looking for a real job

Virtual Assistants that have trouble finding a position

Don’t only think of job applications and even job interviews as “exams” that you must “pass”. Think the other way round: if this place does not accept you, it’s probably not your dream job, anyway.

With this thought in mind: boldly say the truth.

Of course, don’t be stupid either. If you took a year off, don’t say you were goofing around and doing drugs. Say where you traveled, and how the experiences you made changed you into a better person.

“Getting experiences” is always a good thing to say.

Why should you even listen to me?

I have been looking for a job for half a year before I was successful. Even with a plan of outsourcing my job hunt, it was still essential to stay true to myself.

Every time I am asked about the “gap” in my CV, I can easily brush off the question.

How? With the honest answer!

Did you lose a year in your CV because of some love drama? Then tell them straight, that you needed to “sort out personal issues” in order to work effectively.

Whatever you did in the past, turn it around to express you learned something and that this made you better suited for this position than the “past you”.

What lying on job applications actually can cost you

Man in blue shirt crossing his fingers at his back

Think about the scary amount of personal information that is already out there on the internet. Did you ever google your name?

Try it. I’ll be waiting.

What about the information you share on Facebook. Do you honestly think that if one looked carefully enough, they would not be able to dig up some dirt about you?

Now, what will happen if you blatantly lie about something crucial on your job application?

You will get fired. That is what will happen.

What if you have something in your past to hide?

We are all human. Even the HR employee is a human with weaknesses and flaws.

So, what to do if you have something serious to hide.

Don’t bring it up until you are asked directly about it.
Try to brush it off as it being something private and personal.
Convince the HR employee that you have overcome this past burden and that it won’t interfere with your ability to work.

Turning the negative into an opportunity

Two persons taking a job interview of a girl

It takes a certain skill of presenting yourself in the best light possible – in your application letters as well as in the actual job interview.

Being optimistic, positive and seing the silver lining in every challenge is a skill and a virtue.
Lying on job applications or pretending something that is not true is a bad idea.

Think hard about each flaw in your CV and past – before you get into the job interview.

Better idea: do what works!

I have shared my top tips about how to get a job. Make use of every resource you have. Then, you won’t be needing lies to find the job you dream of.

Francis