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Disadvantages For Employers At Odesk – And How To Prevent Them

Outsourcing to oDesk saves time, is cost efficient and often fun. But what are some disadvantages for employers at oDesk?

And what can you do so that they don’t even apply to you?

Disadvantages for oDesk employers during the hiring process

Sometimes, you encounter problems before even successfully having hired anybody. Doing the hiring process correctly will minimize any risks for you.

Dealing with uncooperative potential employees

Screen your employees before hiring for better results

You may want to pre-screen the applicants by giving them a test or by asking for credentials. Sometimes, all you will get are excuses.

This can drive you mad, because you have no time to listen to excuses.

The solution?

Move on to the next applicant.

Typically, for any well-written job opening, you can get dozens of applicants in one day.

You are not forced to hire any one of them – it’s your money!

If no one is a match for your needs, simply close the job and re-open it a few days later. You’ll be surprised how easily you will find the perfect assistant for you.

Wading through too many contractors when hiring

Taking too much time with unfitting applicants in the hiring process is another disadvantage for employers at oDesk.

The solution?

Pre-screening is everything. Set the bar high and expect the skills you need for your job.

Then, as a principle, only interview the providers that pass all your requirements. Only occasionally, interview interesting exceptions.

Needing to find out the person behind an agency

If an agency applies, you may never find out which person exactly is doing your work. It may be fine for data entry jobs, but not for personal assistant jobs.

The solution?

Set the requirement that you are only looking for individuals, not agencies. Point this out in your job description. Weed out all agencies that apply, if you want to avoid them.

Adapting the budget to the final price/ Cost versus value

Now we are talking money. Your money.

You can do with it as you want. Never feel pressured in spending your hard-earned cash if you don’t want to.

On the other hand, don’t simply go for the cheapest provider, hoping it will save you money.

Good work has his price.

  • Either money, by paying an expert higher rates,
  • or your time (which is money), by training a newbie extensively to suit your needs.

Find the right balance between these two extremes.

Disadvantages for Employers at oDesk after hiring a provider

During your cooperation, things may not go as smooth as you thought. We’ll help you to optimize the “managing-your-freelancers” phase.

Losing time managing providers

One of the biggest disadvantages for Employers at oDesk is that they can lose a lot of time instructing their employees.

Personally, I love my time and am very stingy with it.

The solution:

Speed up your instruction times to the max! The best tool to give instructions the fastest way possible are screen recording software and voice instructions.

Famous Quotation by Michael LeBoeuf

Setting up the communication right

One of the smaller disadvantages for Employers at oDesk: the oDesk message system is not well suited for day-to-day messaging.

The solution?

Exchange emails ASAP – switch from the oDesk message system to email right away in the first message after hiring someone.

Time inefficient instructions via email

Emails are the most used medium for communication around the globe. Emails also take way too much time to read and to write.

The solution:

Write a few emails at the beginning. Then, inform your employee that you prefer sending voicemail and video instructions. Give your employee all the information needed to deal with those files. Then, gradually write less and less, but speak and record more and more.

Ask your virtual assistant to confirm what he has understood in writing, especially the first few times.

Time difference

There will be time differences when you outsource to the other end of the world. That’s expected and normal.

The solution?

Don’t wait for instant replies to your messages. Expect them only – but also latest – after 24 hours.

Inform your employee that you expect quick replies.

Cultural differences

People from the US and e.g. people from China will think very differently. Sometimes, there are big differences in cultural values.

Don’t get misunderstood over language barrier problems or differences in culture.

The solution?

Be as objective as possible. Ask your employee to confirm your instructions in his own words the first few times.

Re-explain misunderstandings, but stay calm and gentle. Don’t scare your employee, he may simply leave.

(This happened to me once, totally unexpected after months of cooperation.)

Disadvantages after firing an employee

Disadvantages of firing an employee

The only disadvantages for employers at oDesk that exist after you fire a provider is the battle with your conscience and if you get into lengthy discussions.

Let’s avoid that.

Bad conscience and pity party

Former employees might try to get you to pity them. Stay strong. If you have done everything right, the provider has had his chance to redeem his errors.

Make a fired provider feel like you have been just and fair. That will prevent 99% of the discussions.

As for the last 1%…

Bad feedback

If you leave your oDesk provider after a fight, he might be tempted to leave you an unnecessary harsh feedback. That’s bad business ethics on part of the provider.

Prevent it by clearing all unclarities before you fire anybody, including letting him try to make up for any errors at least once.

Keep all critical discussions within the oDesk messaging system.

This way, you can try to get a bad feedback removed if you can prove you have been attacked wrongly.

Do you know more problems with outsourcing to oDesk?

Why it is still worth it to outsource to oDesk

Even if there are disadvantages for employers at oDesk, the *advantages of outsourcing by far outweigh them. It’s just business. An employer has to learn to strategically make the right decisions for his business.

You can’t afford not to outsource.

Fortunately, we provide the best training and information for all sorts of outsourcing services, right from hands-on experience.

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Define Productivity: Know When You Are Doing Great

Be productive to meet your goals

True workaholics work and work, without ever being satisfied.

We define productivity as time spent towards your goal.

If you procrastinate, you are not productive, because you are spending time that doesn’t help your goal. Let’s keep this productivity definition in mind.

How do you best determine where you spend your time?

Using a to-do list and checking off finished tasks is one good, old-school way to keep you on track. You’ll know you have been productive when you are done with your list at the end of the day.

Today, there are much better and precise tools available, especially if you are working on a computer.

Measure the productivity of your virtual assistant

When you work with a virtual assistant, it’s important to use some kind of productivity tracking software on the end of the VA.


In case you hire a virtual assistant over oDesk, this is taken care of for you. It’s the best outsourcing company I recommend from personal experience.

When you have employees, it’s your job to stay on track

If you manage a team of workers for your project, it gets harder to clearly define productivity. You’ll need some time to

  • manage your team
  • send your VA’s instructions (the most time efficient way to do this is to use screen recording software)
  • and work out the general strategies for your team.

How do you define productivity as a manager?

Time spent efficiently giving your virtual assistants instructions, so that they can work towards your goal, is defined as being productive.

Time spent implementing strategies, analyzing data and giving feedback to your team for a smooth cooperation is also productive.

What is not productive is to constantly check on your statistics (be it web statistics or the Odesk screenshots of your providers), without doing anything with it. You might feel that you are being productive, but you are wasting time.

I know because I have been guilty of doing this often enough.

Have a road map

When working on a project, take the time to get a 10 000 foot view of everything. Don’t just work short-term on the next actionable step – you might end up in a dead end.

Take the time to define productivity, optimal work output, intermediate steps to your goal. Then, share them with your team of virtual assistants, if you have any.

Franz Kafka's famous saying about productivity

Don’t have any virtual assistants yet?

Then you might be wasting time! Which is not productive at all.

Read more about hiring virtual assistants efficiently

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How We Define Outsourcing

Defining Outsourcing

How I define outsourcing when someone never has heard of the concept:

When I tell my friends that I have a website about real-life experiences of outsourcing to virtual assistants, many people don’t know what I am talking about.

My Definition of Outsourcing

“Sending simple and repetitive work that you’d rather not do in order to focus on more important tasks to a temporal coworker over the internet.”

Often, the coworker (virtual assistant) is based in countries where the cost of living is lower.

The coworker must be willing to do the work for you.

If you want to keep a good conscience while outsourcing, this also means

  • you cannot coerce him into the work
  • he does not work out of desperation (e.g. the whole family is starving)

How Wikipedia defines outsourcing

“Outsourcing is the process of contracting an existing business process which an organization previously performed internally to an independent organization, where the process is purchased as a service. (…)

An outsourcing deal may also involve transfer of the employees involved to the outsourcing business partner.”

Read the whole Wikipedia entry here.

What doesn’t, for us, fall under the definition of outsourcing?

  • Firing an EmployeeOutsourcing is not Offshoring

The concept of outsourcing is often connoted very negatively. People associate with it big companies firing perfectly good workers or giving them the choice to work in countries like India or China.

This is offshoring, a similar but different concept.

  • Outsourcing is not the magic formula for free time – it’s not that simple

What also is not (realistic) outsourcing is to think that you can hire someone from Asia – and the rest of your life organizes itself, including you becoming rich overnight.

Wake up: having an assistant on your payroll does also take time.

But you can free up your schedule by outsourcing simple, repetitive and possible boring work. If you define outsourcing as “freeing yourself up from boring and tedious tasks”, then you are well on the way to success.

Companies and Outsourcing/Offshoring

Since outsourcing and offshoring are different – what is my opinion of big companies doing “outsourcing”?

If I could address big corporations directly, I would tell them this:

Don’t fire the workers you already have. Know that you might lose your secrets to people far away, possible outside the jurisdiction of your country. There is a price to rely on foreign forces too much.

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Define Integrity For A Virtual Assistant That Wants Long Term Success

Showing integrity with a hand over heartGood work ethics, transparency and personal integrity are three key aspects that every virtual assistant needs. We define integrity for a virtual worker as having personal standards that will not be broken by the opinion of others.

What does integrity mean for a virtual assistant?

Personal integrity is crucial for your everyday life. For a virtual assistant, here is how we define integrity;

  • You have to be open and honest about what you can and cannot do.
  • Be sincere when for example, a task is more than you can do. It’s better than to lie in order to get more work to do. Similarly, when you have a strong skill, there’s no need to hide it.  Be sincere and transparent in the work you do.

How to Make Your Work More Transparent?

You can make your work more transparent and understandable for your employer if you grant him visibility on what you do in real time. There are three methods on how to do that:

  1. Using oDesk’s team application, you will share regular screenshots of your desktop and, therefore, the manner of how you work.
  2. You can use a productivity tracking software.
  3. You can make screen recording videos of you doing specific crucial tasks so that your employer can see how you work.

What Does Integrity Mean When You Work As A Virtual Assistant?

Thumbs up by a man and a woman

You should have two rules.

Rule#1: 

Have personal standards.

Those are ethical rules you play by and you will not bend for anyone.

Even call your employer on this if he breaks one of your personal rules. Call people on the word they have given.

Rule#2: 

Say ‘No’ when you can’t do the job.

This does not mean that you are weak or a bad worker. You can show alternatives.

  • For example, show motivation to learn the skill needed to do the work.
  • Or, research alternative ways to solve the problem.

How Others Define Integrity and Good Work Ethics

You want to get some inspiration on the subject of great work ethics, personal power and integrity? Then, please check out this gallery with quotes about integrity.

I’ve asked my virtual assistant to put together a few quotes and present them as a gallery.

(Click on the picture below or on the right to start the slide-show.)

Quotes that define integrity

A quote about integrity by Alan Simpson

How Will Having Integrity Help You As A Virtual Assistant?

Perhaps, at the beginning, it will slow you down when you protect your personal values too much.

But, in the long run, and especially when you work long term for an employer, having integrity will help you succeed.

There is such a thing like an online reputation.

Your reputation as a virtual assistant is crucial.

  • If you lie on one thing, your reputation will crumble faster than you know it.
  • But if you do as promised and over deliver with hard work, you will get referrals and personal networks that will help you with your career as a virtual assistant.

An Inspiring Book

Read about how Ayn Rand defines integrity.

One great book about the subject of personal integrity was written by Ayn Rand and is called “The Fountainhead”.

(As you can see from a photo, I have read it quite often.)

It is a good read and inspires you to think about and strengthen your ideals of personal integrity.

What Does Integrity Mean For An Employer?

As an employer, you can greatly benefit from the lessons of this article. Having integrity will help you retain virtual assistants for a long time as well as to build trust with your coworkers.

Here are some things that you should keep firmly in mind when you are an employer:

  • Pay on time.
  • Keep promises always.
  • Give your virtual worker a perspective for the future.
  • Be ethical when you do outsourcing.

Have your own standards of quality especially for content writing. After all, if you own the article, you will procure good name and reputation under it.

Your Opinion Matters

How do you define integrity?

Show some personality and openly join the discussion in the comments below.  Even if you don’t agree with my points of view, I really appreciate your input.

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How A Virtual Assistant Can Manage Your Creative Commons Photos And Attributions From Flickr

Creative Commons Blue Icon

On my second website, there are around 700 Creative Commons photos from Flickr used as illustrations. My virtual assistant helps me heavily setting them up.

This includes:

  1. Researching the pictures.
  2. Placing an attribution back link to the source.
  3. Commenting under the picture in Flickr with the back link back to my page.  This presented some link views.
  4. Keeping track of all the illustrations in an organized database.
  5. Replacing broken links as they arise and replace pictures if they are not up to date anymore.

All these tasks saved me a great deal of time. But then there was one problem.

What Happens if A User On Flickr Leaves the Platform And The Pictures Are Not Available Anymore?

Shocked business woman in front of laptop

That’s exactly what happened. Quite a bit of my pictures, at least a few dozen, were all from the same Flickr user. Although I received his expressed content via Flickr mail, I don’t have access to that mail anymore as he left the platform.

Did I have to remove all those great pictures which I originally have the consent to use?

Since I could not place a correct backlink to attribute the author anymore, this would collide with the creative commons terms of services, I thought.

To remove that many pictures and research new ones would:

  1. First, be hard work
  2. Be a bit shame because the pictures from the first author were great.

Solution Attempt #1- Contacting the Original Author

My VA helped me track down the original authors of the Flickr photos. That’s because he uploaded some of his photos to other photo stock banks.

By using a reverse image research tool called TinEye or Google reverse image search, he was able to track down the same user in a few other photo banks. Also by researching his nickname, he found him on social media like Pinterest and Twitter.

So, it was possible to contact them this way.

What to Do When the Original Author Is Not To Be Found Anymore?

My contingency plan if the author would not respond and/or we would not find him:

Find the official solution of what is to be done when Creative Commons photos are not found in the source anymore. For that, my virtual assistant took the initiative and contacted the team from Creative Commons.

The Answer in short: Keep the pictures

You can continue using Creative Commons photos.

As long as the pictures were Creative Commons in the first place, meaning that with attribution that one could use them, the license is still valid unless the author changes it.

Since the author has just left Flickr, the license is still valid.

Preventing this Problem from Ever Coming up Again by Stamping Every CC Illustration with a Time Stamp

Date Stamp

Since I cannot afford to waste so much time every time a Flickr user chooses to leave the platform, my virtual assistant researched an elegant solution to the problem.

However, I would have never implemented this system if it were not for my virtual assistant who invested lots of time and hours to mark each picture and their attribution license.

Save time in the long run:

Timestamp every Creative Commons picture with their license and attribution as long as they’re still up on Flickr. Luckily, there is an online tool available for that, which my virtual assistant used extensively.

  • It is called ImageStamper.

Using this service, it’s possible to retain a proof that you had the license in the first place. This way and under the agreement of Creative Commons, if the photographer revokes his license then you can keep the pictures on your web properties as long as the author does not tell you otherwise.

Feel free to implement these tactics sooner rather than later. You cannot know when all your great Creative Commons photos, on your blog or website, will not be attributable anymore.

For the picture managing task alone including all the problems discussed in this page, a virtual assistant more than pays back his money.

If you want to learn nuts and bolts of working with virtual assistants from experience then we recommend you learn from our free email coaching.

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Learn How To Outsource With Youtube Marketing Strategy Effectively

YouTube Logo
© Fank Stone, Berg Eckle [YouTube] via Wikimedia Commons

YouTube marketing strategy is part-17 of an interview with Eric, a fellow entrepreneur interested in outsourcing his work to virtual assistants all over the world.

Follow along to learn from our experience on working with VAs!

Click here to read part 16 of this interview – What are the standards in hiring part-time administrative assistant?

Summary:

  • How to make the YouTube marketing strategy helpful in training your assistants and outsourcing tasks
  • Create videos that contains content that will help your outsourcing strategy effectively
  • Learn how YouTube videos can help train your virtual assistants

Start of the Interview:

Francis
Francis

One other comment regarding YouTube, when you start doing that I would be very happy to learn from you about that because I also think this is one of my many projects in my projects folder.

I think I’m giving my main assistant nightmares with all the projects I’m opening and none that I’m closing.

But I would like also very much like to go into YouTube because I do believe that it is very a targeted traffic and from the right sort of persons. And I know that it’s very useful to have a virtual assistant to fine tune your videos.

And there’s one outsourcing expert, so to say, who’s shared a lot on YouTube already. I’m sending you a link. It’s from a person called Tyrone Shum.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Yeah, I’ve heard of Tyrone. I’ve seen some of his stuff on this.

Francis
Francis

And okay, I didn’t know you knew, but then I would suggest that your assistant should digest all his free information as much as possible because you obviously also have some paid service especially in the direction of video creation.

But if you have basic knowledge about working with virtual assistants, I think it’s more money efficient to train your own team than to pay him for a service. But if you’re not interested in that, then just go ahead and use a specialized service for that.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Yeah, that’s definitely something that I need to look into. Because I think especially with my medium – teaching piano lessons – that’s definitely something that needs to be more on YouTube because it’s such a visual type of thing. You know what I’m saying.

Francis
Francis

Yeah. But I really think when it comes to training your assistant, just let them watch training videos. I think there are lots of how to use YouTube videos on YouTube just as part of the training because I wouldn’t have the patience to watch all these videos if I wasn’t doing the task myself.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Right, yeah. And that will save us the time to have and actually go out and create the video themselves and making that time to do that too.

Francis
Francis

Yeah. Do you have special equipment for your videos? Your quality was much better than mine and you had a big microphone as well.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Well, at the moment, you see, I used to do some basic audio recordings so I have the microphone that I use for that. And I just use that for my videos. I mean, I just went out and got like a $200 HD camera.

Francis
Francis

Okay.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

I went out and bought some lights, just $20 lights that I just saw. And really the qualities of my videos aren’t really that great yet but they’re getting better. But it’s probably only like a couple of hundred dollars and you can get a microphone, a decent HD camera and that’s really all that I have.

Francis
Francis

Yeah. That’s also the advice I’ve read often about videos. One advice that I’ve found very good from Tyrone was to just get started. Just do a crappy video first. And then he showed his oldest videos and they were crappy in comparison.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Because his videos have like explosions and sound effects and stuff like that. And in his first video, he’s like in the trunk in the car or something, really. And then I wanted to follow his advice and I just did that.

I prepared some sort of script and it was evening and I was tired because I watched all these videos but I wanted to get into action. I didn’t want to just read and not do anything.

And then it was dark and I didn’t have the lights installed too well, so I was looking almost green in this video. And I was like looking sleepy and talking slurrish like I was high. And I was recording then a 10 minutes video of myself talking this way. And then I was proud because I took an actionable step, you know.

Francis
Francis

And then I put it in the Dropbox and send it to my 2 best friends and my girlfriend. And I cannot tell you how hard they laughed at me. They did not laugh with me, seriously. They made fun of me and hard, really hard.

And I was just trying to explain myself. I was just saying, yeah, I know it’s bad but I just want to take action and the next one will be better. Then they said that was so bad, just don’t do that.

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Eric

Let me say one thing though really quick, Francis. I’ve sent you a link to my YouTube channel.

And my videos, some of the first ones that I did – they’re horrible. I mean, I’m serious. And also, I was nervous in front of the camera. I mean I didn’t even have my face in them, it was just my hand. And the way I talk I was ah—ah, you know. I mumbled most of the time and they’re just horrible. So if you ever have a minute, watch some of them.

Francis
Francis

But you kept them online, I think that’s charming.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

And if you look at some of them, I’ve got almost 110,000 views on one video.

Francis
Francis

Yeah, you have lots of views. I’ve been looking at it. I think in the end, the content is what’s important in the long run.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Right. And that’s the thing; if you can just get it out there I think that people are a lot more gracious than we think.

I think that even though that we look at it and like oh that’s terrible, that’s horrible, yeah. I mean I think that we want to strive for quality. I think we want to have the best stuff that we can.

But when you’re first starting your business, I think it is better just to get it out there. And I mean, you can see from what I’ve got; I mean they look horrible but I’ve got a lot of views.

And too I mean, it’s different for my stuff because I’m kind of piggybacking off of popular songs. I think that they’re doing a great job but they are horribly, horribly produced.

Francis
Francis

Yeah, I agree. But thanks for the heads up because I really sort of lost my motivation with that story because my tools were so bad. And yeah, also I’m aware that the tool I’m using for recording for my webcam has much lower quality than, for example, the recording that comes from Skype.

So obviously technically, I was not set up either. But I’d like to go into that soon also. And for example, for these videos, I will try work with my main assistant first because I will not have enough work for full time and then I give it to someone else.

I also believe before you expand, you have to have some sort of return of interest so some money which comes back into your business.

If you have videos and you create them. And over time, it creates you either direct advertisement income or links back to your services that you get money from. Then you can say, okay, I’m earning hundreds of dollars more a month, why not put them directly into the expansion of my team?

But if you just expand because you have so many ideas, like I am, then you risk just running and burning lots of money.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Yeah and you’re not getting anything in return on that.

Francis
Francis

Yeah, so that’s something to look out for.

Continue reading part 18 – How reliable Google Analytics YouTube tracking for online business?