Francis

by Francis
(July 17, 2013)

Dropbox notification for 48 GB extra space

I had a very nice surprise to receive 48 GBs of additional free Dropbox space along with a nice email notification from Dropbox.

Granted the additional space is limited to 24 months. So there is a risk of me being tempted to pay for premium service if I get use to those 48 GBs of free space.

But two years from now, that’s a long time into the future.

Why Would You Need 66 GBs of Space for Your Dropbox?

For normal file sharing and storage, their default free space is probably sufficient. But working with a virtual assistant like I do, the many video instruction files really sum up.

Also, all the files from the research and rework from my assistant are saved in the same Dropbox, and that also piles up.

At the moment I can manage just fine with 18 GB of free space that I have received using a trick with Fiverr.

Check out this post if you haven’t done this trick yet.

And don’t forget to earn yourself additional 48 GBs of free space.

Comments for How to Get 48 GB Bonus Dropbox Space and How I Reach a Total of 66 GBs of Free Storage

Sep 10, 2014

Just purely amazing by: JomvieI was so surprised also when I hand you my email and then I had these series of email notification the next few days saying that my Dropbox expands up to 60+gb. I’ve no idea how that works, but it greatly helps on my end, especially with all those files that I don’t want to delete (in case I’ll need the in the future). I just hope 24 months will take its time 😀

 

Catching Up Writing the Diary of My Virtual Assistant

by Francis
(July 31, 2013)

While some real life troubles are keeping me busy, my virtual assistant takes the opportunity to update his diary which you can find at the end of this post.

In this diary, he writes down exactly the work updates he tells me every day. If you watch them closely, you can see how many different tasks a well-trained virtual assistant is able take care of.

It’s also highly recommended that if you have a virtual assistant, you send him to this diary so that he learns the communication style which will be very useful to you as an employer.

For an employer, saving time while reviewing the work of his virtual assistant is crucial. For an assistant, reporting his daily tasks in an easy to understand format is also very important.

We still have many work updates saved as a draft for review. Still do take the time to check out my virtual assistant’s diary.

by Francis
(30 Apr, 2013)

I hope you haven’t missed our updates. These last days were a little bit hectic and I almost had not enough time to even give my virtual assistant some work instructions.
Luckily, I have previewed this beforehand and prepared some work for him to do.

This is also what you should take away from this blog post. If you have a VA, especially if you have him working for you full-time, you must be sure that you have work for him to do at all times.

If worst comes to worst and works just runs out because your virtual assistant is too effective at what he does; then you can have a few, not too many, E-books ready for him to read.

Invest the money into the training of your VA. The lessons he reads from the E-books can be useful for your business too.

Comments for Have a Backlog of Work Instructions Ready for Your Virtual Assistant In Case You Get Tired

Would You Give a Virtual Assistant Access to Your Emails?

by Francis
(08 May, 2013)

Some time ago, I discussed the idea of using a personal assistant to pre-screen and order your private email with a good friend.

In my case, it didn’t really work out when I tried out working with and Indian virtual assistant.

That’s because my native language is German and I have a lot of German Emails.

If your native language is English, would you give your virtual assistant access to your emails?

Internet Not Working – My Virtual Assistant Is Missing In Action

by Francis
(14 May, 2013)

Although it happens very rarely, my VA has problems with his internet connectivity.

When I worked in the past with a personal assistant from the Philippines, she had to fight from time to time with power outage issues. Without an internet connection, a virtual assistant can hardly work for you.

How can a VA work if his internet does not work?

If you have worked together with your VA for a long time, there might be a few tasks that are possible to do offline. Such as data analysis, putting data on Excel sheets, writings tasks, and transcription of already downloaded audio recordings – stuff like that.

If you are smart as an employer, you prepare several tasks like these for situations where your VA is cut off of your internet connection for some time.

Comments for Internet Not Working – My Virtual Assistant Is Missing In Action

My Virtual Assistant Gets a Diary So That You Can Follow Along His Every Move

by Francis
(23 May, 2013)

My virtual assistant takes quite some time every day to update me about his work. He prepares his work updates in the format of a diary for easy reading on my end. Everything is designed so that I can review his work and give feedback to open loops as fast as possible.

Since he is updating me with lots of work from his work day as a virtual assistant, I was sure you would be interested in getting a look behind the scenes.

We are setting up a blogger blog right now. My virtual assistant helps me get some technical issues out of the way. Such as blogging related stuff and sub-domain mapping and stuff like that.

Luckily, I can send my virtual assistant some instructions on how to do that and he can help me implement that. When the diary is done, I’ll let you know.

Stay tuned for seeing exactly what virtual assistant does every day for me and my businesses. And if you want, adapt his ideas and his working steps for your own businesses.

Be sure to let us know if you like or enjoy or, perhaps even dislike seeing my virtual assistant at work.

Bringing Order into the Chaos – A Great Productivity and Organization Tool

by Francis
(May 30, 2013)

I started using simpleology daily. It makes me much more efficient.

Just by doing some training and ordering my to-do list in an intelligent way, I get much more done.

The cool things about simpleology are:

1. Its free,
2. Its browser based,
3. Its effective,
4. It really saves time and gets things done.

I highly recommend it. I am using it regularly to organize my tasks related to my website business as well as to my daily chores.

There are even some mobile versions of it, but I only use it on my desktop computer.

This is one tool you really shouldn’t miss. You can even invite your virtual assistant to also use the tool.

One of the steps to get you more efficient is actually designing some task to delegate. So if you want to implement this tool together with your virtual assistant, it is a great fit.

Is Outsourcing Easy to Do?

by Francis
(31 May, 2013)

When you read websites and blogs of people doing outsourcing, people like me, you can get the impression that it is an extremely easy thing to outsource.

I’ll be honest with you: it’s not always easy.

You have to learn the ropes.

You have to learn how to delegate your stuff to virtual assistants you can trust.

You have to learn how to manage them, interview them, to get them on your team. You also have to learn how to not spend too much money on them, or how to manage them wisely.

In the end this website, Ideal-Helper is geared toward having you learn from my real life experience as they happen.

You don’t need to spend one cent on outsourcing before you haven’t learned everything.

But in the end, learning how to do outsourcing in real life does only come naturally when you do it.

So outsourcing isn’t always easy.

But once you’ve mastered it or even started doing it, you will enjoy the additional free time so much that the little effort of learning tools and trades of outsourcing will seem small to you.

Read more advantages of outsourcing

Comments for Is Outsourcing Easy to Do?

by Francis
(04 June, 2013)

The model of Asksunday seem very nice, for personal outsourcing. But in my opinion it is more suitable for beginners in outsourcing.

If you have gotten your feet wetter a little bit, then I really recommend hiring someone on hourly basis.

Even better – Using a system that has you paying for your virtual assistant exactly depending on the time they worked.

That can also be on smaller increments than an hour, For example 10 minutes. If you do that you will never have to worry about paying for more than the assistant actually worked for. With these ideas of those requests, it seems to me a little bit unclear how long each request takes.

Exactly 10 minutes? Up to 10 minutes? If a task takes only one second… Will it be credited as a 10 minute task?

Another thing I wanted to comment on was the idea of having an army of virtual assistants.

Do note that managing an assistant can be quite a bit of work too. Of course, after sometimes your assistant will be able to do many things without your instructions. But especially at the beginning, you will need to manage your assistant closely. And even after that ideally you communicate with your assistant daily.

Now imagine doing that with an army of assistants.

But all in all – I thank Tim Ferriss for inspiring me to trying out the Four-Hour-Work-Week myself. I think I wouldn’t have done it without him.

Maximizing the ROI from Viral List Mailers with the Help of a Virtual Assistant

by Francis
(05 June, 2013)

It has become a little bit silent on this blog these last days. My virtual assistant has been very busy helping me researching, testing out, tweeting and eventually working on a manual all on the subject of viral list mailers.

What are Viral List Mailers?

I will be writing a post about this subject soon. But for now, here is my definition of viral list mailers.

• They viral list mailer systems function in a way that you can get traffic from other people in exchange for reading their e-mails.

For reading different emails with offers all centered around internet marketing, you can deliver traffic on the push of your button to your own landing site. It’s quid pro quo exchange.

Why are list mailers interesting to me?

For one, it is just another idea of getting traffic to our website. I have to admit, to me personally, it has been a very interesting idea. I have been poking around the subject of list mailers for quite some time – a few months, actually.

But in the end, what I’m really interested is to boost start the opportunity to generate traffic with list mailers by using a virtual assistant. My VA allows me to bypass the time lost from clicking and reading through all those offers and still getting my traffic in return.

Because there are so many different list mailers out there, I want to innovate their use that with the help of my VA. What I present to you is only a list of the most effective of converting tools.

My Virtual Assistant Organized a Data Entry Specialist for My Team as a Hiring Manager

by Francis
(13 June, 2013)

When you have worked together with a virtual assistant for long time, there is a big advantage you gain. Since he knows you very well, he can train and hire other people for you.

You can leverage the training you invested into your virtual assistant. By having him, teach the same skills to others.

This way, you multiply your efforts without you spending more time in hiring, managing and training new assistants.

This only works if you have a relationship based on trust with your primary assistant and he of course the right person and has the right training.

All in all, I am extremely happy that my main assistant has the capabilities of acting like a hiring manager, doing the interviews and training new workforce for my team.

This way, I can scale down my business or up as I needed. This is one of the bigger reasons why I strongly recommend to you that you invest time and efforts into training your own long time virtual assistant in opposite of having several sequential assistants one after the other.