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What’s New These Past Weeks

In the past few weeks, my virtual assistant and I have been busy with a few side projects. The first side project involves Evernote and essentially outsourcing my brain.

My virtual assistant helps me organize the tons and tons of ideas that are buzzing through my brain and that made me the creative center of my website. My virtual assistant is the hardworking and organized side. 🙂

The second project involves moving sites from SBI to WordPress as well as converting SBI sites from BlockBuilder 1 to BlockBuilder 2. If you are interested in support with moving to WordPress, feel free to contact us. At the moment, I’m having a little bit of backlog. But as soon as I’m free, I’m happy to help you out.

Expanding my team

Since my sites contain quite a few Content 2.0 submissions (guest submissions or submitted by myself, to allow me to have a blogging function with my SBI sites), I have hired more staff to do the WordPress conversion.

This works really well, and if you have a site with many C2 submissions, you can be sure to get fast results for your conversion. It’s also set up in a very secure way (subordinate accounts for the Content 2.0 helpers, that will not be able to modify any part of the rest of the site).

 

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Current Outsourcing Projects and Updates

by Francis

Just a short update to let you know that I’m still working on keeping you informed about outsourcing your life effectively.

Actually, to use my time more efficiently, I have moved to an area closer to my day job, saving me hours of time each week. Hopefully, I will be able to invest that time into stuff that matters (doing sports, meeting friends, writing for my websites).

Also, I have a cooperation with a friend of mine, who is called Frank, who is better than me at the area of monetizing. With that, I mean turning your web business into real profit.

Anyways, Frank and me plan to make an interview series like the two with Stefan that are already posted (Part 1, Part 2). When I will be sharing my experience with working with virtual assistants, my team of VAs will be re-publishing the interview, uncut, so that you can learn as well.

A project that works surprisingly well is traffic generation using viral list mailers. The ROI of traffic for time and money is great if you do it right. I’ll be sure to post more specifics in the future. But if you want to see the developement of this project (and any other projects my VA and me work on) in real time, then be sure to stay tuned to the diary of my VA.

How about you? Are you still on the fence for outsourcing? Do you feel it’s not for you, too expensive or difficult?

What would it take to convince you otherwise? I assure you, it’s very doable and affordable. All the tricks are right here, on this website. Nothing is taking you back.

If you are ready to start the journey into more productivity and business independence, then sign up for the free training via email on the right of this page.

To use my favorite outsourcing service, just follow this review.

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My Voice Recording Experience

by Full-time Virtual Assistant
(from the Philippines)

This is the actual basis of my voice recording to know the exact tone and what’s not. That note is actually from Francis (my employer), helping me walkthrough this activity.
This is the actual basis of my voice recording to know the exact tone and what’s not.
That note is actually from Francis (my employer), helping me walkthrough this activity.

Audio Recording Experience

I had this experience wherein I was tasked to conduct an audio recording that should be spontaneous in regards to my feedback on various posts found in the website Ideal-Helper. The purpose of this activity was to see if I could express my thoughts and express whatever I feel during that moment. Here are my thoughts on my very first—yes, you read it right—first audio experience.

Breaking out of the Shell

Prior to this audio recording stint, I actually had this uncomfortable feeling whenever I am recording my own voice. It may be just I am conscious of the act itself. It actually took me three tries for the first of the three recordings to be somewhat audible for me. In the first two salvos, my voice was so soft that I can’t understand what I was saying.

On the third try, I was more at ease and recorded my thoughts as if I was just talking to a friend; which was like I was having a friendly conversation (and the reason for this task). Then everything was just spontaneous and free-flowing. The flow was really so natural 🙂

A confidence-boosting Experience

The whole process went a smooth as silk. All three recordings were conducted and done as the task intended me to do. I soon got the hang of it and I am now eager to do more of this kind of activity. I now felt that there’s no difference in having a conversation and recording my thoughts as I speak. This activity gave a boost to my confidence in terms of speaking then listening to my own voice though audio recording.

I consider this experience a highlight of my job as a virtual assistant. I can definitely say that being a virtual assistant does not only rely on creative and writing skills. The ability to express my thoughts through speech brings a new dimension to the job title.

This kind of activity is highly recommended for virtual assistants and their employers to try. This is also a form of communication that will hasten and give ease to the communication process.

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Awareness of Your Productivity Increases Just By Keeping a Program Running In The Background

by Francis

awareness-of-your-productivity-inceases-just-by-keeping-a-program-running-in-the-background-21790802
To get more productive, just beat your own high score!

There’s a saying:

What you can measure, can be increased.

This works well for your personal productivity. Independent of what you do, if you use the computer, you can either waste your time or get something done.

If you know that you want to relax, then you can disable rescuetime for this time. Or, just keep it running without stressing yourself.

If you know you want to get something done and don’t want to distract yourself, use rescuetime’s ability to measure your productivity to increase the amount of work you get done in a day.

And if you want to guide and coach your virtual assistant, or simply want to know what he does in the time you pay him – use this free software as well:

You can review which tasks take him more time than you would have anticipated. You can keep tab of what distracts him.

This way, you can give him feedback accordingly. And don’t forget to compliment your VA if his productivity score by far exceeds yours! 🙂

Think about it:

One proven way to monitor and keep your assistant effective is to review screenshots of his work recorded by a time-tracker software. Examples for these software are Hubstaff and the Odesk time tracker application.

But there are downsides of using this method. You need to personally review the screenshots. If you are detail-oriented and/or curious, you will tend to do that daily.

That’s what was happening to me. Although I get lots of impressions of the work of my virtual assistants this way, it also takes a considerable bunch of time out of my busy schedule.

(Note that using this software is already 100% more effective than just reviewing the work output or relying on email communication back and forth to check on your assistants! I just want you to save even more time.)

If you have established a baseline of trust with your virtual assistant using screen recording sofware of their work, then it’s time to speed up your review of your VA’s productivity.

(Just still keep the screenshot recording sofware running in the background to double check from time to time.)

If you use rescuetime (additionally) with your VA’s, you can simply check their productivity scores once a week.

That’s lots of time saved in the long run!

It gets even better: if you have a team of VAs working for you, then you can even use rescuetime to compare their productivity levels.

Some healthy competition is always working to bring the best out of your Virtual Assistants. Just don’t increase pressure until it is conceived as stress. This will be counter intuitive.

Also, this method may not work for all types of VAs. Creative tasks like graphics or design tasks may need their time.

But the more “mechanical” the outsourced task gets, the better using software for productivity helps.

Opinions? Would you use this software yourself? And if no, why not?

Comments for Awareness of your productivity inceases just by keeping a program running in the background

Nov 06, 2014 Disciplined and Motivated
by: Francis This may not be effective most of the time, but, if the person is disciplined and motivated to work, then there will be no room for procrastination.

If you work alone esp virtual workers like me, there’s plenty of room for procrastination. But if you are truly determined to do your job~~no app can measure that =)

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oDesk Interview Answers from Real Freelancers

We asked each freelancer participant in the case study for interview answers to a set of good questions for virtual assistants. Look around to get a glimpse into the lives of VA’s from all around the world!

Case Studies:

Muhammad Rilwan - Virtual Assistant from Sri Lanka

M. Rilwan
Age: 25
Colombo, Srilanka

Kareeza - A Virtual Assistant from the Philippines

Kareeza
Age: 23
Muntinlupa, Philippines

Shailesh - From India

Shailesh
Age: 30
Pune,
India

Maria B. From UAE

Maria B
Age: 25
Al Ain, United Arab Emirates

The interview questions

Meet Real life Virtual Assistants!

To get the background about these persons, we asked them for:

  • their name
  • how old they are
  • and where they are from

Because it is interesting to see why different freelancers have been inspired to do online jobs, we asked for their story.

  • How they came to work as a freelancer?
  • Why the specifically choose the outsourcing website oDesk.
  • And if they have used other freelancing websites and why?

To illustrate how tough or easy it is to get a job on oDesk, we asked:

  • “How long did it take you to get the first assignment on oDesk and how you struggled during that period?”

Next, we wanted clear answers about money questions:

Ken Burns' famous saying
  • What’s a good hourly rate?
  • What’s a bad hourly rate?
  • What sort of work you are willing to do at this specific hourly rate?
  • What hourly rate is so low that it represents abuse?
  • Did you think it was possible to earn money online and what changed your mind?

Then, we asked a few more personal questions:

  • What motivates you as a freelancer?
  • What gives you the extra motivation?
  • How do you handle criticism?

Our oDesk interview answers would not have been completed if we didn’t get a few success stories and unusual experiences from them.

Also, it was interesting to hear about their personal outlook on

  • What the most challenging thing is that can happen to a freelancer?
  • Do they see there their future is very bright?
Read Real Life Success Stories of Virtual Assistants

In general, most freelancers do not work for a very high numbers of employers at the same time. Still, we asked for the high score out of curiosity.

Then, we insisted that the oDesk workers explained in their interview answers exactly how they did it to

  • be successful with getting jobs,
  • being discovered with the cover letter
  • and winning the online interview.

We also asked for extensive information about their cost of living for their respective countries.

  • How much they could earn at a normal job?
  • How did their friends and family react to them doing freelancing jobs?

Getting all sorts of different interview answers from oDesk freelancers resulted in interesting outlooks on how working online on oDesk really functions.






Send Us Your oDesk Interview Answers

Are you interested in showcasing your oDesk badge on ideal-helper.com?

Then send us your interview answers to the same questions.

When we feature your interview and you send us a link to your oDesk profile (just submit it with your answers),

we will publish your oDesk badge

so that interested buyers and online visitors can hire you directly from our site.

It’s a great way to get your skill set known to more people.

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Outsourced Email List Building

Interested in strongly accelerating your email list building results?

Follow along as I show you how a Virtual Assistant can help you bring you traffic and subscribers.

Why is an email list important?

Building an email list is the most important step of truly getting successful with your online business.

  • Get ahead of your competition by starting your online business with the right set of tools.
  • As you “capture” interested people in your email list, you can start building a relationship with them. This way, it will be most effective when you really want to recommend a product to them.

Having a responsive, growing list is crucial for your success.

Getting traffic to your websites is the first step for building your list.

How a Virtual Assistant can help you with tasks within your email marketing service

I tested different email delivery services and without question, Aweber is the best one. It has extensive training materials available. This makes it very easy even for an inexperienced (and possibly lower cost) Virtual Assistant to get trained without much effort from the side of you, the employer.

Some tasks that are time consuming that can be effectively outsourced to a VA:

  • Set up emails from a word file in the Aweber interface. Especially if you use advanced designs, colors etc
  • Moving email autoresponders that you have set up in the past with the classic autoresponder to the more flexible and modern campaign builder. This can be very time consuming to do on your own if you have long autoresponders or many lists
  • Setting up lists if you segment your audience. This means that you send one set of messages to visitors interested in one aspect of your business and another one to other groups of your visitors. This allows for much better conversion rates.
  • Your VA can review reports, analytics from the Aweber interface and point out actionable informations for you, so that you don’t have to review the analytics yourself. Checking on analytics daily is a very pointless and ineffective, but easy to fall in time consuming activity. Just leave it to your VA who will focus on just the right things.

Put to work an email list building ebook with a VA

Your email list building efforts should all start with a comprehensive list building blueprint.

The overall blueprint involves a lot of work. Just to be honest with you.

The work needed for these strategies to work is more time consuming than hard, actually. And that’s exactly the right moment to leverage your time using outsourcing.

You can turn the hard work into more easy list building by getting one trustworthy Virtual Assistant to help you.

What are some steps to start?

First, it’s important to understand the concept of a viral list builder.

Warning: 

Girl pointing sideways

If you don’t stay focused and jump right in, you risk losing lots of time and even money, as these services try really hard to upgrade you from free to paying members!

Three proven services that work

Here are three services (from a choice of many dozen services – don’t get sucked into it too fast!) that you can check out to generate quite a bit of traffic.

  1. Inform yourself about the email service Viralinbox to keep the emails in your personal email account manageable. This is especially useful when you start using multiple viral list builders!
  2. Protect all your “viral affiliate links” that you will use in this email list building project with ViralURL.
  3. Ready to effectively generate traffic? To start, I recommend the State-of-the-Art-Mailer (SOTAM) from personal experience (including a free ebook with step-by-step instructions!).

No need to do all at once (even if all these services will try to convince you to sign up everywhere).

Stay calm and focused, and work with your VA on each service until you get the traffic and results you need. Don’t invest any money (except in your assistant, of course), before you don’t see any subscriptions.






What Experiences Did You Make With Using Viral List Builders?

Do you have a great experience about Viral List Mailers? Share it!

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