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Why You Need An Email Marketing Assistant To Be A Successful Online Entrepreneur

girl holding an email signDo you know that your subscriber list is your most valuable asset in your online business? Having an email marketing assistant help you

  • build the list
  • get more leads and subscribers
  • and analyze the statistics and data from your subscribers

speeds up your success with your online business at least ten times.

What if you are not an expert on email marketing? How are you going to explain things to your virtual assistant?

I was in the exact situation. Luckily, the best email marketing system, Aweber, comes equipped with LOTS of training materials, videos and discussions. It’s simple to send your virtual assistant to the Aweber interface, and give him some time to figure things out.

Since the first month with Aweber is almost free (1$), you have enough time to train your email marketing assistant before spending lots of money for nothing.

Simplify your email marketing efforts

The goal is that you can send your virtual assistant a simple form of the newsletter content

  • an email
  • a word document shared via Dropbox

and he can format, fine-tune and set it up in your email marketing system.

Milan Kundra's famous quotation for marketingHe can

  • set up links,
  • include images
  • even split test messages,
  • or set up blog newsletters and more for you.

The best of both worlds

  • Free time to manage your online business.
  • An effective email marketing strategy set up by your virtual assistant in a fraction of the time it would have taken yourself.

What about analytics?

Email Marketing AnalyticsIf you have a big subscriber list already, you probably know that you are sitting on a big amount of valuable data and statistics. But who has the time?

Luckily, if you have entrusted your marketing assistant with it, he can dig into the data, dice and splice it and give you valuable suggestions:

Your subscribers jump off the wagon after the 10th email? Perhaps there is something wrong with its content.

Free up your time and stay productive.

What does an email marketing assistant cost you?

Good question. What is your free time worth to you?

An administrative assistant that is not yet trained with email marketing can be found for 1-2$/hour on Odesk. You’ll need some initial time to train him, using Aweber’s training tools.

Then, he can do transcription and formatting of your email content which you have to deliver to him.

Depending on how many newsletters you set up, you’ll pay him on an as-needed basis.

Easy, right?

If you instruct your email marketing assistant efficiently, your return of investment will be huge.

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What Is A Viral List Builder?

illustrating viral list building processA short definition on what a viral list builder is:

You click emails to receive credits. You use the credits to send emails of your own. With these emails, you can build your own list to market your own products.

Why is it viral?

The concept of a viral list builder is strongly tied to the idea of adding people to your so-called downline. A downline is a list of people that have signed up under your affiliate link to the list mailer in question. They are assigned to you. When they refer people, their own downline is also associated to you.

Most viral list builders reward referrals with more traffic and credits to you. In other words, the more the service is referred, the more traffic can be made. This motivational rewards were quickly coined “viral”. Although the “viral” aspect is, in my opinion, the least important one of using a (free) list mailer.

How can you profit from using a viral list builder?

businesswoman drawing growth of chart
businesswoman drawing growth of chart

You will get, if you use it correctly:

  1. Traffic – to the landing page of your choice that you mention in your emails sent through the mailers
  2. Money – either by referrals to your mailer or by selling items, subscriptions or services through your landing page
  3. Reach – you can connect to an additional audience that you might not have reached if you relied only on search traffic.

One caveat:

Note that most people interested in list mailers are heavily interested in the areas of traffic generation, blogging, webmaster topics and internet marketing. If you want to promote a blog about cats, then using list mailers is not the best tactic.

It will still work, because there may be cat lovers under the webmasters you reach. But the traffic is much less targeted if your niche is far outside of the topic of internet marketing.

How good is the quality of the traffic?

viral list builder traffic stats

Most visitors generated with list mailings are from the US, Canada or the United Kingdom

One fear you might have before joining a list mailer, is that the traffic could be low value. Check out the demographics of my landing page, where I sent a few hundreds visitors with a list of my best list mailers. As you can see, most of the visitors come from the US.

Do you need a professional landing site?

No you don’t. In fact, as part of my experiment, I wanted to measure if I could get results (sign ins to my newsletter) with only a basic free one-page blogger page. This took me 5 minutes to set up, and I wrote a summary of what I offer in my newsletters in less than one hour.

Then, I added a sign-in form, and the rest is managed by my email marketing assistant from there.

Bottom line: the traffic converts well – given that the landing page is rather unprofessional and not yet even split tested for better results. I convert about 0.5 % of the visitors generated through the list mailers into subscribers.

This looks scammy. Why should you do this?

Woman thinkingThe whole concept of a mailer being “viral” is pretty much hype.

Don’t deal with hype.

Use the free services (don’t get sold into premium services until you really are convinced it works). See if you can convert the traffic into subscribers. Only then think about professional landing pages, premium accounts in the best performing list mailers etc.

How to build your email list with viral list mailers:

This is the critical lesson you have to take away from this page: don’t focus on building your downline on a given service. In the end, this builds someone else’s business, not yours.

Instead, send them to your own landing page instead of building your downline.

If you “accidently” generate referrals and get a downline, use it only to send more traffic to your private landing page.

Convert visitors into your private, owned email list. Then, market to that list as you see fit, without being controlled by the list mailers restrictions.

Disadvantages of viral list mailers (and how to turn them into opportunities):

Girl indicating sideways
  1. You don’t own your list if you only build your downline.
    Since this is the biggest risk, it’s worth repeating.Solution: Use a landing page. If you don’t want to bother with a professional landing page, try out one done with blogger for example.
  2. Earning credits takes time.
    This is true no matter how you try using viral mailers. To generate traffic, you need to read and open other’s emails. You need to click links to generate credits. This is all very dull. And what do you do when you have dull, repetitive work that isn’t worth your time…?Solution: You outsource it, of course. This can be done very easily, and you can even save your instructions and send them to a growing team of virtual assistants, if you really want to scale up your traffic generation.
  3. You can only mail so often.
    Each list mailer has only a limited frequency when you can use your credits. Even if you generate tons of credits with a virtual assistant, you can’t spend them all at once.Solution: Use several list mailers (see our best viral mailer post) and organize your mailings nicely. Any calendar tool will help you with reminding you which mailers need to be sent out when. This way, you scale up your results.
  4. Your email inbox gets flooded.
    No way around this one. You will get many many emails, especially if you sign up with multiple viral list builders.Solution: That’s what viralinbox is for. Alternatively, make a separate account and organize yourself using gmails free functions.

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How Effective is Video Screen Recording in Communicating Your Virtual Assistant?

Maximize efficiency meter
maximize efficiency marker illustration design over a black background

Video screen recording is part-5 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 4 of this interview – Creating a more efficient communication through virtual assistant feedback

Summary:

  • How effective and reliable is video screening in relaying insights and ideas with your virtual assistant?
  • What are the odds with audio-video application and video screening as a tool to channel instruction?

Start of the Interview:

Francis
Francis

I would like to go back to the basic research that you were not able to get overnight and that was not making you happy at the beginning.

Assuming that you have read the transcript from this interview and you’ll say, “Okay, at the beginning, start with very basic tasks.”

Even if you say, “Okay, now I finally hired a virtual assistant. It took me a week to find the right candidate and lots of time to hire and interview. And now, we finally have them and have given them the Dropbox account and whatever.” Now you just want to get to work.

I can’t totally relate to that since now I’m looking for a full-time VA to expand my team because I have so many ideas just itching in the back of my head wanting to get them out. But, I need the assistant to invest the time to get those ideas running. Because, to be honest, I, myself am not disciplined enough and willing to put the time into it, nor effective enough at working online in comparison to my assistants that I can do it myself.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Right. One of the things that I thought that I should have done was be on Skype more with my virtual assistant.

At the beginning, I was a little apprehensive to get on Skype with them. I thought that I could just basically use the chat function in Elance or the program that you use and that would be sufficient. And just send them over a text document and then they could just get to work.

And I realized that’s not how things need to be. There needs to be a one on one communication with each other just like we’re doing right now talking with your virtual assistant.

Let them hear your voice, let them see your face so that they can get to know you a little bit better. So that you can know them and make form that relationship with one another.

And also one thing that I wish that I would have done was started using Skype share screen.

Because, I think that if they can follow you and you can show them exactly what it is that you’re doing. And, then if they have any questions, they can ask you right then and there.

Well, you know, “Okay, Eric, I don’t understand exactly what you’re doing. Could you show me that one more time? Or could you explain that in a different way so that when I do that I won’t have to ask you another question later.”

I think if I have done that at the beginning that I wouldn’t have had as many problems. Because, then it would have kind of gotten rid of the whole delay process of back and forth questions between the two of us.

Francis
Francis

Okay. It’s funny that you say that because I have heard the same feedback from a friend of mine, another entrepreneur, who said it’s crucial to him that the virtual assistant has Skype access and is willing to Skype.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Yeah.

Francis
Francis

Because, even when you watch videos, you expect a lot of going back and forth question and answer. And to be honest, the feedback I received almost always from my virtual assistants, even new ones when I make videos, is that they say everything is clear and it’s much better than emails.

Then, in general, they just give some feedback of work and then I make another video commenting the new skill level. And then after sometime, it really is optimized.

And, I believe that if I put the time into connecting with Skype, waiting until the other party has set up their mic, etc; it would take much longer. And so to speak, my time is very valuable.

So, I try to find the most time effective way to communicate. And perhaps, it’s my way of talking in the recordings that’s different than others. I do not know.

But, in my experience, screen recording were always sufficient and it did not leave open very many questions. So, perhaps, we have to talk about how to record a screen recording so that we can communicate effectively.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Well, yeah. I think my issue was that because I tried to do the screen recording and it seemed to be okay, there was still a couple of questions that they would have.

And  I think,  as the person who’s used to doing that task, if somebody who’s familiar with that task and is used to doing it over and over again, I think that it’s harder for us to explain it to somebody who’s never done it before.

Francis
Francis

Oh, yeah. That’s true especially with propriety systems like content management systems or especially the SBI! system. But, as a side bar, so to speak, the SBI system has the big advantage that it has lot of training materials built in.

And just tell him, “Here, read this guide. Read this article then watch this video. Then come back if you have a question.”

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Yeah, definitely. But, I think the problem is that like I’ve done something 150,000 times so when I go to explain to them, I’m not going to be as detailed because to me it seemed simple to me compared to somebody who’s never seen that platform before. It makes absolutely no sense.

So, I think that one of the things that we need to remember as employers when we’re hiring a virtual assistant is to remember that the virtual assistant may have never been exposed to anything like that before.

We need to be a little more careful when we’re explaining and not go too fast or not to skip these steps. Because, a lot of times, we’ll do little tricks or whatever that we’ve learned from using the software or using whatever it is and then skip over steps that leave room for confusion or places for misinterpretation of what we want done.

Francis
Francis

I also have made the experience of encouraging my assistants to look for the solution themselves and its good. So, for example, let’s say at the basic task, you have a research.

You have a research that’s more complex than you think yourself. But, perhaps you can tell me. Are you willing to tell me about the research and perhaps leave out critical information that’s sensitive to your business?

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Yeah, definitely not a problem. Basically, what I wanted my assistant to go in and look for is, I wanted him to do research on different backlinks of a competitor and then give me a spreadsheet so that I could go through it and contact the people who were linked in to my competitors site.

I can’t remember exactly what the program was at the time but it was just a basic backlink checker software or a website and I would have them go in and type the URL of all of my competitors and then go in and find what is linking back to them.

And then find the contact forms and contact information for those people in those sites that I could send them an email to possibly get a link to my site.

Francis
Francis

Okay. Yeah. This is actually not so complicated for a research but I can see a few details that might put off the virtual assistant or take them longer than you imagine yourself.

So, if you have a small task like this, especially in the beginning, it would be more helpful than if you start with more complicated stuff.

 

Continue reading part 6 – Getting started with a virtual assistant

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Save Your Time by Providing Effective Video Instructions to Your Virtual Assistants

(Written by My Virtual Assistant)

Read what a VA thinks about video instructionsFor a Virtual assistant, video instructions prepared by a screen-recording tool are the most effective and fastest way of communication. They can save a lot of time for both parties most of the time, and instructions are accurate and to the point.

I quickly learned new and complicated skills

For example: When I started using SBI Sitesell’s different interfaces, I had no idea about how to use it. Then, I was provided with a pretty short video which was not more than 5 minutes long showing how I can use different features of it.

It was a real help and in my opinion it saved a lot of time and effort on both sides.

An experience where video instructions would have helped a lot

Famous quotation by Plato

Not long ago, I experienced working with another employer. He had a complicated job where I had to illustrate his WordPress website. He asked me to come on to chat via Yahoo messenger where he provided me instructions and tried to instruct me

  • on how to perform that job
  • which interface I should use
  • and which options I should not change

Honestly speaking, it took around 5 to 6 hours to instruct and train me.

I was thinking that if he could provide me a video instruction, this would have been over in five minutes.

There are some limitations to instructions via video

On the other hand, just like other tools, these screen-recording instructions also have some disadvantages and limitations:

  • Read the limitations of video instructionsThe quality of audio and video should be fair and clear
  • Videos should not be very long
  • Sometimes it’s hard to determine the sequence of instruction videos, so it’s always helpful if you save them in an organized method.
  • In comparison to written instructions, videos are always hard to review again. If you want to review a single point of the instructions, you will have to watch and review the whole video again.
  • If you are using an online server for uploading videos, sometimes it takes too long to stream the whole video.

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How Audio-Video Software Measures Productivity With Virtual Assistant Communications?

virtual assistant with an up-arrow signboard
Increase Productivity of your VA with the right communication channels

VA communications is part-7 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 in working with VAs!

Click here to read part 6 of this interview – Getting started with a virtual assistant

Summary:

  • How to monitor and increase your online business’ productivity with recording software.
  • How reliable recording software is to get your message across your virtual assistant.

Start of the Interview:

Francis
Francis

So, I think we would have probably to compare screen recording video that I do and that you do and see if we can learn which style we’re doing it in.

When I do my screen recordings for my main assistant now, there’s a lot of implicit knowledge already there.

But, with the new assistant, in general, I’m trying to think about whatever questions they might have and try to answer them in advance because I know how annoying it is to lose time on back and forth questionings.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Right. For me, I think that the issue was that I wasn’t able to see or judge what the questions were that they were going to ask.

So, it was hard for me to be able to kind of be like “Okay, what questions are they going to have or what areas are they going? Is there going to be places for concern?”

So, then that makes things difficult when you’re trying to make the recording because you want to try to make it as detailed as possible.

But, you’re not exactly sure if this area is going to be something that’s going to be of an issue or I think that that just comes with time and once you learn the strengths of your virtual assistant, too.

I think once you see where the areas they’re strong in and the areas that they’re weak in . I think you’ll be able to tell or gauge a little bit more when it comes to areas areas that they need help with or where they will need a little assistance or a little more clarifications on certain things.

Francis
Francis

Yes. Another thought that came to my mind just now, especially in the beginning of the working relationship, is to make it clear how would you like the communication to be.

Many assistants assumed that you are available online, email, most of the day. And then you just write an email with one question. And then perhaps, you even take time during your day job and secretly open a Gmail window and just answer the question. That’s how you do it, but it’s not very effective.

So, in the beginning before he even starts the project, you should clarify how you would like the communication to be. You could say something like, “Okay, I’m sure many questions will come up.”

Put a list of questions together and send them to me at the end of the day. I will answer them all at once.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Right. Yeah, kind of batch your questions together rather than one at a time.

Francis
Francis

An alternative is okay. You will have many questions, you are allowed to do the background research and you are also allowed to put in time to work in presenting possible solutions. Make the job as easy as possible for me, the employer, to answer you your questions.

For example, they tell me “Okay. I tried to do the research but the service in question did not work for me, did not accept my email. It was not possible in my country or it’s now a paid service and it doesn’t work like your service in the video.” Something like that.

Then, the ideal continuation of that question would be, “I tried to find out several solutions. I have researched 3 different services in half an hour. Do we have a preference for one of them?”

Then they can say, if you definitely need this service, I propose these solutions.

  1. You send me your login data;
  2. You pay the fee for the service. And then, I will use the login center, whatever.

So then you just have to give a yes or no answer.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Yeah, definitely. Because, then too I think that was them feeling more comfortable to suggest things to you (the employer), as well as being freely able to search for solutions at the same time.

Francis
Francis

Did you watch the series called A House of Cards?

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

No.

Francis
Francis

It’s the super actor who did the American Beauty.

anonymous-user-thumb
Eric

Yeah, I know who he is. I can’t remember his name either, but I know what you’re talking about.

Francis
Francis

Yeah.  He has this great style of looking in the camera and saying sarcastic remarks in the series. It’s superb. I really recommend it to you. And why I’m talking about it is because there’s a great scene pretty late in the series.

I’m trying not to spoil it, but he’s talking with a guy, an important powerful guy, and he’s a businessman. During the meeting with this politician, he’s interrupted all the time by phone calls. He just takes up the phone and then just waits a second so the effect is more powerful when he speaks. Then he waits a few seconds and he’ll just say “yes or no” and hang up.

And I’ll ask my virtual assistant if he can find a video extract from the scene. Perhaps, this is possible to find. But in principle, that’s what you’re looking for. The assistant should prepare his questions with additional possible answers and you should just be able to say, “Solution 3 is fine.”

Continue reading part 8 –How to effectively extract virtual assistant concerns and questions?