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November 25, 2012 By Francis Leave a Comment

You Can Publish Your Stats To Get Some Accountability

by Francis

**How to Publish Your Stats to Stay Accountable to Your Friends**

If you are the sort of person that gets motivated by the feedback of his friends, then you should use the functionality of RescueTime to publish your productivity charts.

Nothing works better as a kick in the rear than your friends calling and telling you off in real time when you go goofing of on Facebook.

Look out for your privacy!

You can publish everything, or only parts of your activity. If you are worried about privacy – the tool records (to a certain degree) everything you do on your computer! – you should only publish parts of your activity charts to a private blog that only your closest friends have access to.

Word of advice

Of course, if you want to use your computer for stuff that’s very private (ahem), you can simply disable the rescuetime tool for an hour or until the next day. This way, your productivity stats stay “clean”.

Comments for You Can Publish Your Stats To Get Some Accountability

Nov 25, 2012

Don’t underestimate productive peer pressure
by: Francis

Just knowing your friends *might* watch you waste time helps you get your stuff done much more faster.

Be sure to only share info with friends you trust. Also, the tool does not show exactly what you are doing. There are no screenshots or keylogs of your computer activity saved online.

What this productivity tool does is that it saves the names of the domains you surf on. (Similar to your browser history, but not as deep.)

November 19, 2012 By Francis Leave a Comment

Prioritizing Your Outsourcing Tasks for When You’re Virtual Assistant Has to Take Some Time Out

by Francis
(November 19, 2012)

Recently, my virtual assistant needed a week of time out due to personal reasons. This is something every employer must be able to understand.

Your virtual assistant is not a machine. He has family, friends and important events in his life that will take priority over your online tasks from time to time.

Of course, some of my projects still are of very high importance. So, I found this compromise with my virtual assistant: he is able to log a few hours every week to take care of the most pressing matters. One of them is to coordinate work with my virtual transcriptionist on my team. Another one is for him to manage my online researcher, who’s also on my team. And to train a new member of my team who’s a little bit hard to teach.

What I did to take care of this matter quickly is I prioritized my work. By the way, I used a normal email this time.

Normally, I communicate with my virtual assistant using screen recordings and audio recordings. This saves me time writing. Since this time my virtual assistant is the one with less time than me, I turned it around and took the time to write a carefully crafted report via email.

Remember, the one person with fewer time gets the VIP treatment.

What are the tasks that I find most important?

First, as I said, to manage my other team members. It’s very important to stay in contact with your team members if you have hired more than one virtual or personal assistant. If you stop communicating with your team, this will hurt you in the end.

Since I’ve managed to work out some trust with the team members that are longer on my team, I don’t worry too much about this. Still, my VA has to follow up at least every other day with everyone in my team.

The second priority is to take care of my email marketing efforts.

The third priority is for him to help me with monetizing my other website.

What about all other tasks?

Seriously, they can wait for a week!

An online business is something you should do for fun and for profit if you’re successful. But it should never weigh down your personal life or the personal life of your virtual assistant for that matter.

So, it will be a break for everyone and all the ideas I will be coming up. In the meantime, I will be able to safely store them into our shared Dropbox for when my virtual assistant come back. Then, he’ll easily be able to pick up where we left off and work out the back log of projects.

Comments for Prioritizing Your Outsourcing Tasks for When You’re Virtual Assistant Has to Take Some Time Out

Nov 19, 2012

Do it yourself when your VA is seriously excused
by: Francis

If you’re VA is seriously hindered on doing his job, it’s back to the drawing board and you better take care of things yourself.

This really puts some work of your VA back into perspective 😉

Nov 26, 2012

Keep A Calendar
by: Savvy Subcontracting

A great way to stay on task is by using an online calendar like Google. If you keep ongoing tasks on it you can pickup at any time or someone else could know exactly what should be done when.

Nov 27, 2012

Have a contingency plan
by: Francis

Thanks for chipping in 🙂

Great tip with using the Google Calendar. In fact, there are tons of useful tools from Google your assistant should be using.

(Click here to read my post about making your assistant Google-Savvy)

What’s also important is to have a “plan B” in place. Your assistant could get sick, or he could stop working for you and start working for someone else.

You have to define which are your most crucial tasks that have to be done no matter what. Either do them yourself, as I have written before, or train someone to be a “backup virtual assistant” in case your main helper drops out.

November 8, 2012 By Francis Leave a Comment

Getting a High Quality 400 Word Blog Post Written for 80 Cents

by Francis
(November 08, 2012)

Screenshot from the work diary of my transcriptionist

You won’t find a writer doing high quality blog post writing for this amount of money.

Guaranteed.

How did I do this?

I hired a transcriptionist. In fact I hired several transcriptionists and continued to work with the best of them. Then I took a few minutes of thinking and about 5 minutes of recording an audio file.

My transcriptionist from the Philippines swiftly transcribed the blog post, formatted it and proofread it.
Then she sent it back to my main virtual assistant who set it up on the website.

I quickly had a last proofreading glance at the article but found nothing to change on it. So, I went ahead and posted it.

Total cost?

It’s about eighty cents for the transcriptionist.

Do you think this would come handy in your blogging efforts?

If you are serious about blogging regularly but you are hard pressed on your time, try this little magical trick of mine and hire a transcriptionist. This additional help alone will help you produce much more high quality content than any outsourced writer could ever dream of giving you.

After all, whatever you are recording for the transcripts are your very original high quality thoughts as a blogger. And the best thing of all, you will save much time in the process.

Don’t believe me?

This very post you’re reading was recorded in less than 4 minutes and the rest was set up by my team of virtual assistants.

Comments for Getting a High Quality 400 Word Blog Post Written For 80 Cents

Nov 08, 2012

Keyword optimizing would have made this post even better
by: FrancisThis post is an example of quick-and-dirty outsourcing efforts to leverage your money into time. If I would have keyword-optimized this article with the help of my virtual assistant even further, then the blog post would even be a traffic generator.I’m also not saying that this process is as easy as hiring a guy, paying him a few bucks and then your blogging works on autopilot.That’s NOT how it works. You need to invest some time initially to train and get to know your virtual assistant.

But when everything is set up, your cooperation will give you some great results.

Sep 29, 2014

No Small is Small
by: AnonymousA great deal you got there.. Yes, it’s not that easy in getting someone online to do the job for you. I did freelancing job before and that is one of my problems because I don’t agree with exploitation.I noticed that many freelancers would agree to a pay less than a dollar and I find myself in a deep situation because there’s no way I can control them and tell them “Hey, do you understand what’s exploitation?”But, oh well, who am I to stop on what they are doing—we have different viewpoints in life and I don’t know what they are going through.So, I’ll just have to adjust to the freelancing world—bid and bid because no small is small.

Nov 18, 2014

Missing the Point
by: FrancisThanks for taking the time to leave your opinion here. However, I think the point I wanted to make with this blog post didn’t come across well.I did not outsource the writing of a blog post for 80cents. I outsourced the transcription of my own thoughts into a blog post which was then formatted by my virtual assistant team.

In other words, all the thoughts behind the writing of the blog post you just read was from me. The only thing I didn’t do was write it.

In my opinion, transcribing thoughts is one of the fastest, most efficient and probably also most affordable ways to create written content. And the written content is, from the quality, very high because it comes straight from your thoughts.

November 8, 2012 By Francis Leave a Comment

Fiverr Is Useless for Internet Marketing or List Building Purposes

by Francis
(November 08, 2012)

I have come to this conclusion not so long ago. A few discussions with internet savvy marketing friends confirmed this suspicion. Using Fiverr for internet marketing, traffic generation or lead generation is pretty much useless.

If you’re reading this and have no idea what I’m talking about, this is essential for some technical details that website owners have to deal with. Fiverr actually can be useful for fun stuff like unusual gigs that make you laugh. Check out the sections of fun or bizarre or creative sections in Fiverr to get good stuff for your money.

Back to the website owners. The last few days I’ve intensely read up and informed myself about lead generations and solo ads. I really needed to put down this blog post to warn every internet marketing newbie to try out Fiverr to use lead generation.

Of course I could also say: “just try it out, what’s the harm, it only costs $5”.

The problem is: those people offering these gigs on Fiverr are working with exactly this mindset of all the newbies and make money out of those people who do not know better.

If you really want to be successful with internet marketing especially via email, my personal advice would be to hire a specialized Email Marketing Assistant.

This move alone will indeed save you lots of time and, therefore, money and you won’t need to stress yourself out over getting your hopes up with internet marketing on Fiverr.

I hope this one warning posts will help at least a few readers. If it does then it will have served its purpose.

November 6, 2012 By Francis Leave a Comment

An Emotional Experiment – Renting Out My Virtual Assistant – It Wasn’t As Easy As I Thought

by Francis
(November 06, 2012)

xyoung-employer-thinking-seriously.jpg.pagespeed.ic.Ow6RKSLHyt A few days ago, I made a fun experiment. My girlfriend needed some pictures researched for an online publication. Stock photos would have been needed instead of free photos in order to make sure that the copyright stays on her end.

As it is almost my reflex now, I persuaded her to rent out so to speak my virtual assistant for this task. I was excited about showing her the ropes of working with a virtual assistant on a trial basis.

Unfortunately, I had underestimated that I have worked with my virtual assistant for 2 years now.

Although I can proudly say that the way of working of my virtual assistant is pretty awesome, there were some communication problems on both sides.

The moment I was aware of those problems, it was already too late. The project got cancelled.

How it all began

Let me take a step back here, I sent my virtual assistant a screen recording message informing him about a new project where the instructions would come from my girlfriend.

As a next step, I provided my girlfriend with access information to my virtual assistant. What was already not clear at that point is that any work my virtual assistant would do would automatically be billed to my account. This was not a problem actually because my VA did not do much work until the project got cancelled.

But let’s see what happened next.

The actual project: how it should have worked out

The task was pretty simple, actually. We had already researched 10 photos from a stock photo bank that seemed too expensive for us at that time. But more about this little twist later.

Since I saw the potential to save a lot of money, I saw the opportunity of outsourcing the picture research to my virtual assistant. He has done similar work before and I knew it would be a piece of cake for him.

One day later, my VA already sent the results to both my girlfriend and me. Unfortunately, the pictures he found were not ideal. So he went ahead and took the good decision to choose alternate pictures.
He then sent an Excel sheet with all the links to those pictures choices to my girlfriend for her to choose from.

Now, another big understanding came into place.

My girlfriend only saw that some or all of the stock photos my virtual assistant proposed had price tags that surpassed the initial budget.

The misunderstanding was that my virtual assistant would be buying those out of his own budget.

So she decided it wasn’t worth the time and money anymore and cancelled the project.

I needed to dig deeper into the whole discussion in order to find out where problems were.

Why we “the double team of employers” was stupid in the first place

The misunderstanding that started the whole project was so simple that I’m almost ashamed to admit it.

The problem with the stock photo bank where we discovered the original pictures we wanted called Fotolia seemed to have a rule that you need to purchase a package of credits in order to download pictures.

It’s only after this whole project was over that we understood it was easy to simply buy the amount of pictures needed from that stock photo bank without going over your budget.

It was a real “duh!” moment.

The other misunderstanding: Where does my virtual assistant get the stock photos from?

Unfortunately, I did not share this crucial detail with my girlfriend as I got accustomed to my virtual assistant smartly researching pictures from all sorts of temporarily free places.

What my virtual assistant did is he researched promotion actions of stock photo banks.

For a short time, many stock photo banks – and you won’t believe how many they are out there in the internet – give out coupons or action codes for temporarily free credits that you can change into downloadable stock photos.

In other words, my virtual assistant gets the stock photos for free in exchange for doing some research. It is a well thought out leveraging of his time and the money I pay to him.

Just because I am accustomed to his strategy does not mean my girlfriend knows about this.

The solution: Communicate better with each party and the power of a deep breath

If I had taken care more of the project by communicating clearer – what the background of the ability of my virtual assistant was on how he can get stock photos – many misunderstandings would have been avoided.

If my girlfriend and me would have seen at the very beginning of the project that it was not even necessary to invest more than the required amount into Fotolia; then this whole misunderstood project would have not been started in the first place.

So this case study of outsourcing will have to be put to the files as a temporarily failure. This is not a bad thing.

As long as everyone involved learns from this. 🙂

Actually, the whole discussions, the back and forth of emails and the changing of the project went about pretty intense and many discussions were going on.

But the bottom line is:

If something goes wrong, nothing beats a deep breath of air.

Ahh…

That’s calming down – and it doesn’t cost anyone anything.

Hope you enjoyed this case study. Feel free to chime in down in the comments.

Comments for An Emotional Experiment – Renting Out My Virtual Assistant – It Wasn’t As Easy As I Thought

Nov 06, 2012

In all fairness
by: Francis

The thing with the credit packets at Fotolia were really confusing.

And for the record, you need to get 10 credits at least, so if you only need 3 stock photos, then my strategy of outsourcing the research for free coupons for stock photo companies is still good. 🙂

Nov 06, 2012

moh
by: Kittycat

moooh, Francis… 😛

But kinda thx for making a story of it. :*

Aug 26, 2014

“failure” can also be a teacher
by: John

I think we all do need that “failure” sometimes to learn and write your experience out of it for some people inclined to this kind of job also or just for some random people.

If it wasn’t for that experience/experiment, it’s possible that most of us will never know this trick..

November 3, 2012 By Francis Leave a Comment

Use a Time Tracking Software to Determine the Best Virtual Assistant Out Of a Team Competing Against Each Other

by Francis
(November 03, 2012)

Do you need to find the perfect virtual assistant for your online business quickly?

The standard method is to work with one assistant at a time and over time you will find the perfect fit.

This can take years. That’s how long it took me. I’m very happy with the members of my team right now. But, probably, you won’t have years to spend.

If you quickly want to find the perfect team member for your business, do the following;

Hire several virtual assistants at once. In this phase, you will need a lot of time managing everyone. Ask everyone to install a productivity tracking software like RescueTime.
Let them work on a comparable project or even at the same project for several days.
Then, sit down for the weekend and analyze their productivity recorded by the RescueTime productivity software.

These will give you, quickly, an estimate of which team members to keep and which to get rid of. Of course oDesk also has its own tracking system. The trick is to use both tracking systems at the same time.

While oDesk takes screenshots every 10 minutes at a random point in time; RescueTime measures the overall productivity – how much time is lost on unrelated projects or websites.

If you use this sort of healthy competition, you will quickly find who is more likely to be your optimal virtual worker than if you spend time testing one assistant after the other in a linear way.

Comments for Use a Time Tracking Software to Determine the Best Virtual Assistant Out Of a Team Competing Against Each Other

Jul 28, 2014

Modern Virtual Manager
by: Jomvie

I think this strategy would be beneficial to the employer searching for an exceptional and skilled virtual assistant.

For me, as a VA, I find time-tracking software intimidating when it comes to tracking the hours of my work.

It often pushes me to my limit. Although it helps me not to procrastinate and be productive, often it is bothersome 😀

Aug 08, 2014

Testing VA’s without their awareness vs openly
by: Francis

Keep in mind that a situation of “competition” leads to considerable stress for your VA candidates.

Either test them by comparing their abilities without their knowledge and choose the best fit for you.

Or, openly have them “compete” against each other – but in this case, the task must be comparable (ideally the same), the conditions transparent and the testing time frame very limited.