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I Wanted To Try Out Doing a Data Entry Job in Germany to Compare How This Sort of Work Actually Feels

by Francis
(October 19, 2012)

One press of a finger...Modern laptop isolated on white with reflections on glass table.

Yesterday I got a good opportunity, thanks to a friend of mine, to apply for a simple data entry job here in Munich to make some money with relatively easy work.

I thought it would be fun to make a study out of it and to compare how it actually is typing data in Excel all day long.

I assume that for people in India, for example, who do data entry jobs as a full-time job; this can really be tiring and annoying at times.

By the way, this part time job would have paid me 10 Euros per hour. Many students apply for jobs like this. The pay is decent but not extremely high. How does this compare to the pay of an average $1 per hour for data entry jobs in countries like India?

Do you think this difference of payment is fair or is it simply a difference due to the countries?

If you think that there was a missed opportunity to find a real cash making machine, I’ve already thought of that. Just as a joke, of course.

Just imagine if you would have a work at home data entry job which would pay as much as I just described. Couldn’t you just outsource it to a data entry person for $1-2 an hour and keep the difference? Well, theoretically, you could.

Here’s why this wasn’t possible:

  1. First of all, it wasn’t a work at home job. I would have to go there and physically work there in a computer room.
  2. Confidentiality of the data. I cannot just take the data of someone else and share it with an outsourcer overseas. That would be huge breach of trust and could get me into serious trouble.
  3. Language Barrier. Of course, this work is in German and to get an outsource assistant who speaks and writes German perfectly, you’ll have to invest a little bit more than $1 an hour. Actually, this is one of the challenges I personally have faced from time to time when I thought of outsourced projects in my native tongue and couldn’t find an affordable virtual assistant with great German skills.

Final note

Unfortunately, I wasn’t even taken for the job.

Perhaps I should have posted how hard it is to get a side job when you really want one. 😉

But perhaps that’s for another time.

Comments for I Wanted To Try Out Doing a Data Entry Job in Germany to Compare How This Sort of Work Actually Feels

Sep 07, 2014 more than decent pay
by: John

That 10 dollar an hour is more than pretty decent.. Data Entry jobs often amounts from one to two dollars here in the Philippines. But, I think due to the nature of the job, the pay is higher.

I hope I could find some of that from time to time 😀
Sep 07, 2014 In Munich, the rate was OK
by: Francis

As a student doing “simple” jobs, you could earn between 8 and 12 Euros per hour. So the pay was OK, but nothing big to be surprized about.

And it would require fluent German skills – else I would have outsourced this job instead of trying it out myself 😉

But in general, I do not see many data entry jobs that are german-based.

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Driving Traffic to a Website with Fiverr: Does it Makes Sense or Is This Useless?

by Francis
(October 12, 2012)

Famous Saying by William Blake
Famous Saying by William Blake

Today I’m trying another experiment. What it will cost me? Some time, some effort, some brain power and $5. I’m talking of course about the website Fiverr where you can order all sorts of stuff.

I set up a new page where I wanted to drive traffic to, to see if it is working. One gig promised me 5,000 human visitors for the price of $5. From the point of view of a cost per click marketing, this is a no brainer. The question is, though, are these visitors real? Can I use them?

The simple test I’m making is to send it to a website which has a sign up form. If a lot of people sign up for free offer and join my mailing lists, then I know that this traffic is genuine and I can use it.

Normally, I would never do that with a website which is important to me. But the landing site I’m talking about is free blogging website which is not that important. After you buy the gig, you are sent to your PayPal page. Pay your $5 and you are off.

Now I just follow up and sent him or her, the website link I want to drive the traffic to and then I’ll have to wait for a day or two. Depending on the gig, you have to invest some time waiting but all of this information is disclosed upfront.

As a website owner, I have to warn you to be extremely careful with search engine optimization, traffic driving or other quick solution tactics with Fiverr. You might break your website and lose traffic in the long run if you try to manipulate search results using Fiverr.

I am doing it because it is an experiment and I want to tell you how this went. You, however, should be careful. Save your $5 if you don’t know what you’re doing. But if you want to have fun with crazy or useful gigs, Fiverr is possibly the fastest outsourcing service available for outsourcing newbies.

Comments for Driving Traffic to a Website with Fiverr: Does it Makes Sense or Is This Useless?

Aug 07, 2014 Loads of Good Luck
by: Francis That’s how they are promoting and they all sound very promising—sales talk. Since your purpose is to try out or rather experimenting if driving traffic really works, I think investing five dollar sounds fine for trial and error. Hopefully you’ll get loads of traffic in the future 😀

Disappointing Results of Quick Traffic Driving With Fiverr

by Francis
(October 12, 2012)

Webpage traffic Analysis
Webpage traffic Analysis

I got my Fiverr gig completed in time. Unfortunately, the results are very disappointing to say the least. The bad thing is I can’t really give him a negative review.

When you have a look at the stats of this gig, as shown in the picture at the top of the post, you’ll see that this person claims to have delivered 12,000 clicks to my website.

The data does not really show any problems. The analytics on my site, however, did not show this sort of activity at all.

The bad thing is I did not install Google Analytics on this blog page I wanted to send traffic to. I relied on the automatic visitor counts of Aweber where I have placed an Aweber form on the blog page.

So I can’t really disprove that this person has done a good job. What I can see is that I did not get any results. No subscribers, no visitors. So to be honest, I was really disappointed with this Gig.

fail-quotation-anthony-J-D-AngeloI think those $5 were spent in vain. Perhaps not in vain, you should reconsider seriously when you think about buying quick traffic from Fiverr. You might not necessarily hurt your website. However, you might not also necessarily get the wanted response.

Let’s have a look at where the traffic comes from. Some from Facebook, some from Twitter and most of it via email clients. I assume that they are able to drive this much traffic in such a short time using some sort of automated huge email network.

It’s clear that many of the visitors will not appreciate the website I’ve shared there. Also, most visitors come from China. Without wanting to sound disrespectful, I’m not even sure if all these clicks and people are real, to be honest probably not.

How else could you explain that someone sends 10,000 visitors to a random website overnight? Those can’t be interested normal people.

So I was greedy, it was my fault. I shouldn’t have used Fiverr to drive traffic to my website. But it was an experiment as I said in my last post.

So what I will have to do is to give a positive feedback because I cannot really prove that this guy did something wrong. But still it has a bad after taste. I’m not really happy with it.

To outsource traffic generation, I believe it’s smarter to create your own hard work product and content and have it marketed by your virtual assistant specially trained for this.

Dear website owners, try to stay away from traffic driving Fiverr gigs. That is my take home message.

Comments for Disappointing Results of Quick Traffic Driving With Fiverr

Aug 06, 2014 credible gigs with VAs help 😀
by: Francis I’ve read some posts about buying off some traffic, and mostly there’s always a downfall to it since it is not credible and most probably it’s created by one or two individual. In the future, they’re not much of help if you need more. So, I think it would be best if credible and true traffic will come to your website with the use of some gigs from your own VAs help 😀

Whoops – never mind. Traffic was sent as promised by the Fiverr Gig

by Francis

OK my bad. The traffic is there.
OK my bad. The traffic is there.

Although that traffic bought by Fiverr yielded no profit or interaction whatsoever, the traffic bought by the gig I told about in the post above was delivered as promised.

So – I cannot complain. I only make the observation that traffic bought through a Fiverr gig with doubious background to say the least is probably not the smartest move for your website. 😉

Comments for Whoops – never mind. Traffic was sent as promised by the Fiverr Gig

Nov 16, 2012 No, you’re right.
by: Fiverr Traffic Don’t take it back. You were right. The traffic was junk, thus the reason you had no conversions. I’ve experienced the same phenomenon. See my similar post (though I DID have Google Analytics installed) atHow Not To Drive Traffic Using Fiverr

Matt
Marketing Ideas 101
Nov 17, 2012 We should have asked what sort of traffic they deliver
by: Francis I agree that they send out junk traffic – but it’s traffic, so they did not trick us, strictly speaking.For someone who might have had a Cost Per Impression advertisement system set up, he might even had made a profit from such an arrangement.

I’ll also check out your post in a second!

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Why You Should Make Your Virtual Assistants as Google Savvy as Possible

by Francis
(October 11, 2012)

Use Google's free tools. They are awesome!

Use Google’s free tools. They are awesome!

Google shares us a set of free tools with everyone who wants to use them. It is a smart move as an employer to teach your virtual assistants how to use those Google products to their fullest potential as fast as possible.

Personally, in one of the very first messages I share with a newly hired virtual assistant I tell them:

“I like Google Mail. I need you to use Google Mail too.
If needed, please create a free account and let me know your email.”

Google Mail itself has a lot of advantages like big storage, being free, great spam filters and so on. But the good thing is that many Google products play well with each other and work especially well when used as a team.

The Google Messenger

a screenshot of Google chat desktop application

I like to use the Google messenger and their voicemail functionality a lot.

Since I already have the Google account, it is easy to locate the contact in Google messenger and send them quick chats. Whenever I have an idea, I like to share a chat with my virtual assistant.

I’m not sure if this is a specific thing for Germany but, unfortunately, Google voicemail doesn’t work anymore for me.

Some years ago, I loved to use it to send my virtual assistants and my personal assistant specific voice instructions on the run. I’m now using my mobile phone or Jing.

Google Documents

Like Google Mail, Google Docs has huge storage capacity. You can share and work in real time at the same document as your virtual assistant does. This is awesome for all sorts of online collaboration.

You could be creating content at the same time. So if you have any documents to cooperate on, why not use Google Documents.

Google Search and Google Suggestions

Google search and Google suggestions are, of course, very central. Who have not used Google nowadays? But even in the search there are many hidden functionalities that you can ask your virtual assistant to look into.

showing Google search suggestions
For example suggestions: When you type in a keyword other ideas might pop up. If you need some quick brainstorming, just ask your virtual assistant to get suggestions around the keyword using Google suggestions or let them research more topics based on that.

Google Reader

rss icon

And the last tool I want to talk about: Google Reader. Google reader is a great tool to follow along many discussions at the same time.

Honestly, I get overwhelmed by the amounts of threats and feeds I’m following.

That is why I outsourced this to my virtual assistant again to save time. He screens all the feeds for me and lets me know of the most important things. I then act on them.

Take home message:

Use the free tools of Google as much as you can and let your virtual assistant in on your secrets as well. Both of you can only win from that. Don’t you agree?

Comments for Why You Should Make Your Virtual Assistants as Google Savvy As Possible

Oct 12, 2012 recommenation
by: kittycat

I switched to gmail two years ago. At the beginning I was very sceptical and found it confusing. But when you get used to gmail it starts getting better and better!

I’m still impressed how good it works for me today! I can only recommend it.
Mar 11, 2013 data privacy of googlemail
by: Nadine

Can you tell me how safe it is to share documents, voicemail-data via googlemail?
Mar 13, 2013 Don’t Upload Critical Data to Google
by: Francis

Nadine, let me give you my take on this question.

Although I think that in general it is safe to use Google, I would not trust it with major top secret data.

In other words, stuff you would not like to lose by accident or do have published to others by accident, should stay away from Google documents etc.

For your day to day stuff or for all projects that involve your free time, it is more than good enough.

If you have work related data for which you have signed a non-disclosure agreement, I wouldn’t go to Google either.

In principle, I think it’s safe to assume that Google knows what is saved where and uses it for some analysis on its own. Perhaps even only to show you specific advertisements, but I’ll also ask my virtual assistant to research this issue a bit and give you his opinion also.

But it’s a good and important question Nadine.
Mar 13, 2013 Re: Don’t Upload Critical Data to Google
by: Virtual Assitant

Hi Nadine,

Internet is like real life, your secrets are secret unless you share them with anyone. Although Google tries it’s best to make their services safe and secure, but still there are tons of possibilities that your personal files can easily go Public.

No matter how strict their security settings are, once you share a file with a third person, it’s up to his credentials whether he keeps the data confidential or makes it public.

Although in Google docs you can set a shared document’s setting to ‘view only’ so that the third person would not be able to edit or copy it, but still there are so many ways one can copy your restricted documents. I think you know what I am talking about.

However, there are certain remedies you can take for making your data more safe and secure. Please go to this helpful link about security in Google drive.
Aug 07, 2014 Newbie VA
by: Jomvie

I think it is really important that VAs are internet savvy since most of our task rely on the internet. The technical stuff is a plus if the VA is good at it. And I think I need to work on it since I lack the technical skills. 😀

Although I know how to use Google, there are some features I am not yet familiar with, might as well check them out to see how it works.

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How I Manage Multiple Virtual Assistants Over oDesk

by Francis
(October 11, 2012)

Hire one main VA to manage your Virtual Task Force Army
Hire one main VA to manage your Virtual Task Force Army

If you get started using oDesk, in order to hire VAs or other providers, you’ll soon be tempted to hire more than one person. It’s a smart business move:

You can find out who is the best fit for your business and you can get much more work done.

However, don’t forget that managing multiple people takes time too and a considerable amount of time, if you do it well.

Here is how I work around it in times of time pressure:

I have my one main virtual assistant. He is responsible for many different tasks and I have heavily trained him. I discussed with him if he would be up for managing other virtual assistants for me.

I gave him instructions about how to handle my other team members and enabled his account to get the rights as a Hiring Manager.

This is possible on oDesk. You can, if you trust your long time virtual assistant enough, give him the rights to hire, fire, employ and manage other people.

This is outsourcing on steroids.

Here is where the real power kicks in. My virtual assistant not only closely manages and stays in contact with two additional VAs.

He also gives me feedback about their work and evenly distributes the workload to both of those co-workers. This way, I can get a lot of stuff done in extremely short amount of time.

Especially if you’re pressed for results right now, this is a good tactic to use.

Finding out who’s the perfect fit for your business takes time.

And if you first have to screen through several co-workers one by one, you might not get all the work done that you need to.

My main advice, my main take home message from this whole website is:

Get yourself one trustworthy main virtual assistant.

Train him in the way you have been trained so that in the case of need, he can “replace you” accordingly.

Would you rather do all the managing and e-mail writing yourself?

How much trust do you need to build with your main virtual assistant before you can trust him with your account and with the privileges of hiring people?

In essence, how long does it take before you trust your virtual assistant with your credit card?

Be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Comments for How I Manage Multiple Virtual Assistants Over oDesk

Jul 21, 2014 Business and Personal Stuff
by: Jomvie

Strictly training someone to get you a clone is indeed an excellent idea. Especially business outsourcing is innovatively changing every now and then. Your business should adapt quite well through the help of VAs who will focus and closely monitor in your absence.

Yes, you can trust and hand all your business transactions. But I don’t think I can let someone take over my personal stuff even for years of working close to that someone. And I don’t think it has to do with “trust”, I guess simply it’s just for security reasons.

Let’s just say, business and personal stuff are two different things that can’t be mixed and put together in one place.
Jul 21, 2014 Outsourcing personal email
by: Francis

I know of some well-known leader figures that are experts on outsourcing – who outsource their personal email.

Personally, that goes too far for me too. For now.

But taking care of some of your less critical matters (and be it reviewing some of your newsletters for the must-read-stuff for your employer) can be something I can imagine a personal assistant do.

Those really innovative uses of VAs are reserved for those of you readers that are courageous enough to try out wildly new things.

Keep your critically personal data safe, though.

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As a Virtual Assistant, How Do You Know if Your Boss Likes What You Did?

by Francis
(October 10, 2012)

Recently I got asked this very simple question from a virtual assistant: How do I know if my boss likes what work I do?

famous quotation about bad feedback

There are several factors that will determine if your boss likes the kind of work you do for him over the internet. The most important one will be his feedback. If there is good feedback, good for you; if there is bad feedback, act on it as fast as possible.

Try as much as you can to make your employer happy. Make changes and propose solutions because your reputation is on the line.

If there is no feedback, well, I would assume that first it would be a good sign. Most employers try to save time by not overdoing the whole feedback thing. Most employers are looking for self-starters and self-sufficient virtual assistants that need as little supervision as possible.

So if you don’t get any feedback, I would assume at first that it is okay. If the lack of feedback takes too long and only you can decide what too long means then by all means contact your employer. Say something like,

Hi Boss, here is what I did: A, B and C. I hope you liked it. I took the freedom of researching an alternative way of making C even faster and better. What do you think about it?

Do you like my work?

If there’s anything you’re not pleased with, please let me know and I’ll change it right away. I would be happy to hear from you so that I can make your business even better.”

Just write him an email of such a nature. As an employer, I could not help but be impressed if someone wrote something like this to me instead of complaining that I don’t write. It would show just the right message to me.

If you use a system like oDesk, your work is recorded with screen capturing software anyway. So you can assume that your employer takes a periodical look at your work. And as long as he is paying you, you shall assume that he likes what you are doing.

I hope I could give you some fresh insight to know if your boss likes what work you do as a virtual assistant.

If you need further help or if you have any questions or if you are an employer reading this and wanting to join the discussion, be sure to click on the comment function below.

Comments for As A Virtual Assistant, How Do You Know If Your Boss Likes What You Did?

Jul 21, 2014 Feedbacks are like fertilizer
by: JomvieFor me, I think there’s no such thing as negative feedback especially if I am working on some stuff that I don’t understand a single thing or two. 😀 In my case, I will start to worry if there’s no word from my employer’s end.Feedbacks help you improve and grow and in time it will make you to a better one and that will be the time I will not worry if I don’t get to hear from my employer regularly.. =)
Jul 21, 2014 Sometimes you have to “fish” for the feedback
by: FrancisI think I am not the only employer who sometimes is not able to answer my virtual assistant right away.While the VA (even more for a full time VA) is constantly in contact with the problem he is trying to solve for his employer, the employer is often busy with other stuff.And be it him going off to a beach living the dream 😉

Anyways, as the employer I need to be reminded for a need of feedback from time to time, too. Just as a VA needs to be reminded of open tasks, e.g.

It helps to insist a bit on open questions. Either by asking them differently, or even by doing some research and presenting some possible answers to the employer.

What else can an employer do if his VA is waiting for feedback but there is just too little time to give him that?

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How to Best Share Your Passwords with Your Virtual Assistants

by Francis
(October 09, 2012)

When you have an online business and you work with a virtual assistant, it will be necessary at some point in time that you share your online passwords with them. Of course, don’t share your bank account or if the VA doesn’t need it – your personal email password.

Although I know that famous authors like Tim Ferriss have outsourced their emails completely, personally, I like to keep my personal email account for me. However for many other tasks, you might want to share your passwords with your virtual assistants.

For that, change it first if you have the bad habit of using the same password everywhere. It’s a good first step to changing this habit anyway.

How to keep track of all those changed passwords?

If you try to remember them or write them down on little bits of paper, stop.

You’ll forget them, mix them up or lose your paper.

There is a free tool I like to use which encrypts all my passwords in one place and I remember one main password which is extremely important in order for me to keep track of all other passwords. This tool is called LastPass.

What this tool does is that it retrieves all the passwords you have used so far which might be saved in your browser in one safe place. Then it deletes them all from your browser.

In order to get access to your passwords, you will need to login into your LastPass account. Fortunately, this can be accessed from anywhere even mobile. So don’t worry about forgetting your passwords.

It’s still useful to remember the most important passwords manually. Also, I don’t save my bank account passcode anywhere. This one I know by heart.

What does it all have to do with Virtual Assistants?

Well, a VA can help you with managing your social media. I share my password from my Twitter account, my StumbleUpon account and of my content management system, the Site-builder platform, with my virtual assistant.

This means I have changed it before, saved the change into my LastPass account and now my virtual assistant cannot access to it. If at some point in time I need to change it again, for example if I work with another virtual assistant, I will do so LastPass will save the password for me and the access will be for me alone again.

Actually, LastPass goes further than saving your passwords; it generates and encrypts passwords which you don’t need to remember in one place for you. That’s a good service if you have a hard time coming up with passwords.

Anyways if you share any access with your virtual assistant, think about how you manage all the passwords. They are important, you know?

Do you have any tips of how you deal with your passwords?

Would you trust your VA with your personal passwords?

And if not, what would it take?

Please be sure to share your thoughts and comments.

Comments for How to Best Share Your Passwords with Your Virtual Assistants

Mar 07, 2014 LastPass: Highly Recommended!
by: DeineI use LastPass for my social media accounts and for work, too, and I must say that it really is very very useful! I don’t have to remember passwords anymore — which I’m prone to forgetting. Waah! I recommend it to anyone who haven’t tried it yet. It only takes a couple of minutes to download and install. It’s just great! 😀
Jul 15, 2014 Entrepreneur’s must-have tool
by: JohnThis is truly an amazing tool that every entrepreneurs online must have. It will make things easier for you since you only need to remember one password to gain access to all your virtual offices 😀
Sep 05, 2014 Change Password Frequently with Your VA
by: FrancisLastPass is a great tool for anyone who’s online, anyways. Especially with all the different cases of passwords being hacked and stuff like that. You wouldn’t believe that passwords like the word “PASSWORD” are the most popular passwords out there. Other combinations are “123456” or something like that. It’s ridiculous.With LastPass, at least you have some very strong and very unique passwords at your reach. The best thing is that you don’t have to remember them. The only bad thing is that you definitively need LastPass for your online life to work well.

In combination with the virtual assistant, LastPass is best used like that. You create a new set of passwords for all the services you want to share with your virtual assistants. Then your virtual assistant installs LastPass for himself. You share the services that your virtual assistant should have access to. Your VA uses LastPass to save his passwords that he received from you.

When you update a password, you just send him the information. He changes it in LastPass and doesn’t need to remember anything except for having his plugin from LastPass in the browser up to date, of course.

All in all, a very safe method where I can really give two thumbs up with all of my heart.