virtual assistants
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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:
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.
- 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!
- Protect all your “viral affiliate links” that you will use in this email list building project with ViralURL.
- 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.
Virtual Assistant Training Is Important – But Manage Your Time Effectively!
Train your personal assistants thoroughly: it will pay back to you tenfold. On the other hand, also make sure that your virtual assistant training efforts are applied effectively.
Working with one VS multiple virtual assistants
I tried working with a team of providers on Odesk. This was stressful, as each and everyone needed and deserved clear instructions from me.
Outsourcing turned into a full time job – I would have gotten things done in the same time that I outsourced it.
Not so good!
Now, I decided to train dedicated, highly motivated staff for me. Focusing on the virtual assistant training for one provider at a time took less time and yielded more results.
How many assistants do you want to hire and train at the same time?
Here is the maximum that I was willing to work with after years of outsourcing experience – in addition to one primary virtual assistant:
- One specialist for one-day-a-week tasks in addition to my “main” virtual assistant
- Several short time helpers for on-off fixed price tasks that needed to be done in few days
Be prepared if your personal assistant quits
There is one big risk and downside to hiring one excellent provider and training him everything you know, though:
What if the cooperation ends?
- There are many reasons a freelancer would stop working with you.
- He could be unhappy with the payment.
- He could have other, more lucrative working agreements with other employers. He could have found a better paid, permanent offline job.
This is a risk you have to be aware of, as an employer. I propose one solution to this biggest risk:
Create a backup virtual assistant training plan!
Ask your assistant to work out a training plan that would be able to teach another virtual assistant the same steps that he learnt himself. You profit twice:
- The VA shows how well he has understood his tasks. They say that you have not mastered anything before you cannot teach it to others.
- He creates the instructions for a possible successor for you. No need to worry about being left alone with all your work on the desk. (There will be a transition phase though, where less work will be done!)
Save this training plan and be prepared to send it to a possible successor.
Automated Virtual Assistant Training with an Autoresponder
Or, if you are successful with your online business, you can also distribute your training using an email autoresponder service to a whole team of virtual assistants. Automate the expansion of your enterprise, so to speak.
Whatever happens, I am really glad the cooperation works so smoothly for all this time till now.
Feedback is as important as training was
You taught your virtual assistant lots of skills that he will profit from in future assignments. Don’t forget that he used these skills to work for you, for many hours, at a competitive price.
The least you, as an employer must do, is put in some work to write a solid feedback for him.
When you are working with a provider who does a very good job, like mine does, make sure you leave him with more than a few words of thanks at the end.
Make Your Online Home Based Business Ideas Come True
Every person has the potential to create his own online business. Not everyone uses the right tools to turn his potential online home based business ideas into real income.
Your ideas are a unique and hidden treasure
You are a walking fortune. Sounds cheezy? I know, sorry.
What I want to say to you is that you have a best-selling book or a super popular website stuck in your brain.
I don’t know what is your big passion. It may be hiking, yoga or collecting stamps. But there is something that you know LOTS about. And there ARE people that are looking to find this info on the net.
Believe me, there are so many people looking for so much different stuff, you won’t believe what crazy ideas you can make money with.
Where does the money come from?
If you are an expert in something – even if it is paper-ball-tossing! – you can present that information to others that are willing to bring value to the table in exchange.
That’s almost all the secret there is to make a business.
Start with the right tools
There are however, a multitude of wrong approaches you can take. Let me show you one example:
The answer: no.
For me personally, using Site Build It! is the way to success. The “downside”? You’ll have to invest a lot more work than what the easy promises on the internet might say.
The upside?
You won’t lose unnecessary time working without a working business plan and without training. This is all included in the system.
The secret of creating more free time
You’ll read much phony stuff out there on the internet when you start researching good info about how to actually build an online business on something you love.
Some people will promise you great riches over night if you just sign up here… Blabla!
Don’t trust those easy promises!
If it was that easy, don’t you think everyone would not be driving a Benz right now…?
So, what works if the easy way out is not true, in my opinion?
Long, hard work… works! Be it online or in the real life. You will need to invest some serious time and commit to your online biz.
But who has the time?
No one. I had taken a few months off after graduating before jumping into the world of work. And there still was not enough time.
The solution?
Get a trustworthy virtual helper. That’s what you will learn all over this site. What is a great challenge to you alone is much more doable with some (extremely affordable) help from outside.
(Click here if you want to know where I look for virtual assistants.)
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On a side note:
The process of using this website building system is also doable alone. You can turn your online home based business ideas into reality, even alone. it will just take a lot of time.
However, it will take less time with a virtual assistant.
Why this system works so well with virtual assistants
It Worked For Me!
I started working with my virtual assistant on a website process using the same Site Build It! system.
He knew nothing about it at first. I handed him the training materials and he understood most of each step without me needing to train him much.
Of course, I needed to give him my input about what my personal preferences for my website were.
The great feature of this system is that it is described in simple followable steps that are understandable even for someone without any training.
That makes it perfect for using it together with a virtual assistant. What actually takes the most time before working with a VA really pays off big time, is the time you need to invest into your VA for training. But the training wheels of the SBI-system drastically reduce this time.
You’ll reach the point where you make your online home based business ideas reality much, much sooner with some help.
Believe me.
How the oDesk Feedback System Motivates Your Virtual Assistants to Do Great Work
The oDesk feedback and rating system is the bottom line “carrot and stick” – next to the money paid with either fixed-price jobs or hourly jobs – to make sure the quality of the outsourced work is top notch.
It is very crucial, not only for oDesk but also for many other outsourcing services.
- The better you are rated as a provider, the more likely you are hired on the next job and vice versa.
To virtual assistants reading this, but also potential employers…
It’s not only your oDesk feedback that counts but also the feedback of others after the completion of the project.
The oDesk feedback score is like an online reputation
It works just like a job reference or testimonial. If all your testimonials sound really excited and extremely positive than you will impress your future employer and the likelihood of you being hired raises a lot.
This encourages the provider to really give their best. On the other hand, once you have a bad reference in your profile it will not go away so easily.
Employers usually read all references – at least that’s what I do and that’s what I expect everyone who reads the content of this website to do!
But sometimes providers go after sheer numbers as they might have a bad score, instead of gathering solid references, they try to fix their scores with numerous scores by doing really simple and easy small jobs which can be easily finished. This raises their average feedback a bit.
Be careful and read beyond the oDesk Feedback Score
Careful employers read beyond the simple feedback rating system. Smart employers only read the testimonials. Or take note of the missing of testimonials.
Example:
“Comment made private” always sets off my alarm bells for any provider.
The importance of the feedback score from the point of view of a virtual assistant
As always, I asked my virtual assistant for his unbiased opinion. How important is the oDesk feedback score really?
Here is what he shared with me…
For me as a provider obviously feedback is very important, but feedback score is much more important than feedback text. I would not mind if an employer gives me a 5 star rating with a little feedback like “Thanks for your hard work!” is pretty much more than acceptable.
On the flip side if someone writes long feedback praising my work and my work attitude, highly recommending me to others but only gives me 3 stars, I would not prefer it.
Reason:
Many employers usually specify required feedback score within the job post.
So keeping in view this employer’s requirement if I have a feedback score less than 4.50, no matter I have high positive remarks, but still I will not be even shortlisted for this job because the employer will reject my application without reviewing it as I am not fulfilling his job criteria. So in my opinion Numbers are more important than words especially in this case.
Obviously feedback remarks are also important but I don’t think that all employers review it very carefully, normally they judge you with your overall profile and if you have a good feedback score, you are more likely to get hired rather than a person having one or two remarkable feedbacks.
But there is a thing which I rate above both feedback and score is the experience, I think the most important factor of your freelancing profile is your experience and availability. So if you have worked more hours you always have an advantage.
But here employers need to be a bit more careful because some freelancers are also outsourcing their work even further. Since they are so experienced and they have thousands of hours under their profile so they are more likely to get hired by most of the people, but here look at these statistics.
This provider has worked more than 5700 hours in the last 6 months which means he has worked 230+ hours per weeks which is impossible.
How can somebody work without eating or sleeping continuously for 6 months or so?
So I would consider it a spam because he has an experienced profile, therefore he is getting contracts and outsourcing his work to other providers.
Keep Your Assistant Motivated To Increase His Self-Confidence
How to keep your assistant motivated is part-21 of the second interview from Stefan from Germany, who lives the Four Hour Work Week lifestyle in Thailand.
Click here to read part 20 – Outsourcing case study about traffic generation
Summary:
- One concern every employer has that how many time virtual assistants need to learn new skills and what if they lose focus while doing a task and not completing it.
- The best way to keep your assistant motivated and loyal to you is constant and well meaning communication.
- Don’t communicate with your virtual assistant while you are angry or you shout at your assistant. He will be scared, he will leave immediately and thus all money you invested in his training is in vain.
Start of the Interview:
Francis:
The big question was we are afraid that the assistants use too much time while learning new skills.
Stefan:
And lose focus while doing the task and not completing the task.
Francis:
Yes.
Stefan:
That would be the problem.
Francis:
So against people losing the motivation, there’s not one big cure. Although, we have discussed on our site different topics on how to be more productive and efficient; it’s still different from each person when they lose the motivation.
The best way to keep your assistant motivated and loyal to you is constant and well meaning communication. This doesn’t mean that you are now all errors, it only means that you communicate openly about everything.
This means that the daily updates to which you should reply at least two times a week. This means you reviewing their work and telling exactly what is good and what is not so good. This also includes you not frightening your assistant.
So let’s, for example, say your assistant gets out of his way and does his research on his own and the results were very bad. Please don’t record a video while you shout at your assistant. He will be scared, he will leave immediately.
So always, if you have to get angry, don’t record it and send it to your assistant. Get angry with your wall or with you’re with your friends in a forum. And then calm down.
Think about how it would be for the assistant to receive the communication and then calmly say to them “Okay, this was not usable at all and I don’t want you to do this like that again.
It was good that you tried it but you tried it in the wrong way. Now you know how not to do it, please do it like that in the future. And, although, you didn’t do it right; you don’t let this stop you from having your own initiative again.”
You appreciate that he tried it. Give him the feedback without being angry that he didn’t do it right. You give him a little bit of pointers or sources where he can learn to do it right. Then, you encourage him to do it at another time again.
The strategy to immediately communicate if something is wrong minimizes the time and money lost. There will at least one working day of time and money lost because the assistant works one day; you review the screen shots; you receive his daily communication; and, only then you can react.
There’s a possible time lost of about 8 paid working hours if for 8 hours he does nothing right. But if you manage your assistant at the beginning of the work relationship so closely, this will not happen very closely.
Stefan:
Yes because hopefully it already paid out itself. I mean, I don’t know, it might be over expecting but I would say 1 working hour should at least pay out double or 150%. And for every hour he works, 1 hour can be lost theoretically and used to even. You know what I mean?
Francis:
Yes, I know. So if you talk about money revenue, I think this is not realistic. But if you’re thinking about time revenue, this is very realistic. So my assistant when he works, I pay him his rate for one hour and I’m not thinking about the money that I don’t receive back immediately.
I think about the work he does within 1 hour and think he’s so productive; I know I couldn’t do it in 1 hour myself. I wouldn’t be as disciplined and I still just don’t have the time to do the work. So the work he does in 1 hour equals, at least, 1 hour in my work even more.
Stefan:
Let’s say if he works 40 hours a week or 20 hours a week, if he produces 10 of my hours; that would be good.
Francis:
I think that’s expectable, at least. That’s about it.
Stefan:
Yes. Because I would cost way more from two points of view – from the financial point of view and from the motivational point of view. Because as you say I am not always motivated to work and my assistant provides that motivation because he is maybe more motivated to work than me.
Francis:
I think your assistant should be clearly motivated to work because if you work on your own, you don’t receive money compensation immediately.
So you have to draw your motivation from your dreams – your planning, your business plans. Your assistant gets paid immediately after he works so he should draw his motivation from the payment and the possibility to learn new skills and the possibility to build out his portfolio for future works. So, it’s clear that your assistant is more motivated than you by nature.
Assuming all the topics we’ve talked about in this interview and all the challenges and fears you had regarding ‘is outsourcing worth it?’
Don’t I lose too much time? Assuming you would be able to implement all these tips, are you less afraid or less anxious to give outsourcing another chance?
Stefan:
In the next time, I won’t give outsourcing a big chance in terms of single small projects. I think that it would take too much time and I rather do it on my own.
Francis:
Yes.
Stefan:
That is more efficient and more cost and productive. The other thing is the semi long term, let’s say, the next 4-5 months would be definitely the ideal to find a solution to hire a part time assistant in one way or another. That’s a long time goal of mine.
That’s a long goal of mine to do that. But I haven’t had any success in that yet maybe because I didn’t invest enough time. It takes way longer than 1 month or 2 months.
And I’m still not very sure if I could achieve that yet so it will take time to figure that out but eventually it’s the only reasonable thing to do. You need someone to do the work for you.
You can’t do it on your own.
Francis:
I think so too especially if you have big ambitions like you and I. So the main goal of this website where this interview is standing on is for people like you who are motivated and interested in outsourcing to shorten their learning period.
Continue reading part 22 – Concluding the big outsourcing interview
Learn How To Setup Initial Tasks With Virtual Assistants
How to setup initial tasks with virtual assistants is part-11 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!
Summary:
- Learn how to setup initial tasks with virtual assistants effectively
- How to outsource tasks one at a time to your virtual assistant to avoid overwhelming information.
- Learn how to encourage the virtual assistant to ask questions in the beginning process of outsourcing task
Start of the Interview:
Francis
So, at the beginning, you have to encourage questions. You will think that this is self-explanatory but you have to tell them that it’s okay to ask questions.
Eric
Yeah. I think that a lot of virtual assistants, especially from other countries, I think in the United States, the people are a lot more vocal. I don’t know how they are in Germany.
But, if there’s a problem, they’ll ask you. And they’ll say “Okay. Sir, what is it exactly that I need to do here? Can you explain this to me better? I don’t understand.”
But, I think with the VAs that I’ve worked with from other countries, I think that what they do is they’d rather just get it done. Because, I think they want to give you results rather than stopping to ask you a question.
And I think if you make things more upfront in the beginning of the process saying, “if you have questions, make sure that you ask me or make sure that you send me an email or a screenshot or something.” I think that will go a long way rather than the long queue of going back and forth between the two of you for days.
When in the beginning, if you say, “If there’s a problem ask me a question first, before you go too far along in the project.” Because, I would see a lot of my assistants, they would get too far along in the project or get the project finished. I was like “Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let’s go back to the very beginning and redo this whole thing.” Where if I was a little more upfront, they can ask me questions, before you have any issues, even if it took a couple of days longer to get that project done.
It would have saved me money. It would have saved time rather than having to have them risk the entire thing.
Francis
Yeah. I had a similar experience for a very basic task. So, I had my Aweber list funnel with all the preloaded emails.
I knew that they were not perfectly written because they were all transcribed. So, I recorded them talking and then just said, “Okay, my assistant, take the transcript, put them on Aweber. I don’t want to see them for now.”
I wanted to have 80% solution. I said okay, I will fine tune them later. And I did not do that for a long time. So, when I had the full time virtual assistant candidate, I said, “Okay, I would like to edit and proofread all my emails from the funnel. Just subscribe and when you get the emails, proofread them.”
And then things were forgotten for the other projects that we talked about and this just went on. And she took long hours working on that.
And in the end, I was not happy with the result. It could have been saved if we had exchanges on one example.
So the bottom line: if you have a task, do a very small portion of the big portion. Tell them that there’s a big portion coming.
Don’t necessarily give them access to the big portion. Is it writing an e-book, writing an article, doing research and proofreading lots of content or something like that or reading content for training?
Don’t give them access to everything because they will just do everything and not necessarily how you like it to be done.
So, in this case, she proofread it and then we had a Word document. But, to edit in the proofreading, we didn’t know where the errors were.
So you would have to compare the old version with the new version to find out what to edit. And this would have been prevented if she had just used the “track changes” tool in Word.
And then every correction would have been highlighted and my virtual assistant would have had an easy job doing her proofreading. But at that time, the communication was not very stable.
We took a few days talking back and forth. And during that time, she just continued to work. So, that was not efficient.
Ideally, if you have a task like research or proofreading, do it on one example. And then say, “Okay, I like the result. But, I don’t like xyz.” Don’t say it negatively because it’s always good to say things positively.
But, I would like the system to be different. Then you optimize on one example until it’s really dead. And then you can give her 3 more items. And then when it’s running smoothly, just say “Do the rest.”
Eric
Yeah. I think that the “take away from” is to just start off with one task or one portion of the task so that they can check the work, make sure that’s okay and then you can move on to the larger task. I think that’s great.
Francis
Yeah. And as you do that, of course, you’re communicating a lot and you are also communicating about other stuff. You can really show that you’re a human being. So, I like to even make voice recordings which are quite, well, one sided; I like to small talk a bit.
Because I’m just talking and doing so if I don’t have something smart to say, I just say, “Oh my god, you don’t want to know what a day at work I had.” Or, I say something like “Okay, by the way, next week, I will be on vacation for one week.” So, this saves me writing an email saying “Okay next week I’m on vacation.”
You can say “I’ll be in Italy. It will be cool. I will be in France. Okay, back to the task. Here is blah, blah, blah.”
Eric
Right. And I think that that’s one of the things that’s difficult for a virtual assistant is to kind of get that personal relationship with them. Because, it’s like you’re trying to communicate with somebody across the world and you’re not sitting at the desk with them.
You’re not getting to know them. You’re not getting to know their family or anything like that. I think that’s important too that for us as employers that we get to know our virtual assistant as best as we can.
And, share those personal experiences like what you’re saying so that we can better understand their situation. Better understand them to where they actually have that personal connection with us.
Francis
I agree. I’ll put it as a possible discussion on the list but I’m to be honest a little bit more careful with getting too personal with my assistants too soon.
Continue reading part 12 – How do you fire assistant who is unfit for the job?
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