working with virtual assistants

Francis

Although, I’m sort of slightly switching topic; I would like to test out something. Do you know how to share screen in Skype?

Eric

Yes.

Francis

The plus button or…

Eric

Let’s see, I’ve done it before but I don’t really…

Francis

Ah, yeah. I have it. I’m sharing my screen now and please don’t get overwhelmed, I just want to show an idea I had.

Eric

What program is that you’re using?

Francis

That is Lucidchart.com. That’s online. It’s integrated with Google documents.

Eric

Okay, cool.

Francis

So, I had tried to do some flowchart. It’s simply overwhelming but, in principle, what this shows is we start with ideas and do certain steps then do the keyword research.

Do certain steps than writing starts with voice recordings, a transcription then it goes back in some sort of feedback loop.

We look at the result. We fine tune it, do some steps. And then when I’m happy with the interim results, I create a content page from that with my VA who does some more steps. I’ve implemented a few links from SBI tools or articles in to these steps.

And then I go back to:

• Optimizing stuff building the traffic from that page,

• Doing some supporting steps,

• Going to the Aweber email creation,

• Checking the steps,

• If the stats exceed a certain level then you monetize or you find if you can make an auto-responder or a Content 2.0 invitation,

• Freebies creation, so when you want to have submissions, you’d create some sort of free gift to download. Stuff like that.

• I tried to make some sort of a flow chart.

The idea of that is because we are talking about the team of assistants. This is much more than one person can do.

Eric

Right, yeah.

Francis

Especially, so I’m just stopping now; especially when you are having more than one site going through that to do that sort of process. But that’s sort of my dream final result.

I have a team of assistants and then I start with an idea saying it would be cool if we could talk about this but in high quality.

Then we start with the research finding good keywords. Then we are picking my brain. So, in other words, my assistant puts together a list of ideas and input from internet research and then I just give my comments about each of these topics. Very much like the list of ideas we have in Google documents.

Eric

Right. I think that’s great. Go ahead, I’m sorry.

Francis

Yeah. And then just it goes from there into the next steps of the business building process. And that’s how I would like to really speed start my content creation process with a team of virtual assistants. So, I have a sort of overall assistant but he could not do everything.

And now I would like to expand to have a writer on my team or an editor for fine tuning transcribed content, for example. And then, we go from there.

Eric

Right. And for example, like for me, I was thinking about how I’m willing to start getting into YouTube a whole lot more with my videos because I think that’s a lot for my audience is.

I thought, okay, I can get my general virtual assistant to be just doing basic stuff you were talking about and then hiring maybe somebody to be my video editor. So all I have to do was just drop the videos in the Dropbox, and they go ahead and edit the videos.

Send them back to me and then I could let my general VA upload them to YouTube for me. Put the different descriptions. Add the links and things like that.

Then, I even thought about doing a podcast and I could hire somebody to do the editing of the podcast. Because those are things that I can do but it takes hours and hours of my time to do this thing.

The thing is that somebody else is probably a whole lot better at it than I am anyways. And then have somebody send that back to my virtual assistant and let them upload it.

I’ve been doing a lot of the same things as I kind of trying to come up with some kind of process rather than just being, how do I want to say it, hiring for different roles and having to process.

So, that’s where they can actually do different things rather than just randomly expecting my one virtual assistant to do everything.

Because I think that’s one of the things that as beginners are hired, we think that we can desire one person that can do everything and that kind of gets in the way of expanding your business.

Francis

If you have a person who does everything and you rely on that person 100%; what happens if he goes away? Then all of it falls together. All your training is lost. All your internal knowledge goes away. And you have to start from scratch and perhaps even have to fear that your knowledge goes somewhere else.

So, it makes sense to have some big pictures only for yourself, some big dreams. And some tasks, some very specific tasks given to specialists. If they are full time specialists or project based specialists, it doesn’t matter. But, keep them separated from each other slightly.

So that everyone talks with your Hiring Manager. But the Hiring Manager himself in the end does nothing else than manage. He does not do the technical stuff perhaps.