There’s a point in your Internet marketing career when you’ll need to start delegating some of your daily tasks in order to free up yourself for other things. As an Internet marketer, you’re accustomed to conducting your business in the virtual world. You leverage technology to achieve greater efficiency. That’s why instead of hiring a traditional personal assistant, you’re looking for a virtual assistant (VA). Very cool.
I have personally gone through the experience of searching for a great VA and now I want share with you what I discovered in this journey. I’ll show you how to find highly competent VAs at very reasonable rates. I’ll give you tips and warn you about potential pitfalls.
What Tasks Can You Delegate
You can delegate just about anything you currently do to your new VA. Some of the tasks that Internet marketers usually delegate include
- link building tasks
- forum posting
- blog commenting
- social media participation
- your blog comment moderation
- order processing
- refund requests processing
- and many other tasks
Work with a Company or an Individual?
Some people believe that you should avoid working with individual VAs because there isn’t as much accountability and oversight for an individual VA compared to a company. The concern is that the individual VA may not be as reliable and in case they decide to quit, you’ll have no backup.
However, the great thing about working with an individual VA is that you get to teach your VA exactly how you like the work to be done. You also get to develop a relationship and to the VA you become more than just a source of payment, which increases their loyalty and dedication.
If you’re looking for a long term partnership with a VA, you’ll need to find a dedicated and reliable individual VA. If you just want someone to take those goddamned chores off your hand, look into working with a VA firm.
Where to Start Looking
For VA Firms
There are some traditional VA companies such as Brickwork, but these types of companies focus on administrative tasks. They’ll most likely not have the knowledge for the type of Internet marketing tasks that you require. Another option that you could consider is working with a small VA firm that specializes in Internet marketing, such as Burn Your To Do List.
There’s also a sea of Internet marketing VA firms that would be eager for your business on Elance. You can simply go to Elance and post a job. Then search for “virtual assistant”. You can then invite the providers that turn up to bid on your job. Alternatively, you can browse more thoroughly, open profiles, and check qualifications before you invite.
For Individual VAs
A great place to find highly qualified Internet marketing VAs is oDesk.
Unlike Elance’s multitude of VA firms, what you’ll mostly find on oDesk are unaffiliated Internet marketing individual VAs. Go ahead and post your job on oDesk. Then do a search for “virtual assistant” and start inviting candidates to your job. You can filter your search by region. For example, you can just invite candidates from North America.
Another great filtering mechanism that oDesk has is the “Tests” filter. You can choose to only view those individuals who have passed the “Basic English Skills Test”, and from what I saw, even native English speakers struggle with this test. So, a good score in this test would be a pretty good indication that the candidate is capable of communicating well in English.
To find individual VAs, you can also do a simple Google search with the following phrase “Internet marketing virtual assistant“. The results pages will contain the blogs and websites of individual VAs.
Some VA Hiring Tips
Whether you’re working with an individual VA or a company, if your point of contact quits, it sucks. To reduce the harm, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Hire more than one VA and divide up the work. That way if one VA falls, it’ll only half suck.
What you can also do is hire an Indian company for monotonous tasks such as link building, blog commenting, etc. And hire a more experienced North American VA for unstructured customer service and website maintenance tasks.
This is a good arrangement because those managed Indian VAs won’t procrastinate on the dull tasks like American VAs would. And native English speaking VAs would make great customer service representatives.
I hope you found this information helpful. Best of luck with your Internet marketing efforts!