Hired a Virtual Assistant - How do I best utilize his talents?

I'm also interested in this. So far I've pushed some misc tasks off to a VA but I can't figure out how to use a full time VA.

This may sound a bit harsh and if so, I apologize, but my first suggestion would be to fire whatever VA you hired and hire one experienced in traffic generation so you don't have to "teach" them what you need done. There are many types of VA's out there in addition to the standard administrative ones.

A VA experienced in that field of work will not only be able to get the work done that you need, but may also be able to advise you on the best course of action to take on improving your website/revenue.

If you are hiring a VA and paying to teach them what to do, you could have just done a lot of the groundwork yourself and saved yourself the money.

In regards to your question about improving your adsense revenue, a suggestion that immediately popped into mind when viewing your site is to change the location and types of your adsense blocks. There are various types of adsense blocks and places to stick them which gravitate more to the reader, thus making them more likely to be clicked on. Google Adsense has some good information about this, and you could also look up website visitor heat maps to get a good idea of where you can place them.

Add pictures, life, color.. it's currently a lot of text and nothing that a normal high traffic blog has. There's no flavor to it other than bland at the moment.

Get them to do some social profiles management, setup alerts for when people talk about finance and add them. Comment on other blogs that mention personal finance. Get some interaction and post interesting topics or questions that lure people off the social sites onto your posts....from there get them to comment and interact.


Personally, I have my assistant do article posting, linkwheels, rss submissions, backlink, and jv relations/ad swaps.

Those are great components of a traffic plan, do them all. You should probably study this forum for a few hours, until you feel that you can develop an action plan for traffic generation. It's all here in the forums, waiting for you.

You definitely need to study basic SEO techniques, to get your pages ranked high in Google.

For example, this page;
Personal Finance Student. Manage your money, better.
The title is "Personal Finance Student. Manage your money, better."
The description meta tag is "Teaching you to better handle your money and spend it in a smart way only on the things you need. Start reading, this information will change your life."

Those two tags are not working, not helping you bring traffic. You need your keyword to be in the title and description. You need this for every page. This is just one very basic example.

Give attention to SEO, it will pay off.

My suggestion is to study more, become proficient more before you hire unskilled/inexperienced help, or alternatively hire the skilled help so you do not need to learn it all.

I am a VA and my suggestion would be to hire someone who has the traffic generation experience all ready. What works for one site may not work for another and you need to have someone who can think outside of the box and with experience comes creativity.

There is so many different things you can do to drive traffic. If you spend the time researching, learning and then teaching you are spending more money because now you have used your time. Time that could be saved continuing on to other things for your business to make money.

Agreeing with a couple of others. If you're not quite an expert yet, or at least know enough to know exactly what you need them to do to help you further your ventures, you should hire someone already experienced. Someone's got to have experience, either you or them or it can turn into a lot of wasted time and money.

Experts hire VAs to do exactly what they teach them to do (some also hire experienced VAs but these ppl will be more successful with non-experienced VAs). Non-experts hire VAs to help them do what needs to be done and suggest things, teach them a bit, etc.

When I first started out years ago, I went to work for a very successful IMer, she taught me everything and I was smart enough and savvy enough to 'get it' fast so we turned out a great team. If she didn't know what she was doing well enough to teach me exactly what she wanted done, why, etc. I wouldn't have been much good to her.

Now "I" hire contractors to work for my link building and social marketing teams and "I" teach them. If I didn't know what I was doing and they didn't either, then it'd be a real disaster.

If you don't know what to do, well I suggest before hiring someone ask some free lancers of outsourcing company what are the best technique they can provide to you to promote your site.

By doing this you will know what to expect while the job is going on...

Miles, I'd suggest dropping your VA for now, until you gain more experience in IM. The key here is you really need to know what to do to your site to improve it, so that you can instruct your VA accordingly. Otherwise, it'll be like the blind leading the blind. Don't expect the VA to automatically know what to do with your scenario, he or she is only an employee and needs explicit instructions from you. With that said, if you know someone close to you who has knowledge about internet marketing and SEO that you can trust, you might want to seek advice on how to spruce up your site the right way, and then instruct your VA accordingly.

This is what I'd do in this situation:

1) Clean up my business plan by exchanging ideas with a "good" business planner knowledgeable and experienced in online businesses.

2) Clean up my online and search engine marketing plans by talking to a "good" SEO/SEM/online marketing planner with experience and knowledge in this industry.

3) Choose which information to learn based on those business and marketing plans.

4) Learn effective outsourcing techniques by talking to a "good" outsourcing consultant and hire an assistant through this person's manpower sourcing/recruitment services.

5) Ask my assistant to carefully study my business and marketing plans.

6) Ask my assistant to carefully study the same information I chose to study (number 3).

7) Exchange ideas with my assistant to finalize things.

8) Track/monitor the overall results of our campaigns and performance.

9) Arrange regular brainstorming sessions with my assistant to correct issues and further optimize working systems.

10) If I ever need to hire more assistants, I'll ask my first assistant to go with them through the same steps we took.

11) If I ever think of investing in another venture, I'll just take the same steps which worked for my first venture.