My experience in trying to hire a VA

There are many people that talk about using VAs in your business to grow it. You might ask why should you hire someone to do what you can do yourself. The simple answer is that hiring a VA allows you to take advantage of the differences in economic positions in different countries to drive down your expenses, increase your free time and allow more to be created. Everybody complains about not having enough time in their life. A VA allows you to buy time.

A person in India might make on average $100/month or in Philippines it might be $75/month or in US it might be $2,500/month. You can pay someone in a foreign country pennies on the dollars to do the same thing you would have done by hiring a local worker. By reducing your cost you can accomplish much more.

I have recently gone through the process of trying to hire one or more VAs for my business. Here is a compilation of my experiences.

oDesk
I first started looking for writers to provide content for my multiple websites on oDesk. The rates that you are quoted are usually much lower than on other websites. I started off on a project to write content and hired 5 writers. Once writer produced content that was unusable. One writer produced above average content that required less than 5 minutes of my time to correct spelling mistakes and grammar issues. The other 3 writers never produced anything.

The next project that I posted I hired 3 writers. I had read many recommendations that you should hire writers from the phillipines instead of India since their English is better. One was the writer from 1st project that did ok work and two new writers from the phillipines. The repeat writer did produce above average work again but she missed the deadline by 3 days. The other 2 writers produced content on time but were average or slightly below average.

When I posted my jobs on oDesk I got many many applications. Most of these were cookie cutter copy/paste responses. Most of them started with "Dear Sir, I write good content so hire me". If you are using oDesk I recommend that you post something like in your application put the words 'yellow lamp' in the subject line to show that you have read my job posting completely and can follow directions. Anyone that doesn't do this gets rejected.

Odesk Conclusion: I think you can get very low cost work on oDesk but it will not be above average.

OnlineJobs.ph
This website is promoted heavily by John Jonas of replacemyself fame. There are many workers in the philippines that register with this website. You can read their profile to get their experience, education and work history. If you are interested in hiring them then you can reach out to them and propose a project. You also have the option like oDesk to post a job and let people respond to your post.

I never posted a job. Instead I did send emails to 9 different writers that I liked based on their profile. I sent a total of 4 different emails to these 9 writers. Only one responded. I asked him to write a sample 500 word article that I would pay $10. He never completed the assignment.

onlineJobs.ph Conclusion: I had zero success with this website. They charge $49/mth to be able to email contractors and to post jobs. Waste of money in my opinion.

VirtualStaffFinder.com
I follow Pat Flynn and Corbett Barr on a regular basis. Both of these guys have used virtualstafffinder.com so I decided to try them out. Virtual Staff Finder is basically a head hunter for VAs. They do not have VAs as employees that you can hire but instead they will present you with 3 VAs that they have screened for you to interview that you can hire yourself. They charge a fee of $395 to find you 3 VAs that meet your job requirements that they get from a form that you fill out. You pick the one you want and hire them and then virtual staff finder is out of the picture. If things go south with your VA you better hope that it is in the 1st 14 days because that is how long is their warranty for your satisfaction.

I paid fee, filled out form and submitted it. I got response that they were working on my project and would have list of 3 VAs within 14 business days. After a week of not hearing anything I emailed asking status. I was told they were working on my job and would have list of VAs by the following Friday. Friday came and went and no response. Saturday afternoon I sent them an email asking for a refund. On monday I get an email stating that they were wrong when they said the deadline was Friday and the new deadline was actually today and 5 minutes later I got list of 3 VAs. I interview them via Skype. I asked all 3 to write a sample 500 word article that I would pay $10 to get measure of their writing skills. Only 1 completed assignment. I contacted the other 2 to check status. One responded 3 days after deadline and said they did not submit because they didnt think I would not accept it with it being late.

I sent another email to virtual staff finder asking for a refund again. They said they did not offer refund and they could within another 14 business days provide me with another 3 VAs to interview. If I didn't hire one of the 3 new ones they would keep my money and I would get nothing. I got pissed and filed complaint with paypal asking for a refund and emailed Chris Ducker directly who started the business. Within 30 minutes I got a full refund of my money.

VirtualStaffFinder.com Conclusion: My experience with virtual staff finder were a failure. You are paying a fee to a headhunter to hire someone that may or may not be reliable.

eLance.com
I posted a job on here for people to write 5 x 500 word articles using 5 different keywords related to the exact same product. I got 23 applicants for job with price ranging from $20 to $175 for all 5 articles. I actually hired 9 different applicants for this job and had them write 5x500 word articles using different keyword to promote products for the many different websites that I have with no 2 writers writing on the same product. From the 9 writers, 1 writer failed to complete job and was dropped. 7 writers completed the work anywhere from 3 to 7 days later. The rates I paid these 7 writers were $21.92, $27.40, $27.40, $30, $30, $40, $45. Oddly enough the last writer got around to accepting the offer 9 days after it was awarded. I emailed and said not interested since it was so late and filed dispute to cancel job. They completed articles within 5 hours and then filed a dispute against me to pay them. I responded to dispute and said I didn't want work since of the time delay in responding. The job was for $20 and what elance did was refund me $20 and they credited writer $20 themselves so we could part ways.

Of the 8 writers that completed project I rejected the lady that was 9 days late due to professionalist. Of the remaining 7 I had 1 rated 5 stars, 2 rated 4.5 stars and 2 rated 4 stars. There was 1 that I would not use again because they were the $45 and I had others that could do equivalent work at half the price. The last writer was rated 3.8 stars that I could use if the others were busy.

elance conclusion: I have had the most success with this site. I have 5-6 writers that I can email to check on their availability and then have them write content for my websites. I have been using this for a month now and about to start on my 2nd month. I post up a job just for these writers and a week later I get content back. I spend the following week publishing these to my different websites and add pics, videos and affiliate links. I schedule them to post every 3 days so my websites get 10 new posts each month.

Hiring a VA is a great way to dramatically increase your online income. In 2012 I spent 9 months writing 43 articles about the products offered by one company that I am an affiliate. My monthly comissions during this 9 month period grew from $30/month to over $1,500/month. My goal in 2013 is to use VAs to write content each and every month for 3 new companies that I have signed up for as an affiliate. My plan is to rinse and repeat what I have done with my initial company that I signed up as an affiliate. My end of 2013 I want to have a minimum of 3 new affiliate programs producing at least $1k/month in commissions. I will be able to accomplish this using VAs.

VAs can be used for a wide range of services like producing content, backlinks, seo, building websites, transcribing, creating graphics etc. I have only used VAs to write content. Look at your online business and see what you do on a daily basis and then see about outsourcing that activity to a VA.