What are VA's good for now?

Riza, you're doing your outsourcing wrong, which is why you can't find quality work (writing or whatever).

You don't want to pay someone a monthly salary of 300 bucks. In fact, you don't want to lock in someone at full time/part time unless you have the systemized structures in place, the profitability and the work needed to hire someone full time/part time.

I *highly* recommend elance/odesk for these reasons:

1. You can hire on an hourly "as needed" basis. This means you can easily scale up or down as your work requires.

2. Odesk/elance has software that takes screenshots of their work and bills you the hours. You can then see what they are doing - ensuring quality. You can then reject it if it's bad.

3. Make damn sure that you are specific in what you want/need.

I see people doing these kinds of job postings:

"I want a VA who can write. Will pay 3/hour."

That doesn't cut it at all...

"I want a writer who is knowledgeable about weight loss, diet and exercise. They need to either have experience writing about the topic. If possible, I need to see examples of past work.

I can pay 15/hour. Work is part time, as needed. Some weeks you will get a lot of jobs from me, some weeks you may not get any work."

Note: there is more to the job description than that, but that is an example of what I'm talking about.

4. Slow to hire, fast to fire. Too many people are just quick to let the first schmoe do the work for them.

I don't. It takes a LOT of convincing before I would consider anyone able to work for me.

5. Hire writers to write, design people for designing, etc. etc. Basically, don't hire one person for everything. Every big tasks needs multiple specialized people.

This will lower costs, increase efficiency as well as effectiveness.

6. Pay what they are worth.

Yes, 15 bucks an hour may seem like a lot of money - but if you only need 5 blogs and a review post about a certain course or product a month, that could only work out to 50 or 100 bucks and someone else did your writing.

You've not locked yourself into a full time/part time person without need.


Finally, yes, I've done all those things above and I have a full staff. I have:

1. A writer. (I pay her 30/hour - she's THAT good)
2. Full customer support.
3. A web guy who builds my sites.
4. 2 graphic design guys.

And I'm getting ready to hire a general VA to help keep me organized.

My monthly bill is about 300 bucks for outsourcing, because I do all the things I mention above, and I've found all the help I need from elance/odesk.

Does that help?

Rob

thanks rob, good points.

My situation is a little difficult in that i've had these ppl working for me for a couple of years now so i really dont want to let them go, just becasue i'd feel bad more than anything.

When they started working with me there were loads of easy seo tasks that a semi skilled person could do, (profile links, web.2.0, managing blog network accounts etc), but i've found it progressively harder to find useful things for them to do.

Now i feel bad about having to let them go because i cant find anything easy enough for them to do. I guess thats the nature of the game and need to stremaline though!

I've found that it is often more beneficial to hire a number of people for specific tasks rather than keeping a full-time virtual assistant. You're likely to get much better quality work as well as only pay for what you get if you hire on a job-to-job basis.

This does not mean that you do not develop long term relations with the people who do your jobs, but you do not have the obligation of paying them when you don't get work done. Also, you can find some decent specialists for all your different tasks. Outsourcing is only useful if you do it right!


Yasir

I agree with riza..I have a VA who is reliable and yet can't find enough work for him to do with his current skills, I have changed the nature of my business so ended up paying him for nothing since it's a monthly deal. I have to let him go soon and I don't feel good about that.

I disagree with some of these comments.

I have a full time VA from the Phillipines (not through ReplaceMyself) and I don't have any trouble keeping him busy.

Some of the things I use him for include
- managing my email (setting up swaps and solo ads)
- finding and recruiting JV's for existing and new products
- managing my viral list building accounts
- finding, joining, submitting gifts and special offers and generally managing my JV Giveaway event business
- Creating new posts on my wordpress sites
- Managing my help desk
- Some blog and forum commenting - not this one:-)
- Video submissions
- Powerpoint submissions
- Article (yes I still do some article marketing) submission
- Managing and reporting from my Google Analytics accounts

I write all the content but get my VA to do the boring repetitive day to day work - the stuff I hate doing!

It has taken months to get to this level and I have spent a lot of time training him. This is the key. I use Jing to show him things, MP3 and email plus I have developed a set of procedures that he can refer to as needed. These procedures start with the "aim" of the task, then how it will be measured then step by step instructions.

If anyone would like a copy of one of my procedures to use as a template - please PM me. Happy to supply as a freebie

I honestly don't know how I would survive without my VA and he costs me $2 per hour on a full time basis and he is very happy. I also do pay bonus's when he does something over and above what I expect.

Good luck and long live the VA!

It is always good to hear both side of the story. I totally agree if you train your VAs well, they can be very productive.

I also recommend hiring VAs full time, then they can focus on "your" business alone and not always trying to find higher paid jobs.

Be kind to you VAs, OK? They live in third world country and life can be tough for them.

Give them bonus from time to time if they do a good job.

What I do is best of the both worlds.

I always have scheduled some mechanised work for a VA that they have to do every day. If they get stuck in one one (or more) of the more complicated work the VA can always go back to the "pool" of less complicated daily routined work.

This way gives the advantage of the VA being productive also in case the VA gets stuck in a problem or more.

Often if I am busy and head in to some problem I get a VA to research the problem and come up with a solution. Sometimes the solution is workable and sometimes it needs to be refined but I save a lot of my own time getting forward faster.

What can be a challenge in this is to find the right VA. It is obvious if you hire a specialist you will find challenges if giving this VA task outside the VA's competences. If you hire a broader VA some tasks will take longer but you can expect the VA to take a wider range of tasks.

Another thing is (as mentioned in another post) management or leadership skills. You need to communicate clearly and be very precise when explaining a task and setting goals. If you forget to really work on this there will be 2 frustrated people.

All this sounds very obvious but people tend to forget the simple things when working with VA's. Remember they are human and not machines.

All in all you are the manager they are carrying out your decisions. So if things are not working effectively you might want to look in front of the keyboard instead of behind the monitor of your laptop.

I hope I didn’t offend anyone.

I am considering hiring a VA on a monthly basis and have been wondering this myself. I am going to set up video training for them of exactly what is required. I think this is the easiest and most efficient way to get a VA to do as you require.

USing Elance is good to find a great stream of VA community

cheers

I use VA's for:

Researching
Content Creation
Mass Forum Postings
Moderating Blogs and Forums
Graphic Designing
SEO

Interesting post. Unfortunately, it appears as though the VA no longer works for the OP, the OP wants to work for the VA instead (and pay to do it!).

It's definitely time to rethink your outsourcing strategy and put the right priorities in place.

When I run out of thinks for them to do I usually have them do some yahoo answers for me, or some handmade blog comments for a few of my sites.

1. Create accounts in the forums of the niche I am doing SEO for and try to make that account sound and look reputable so it can drive people to the site organically.

2. Create web 2.0 blogs and post for them.

3. Do blog comments.

I am going to hire a full time VA basically for writing articles. I think he will need lots of training since he writes usually for tech stuff. He has a blog that is 12 years old.


I was wondering what is the successful procedure for Managing username/passwords for the accounts in the niche forums. Do u make you own account and tell the password to them. I might be becoming more cautious here since once you let go off your VA he can do some harm. I read someone on this forum that the guy fired his SEO guy and he or she did negative SEO for him.