I’ve decided to hire not one, but two virtual assistants (VA). Not because I’m angling for world domination, but because I think it’s better to put two candidates through a trial period. I’m going to assign them both analogous tasks and see what they come up with over the next month.
I’m not sure if a VA will be good for the long run, but I can see the value that they will bring me:
1. Web research – and lots of it. I’ve used a VA a few times to help with product research, as well as to build Top 10 lists. Some immediate tasks I need to off load are researching advertising prices of similar sites, as well as building a list of stores and distributors. This task is perfectly suited for VAs since they can do them mostly anywhere.
2. Moderating my forum. Once I get my site rocking and rolling in a few months, moderating the forum will (hopefully) take up a lot of someone’s time.
3. Approving comments on my blog. Probably 80% of comments can just be approved with little intervention, likely going to 90% or higher with some training. But in the few that are problematic, my VA can forward them with me.
4. Twittering (possibly). I’m debating on whether I should include this since just yesterday, I read this post in Copyblogger, since I might be kidding myself about how effective I’ll be using Twitter as a marketing tool. Anyway, if I do decide to go this route, I’ve found HootSuite, which allows me to queue up tweets and allow someone to tweet on my behalf.
5. Optimizing and formatting my blog content. I love blogging, so I’ll continue to write for this blog. However, there is some work in ensuring that it reads well, creating the links, making sure that the tags are right, assigning it to the correct category, etc. It probably adds 10% to blogging time. So if I’m blogging 5 days a week and require 1 hour to write each post, then I can shave about 30 minutes off per week by assigning this task to someone else. I can also see them helping to source content for me and aid in some researching for the blog.
6. Inputting content into the content management system (CMS) on my site. First off, for my stroller site, I’m going to need to clean-up a spreadsheet of nearly 400 products and then enter them into Joomla, the site’s content management system. Well, I’m not since I’m going to assign this to a VA. I then plan on having my VA input the content into the site’s CMS on a regular basis.
7. Responding to email requests through my site (first contact). I recently sent an email to site publisher and got an automated message that told me that I would receive an answer me within 24 hours. I thought that was a bit of overkill since it goes without saying that the site should respond to me within 24 hours. However, it did get me thinking that I shouldn’t allow myself to get bogged down by emails and it seems to be a good thing to assign to my VA. I plan on developing some standard responses to commonly asked questions and providing them to the VA to use before emails get flipped to me. I’ll also get them to own an FAQ to cut down on email as much as possible.
8. Responding to insertion orders for advertising on my web site. Once I get the ads working on the site, I’ll get my VA to load the ads into the site, quality check them and ensure that they are being removed when the ad is done.
9. Managing my eLance postings. It takes a lot of time to post jobs, review and respond. I can see a lot of value in getting my VA to filter out the junk before I see it, as well as responding to bidders with a stock email that I provide them. If anything it would make for a surreal experience having a VA in India managing bids from other providers in India for my site in Canada.
10. General admin tasks. I may ask them to put together a Powerpoint presentation or selling packages, and other admininistrative tasks.
I’m really busy these days, so there is certainly a lot that I could get a VA to do for me. If you’re using a VA yourself, I’d love to hear about your own experiences!
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