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In today’s Q&A, we are talking about our experience working with virtual assistants – or VA’s as they are commonly referred to.
We will also be sharing a few resources you can check out to start hiring your own.
Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you!
Click here to ask your question!
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Today’s question comes from Rhonda over at MultitaskingMaven.com
- Find a VA using Odesk or Elance
- Listen to Chris Ducker’s podcast New Business Podcast
- Try a service like Virtual Staff Finder
- Handy tools for communication are Google Docs, Skype, and even Google Calendar
- Make videos using Camtasia for PC or Mac
- Have a Question? Ask it here!
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
What’s up guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J, awesome to be back with you again today. This is the mini podcast where we answer your questions. We love getting questions from you guys.
That’s one of our big goals is to always to be accessible to you and to help you get those questions answered in your online business. So we are here for you guys. All you have to do is send them in.
Today’s question comes from Rhonda and her website is MultitaskingMaven.com. Don’t forget guys when you do submit a question, we are happy to read your URL on the air. We’ll always check the content and make sure it’s nothing profane or indecent, of course, but just send us your URLs and we’d be happy to share those with our audience and maybe we can get help you guys get a little traffic.
Rhonda writes:
“I am interested in learning more about hiring a virtual assistant or a VA for short. You have mentioned VA services in a few of your podcasts. I would love to hear a podcast about your VA experience. Where did you find your virtual assistants and how do you communicate with them?”
We don’t want to go into a whole podcast about this, Rhonda, but we thought we’d take a few minutes here to kind of let you know about our virtual assistant experience. It has been a very good one so far. We were very lucky early on. We found some great virtual assistants that completed the task that we needed them.
I used oDesk to find my first virtual assistant and actually my best virtual assistant. oDesk is kind of a marketplace where you can find people that are freelancers online. There’s another one called Elance.com. Those are two great places to find virtual assistants. My virtual assistant, my primary one lives in Bangladesh and he handles all of the backend stuff – shopping carts, building web pages. He helps me organize all of my memberships sites and he just does al lot of that busy work that I do not have time to do. He helps me filter spam comments and all those things.
The rates are extremely affordable when you’re hiring someone from like the Bangladesh or the Philippines or somewhere like that, $2, $3, $3 an hour over there is really good money. He lives very comfortably. I pay him probably, I think he’s up to between $3 and $4 an hour right now and he does about 20 hours a week of work for me, but that’s really good money for him where he lives and the economy is just the way they work. He does a good job and it’s a way to get very inexpensive help very quickly.
Another great place, now oDesk is kind of a crapshoot. We’ve also hired people on oDesk that have not been very good. So it’s kind of you’re rolling the dice a little bit when you’re trying these websites. You really got to do your due diligence, interview your VAs, check on all of their references, and make sure you know their background.
A better way to do it probably is to go to a service like from Chris Ducker. Chris Ducker over at ChrisDucker.com, he runs a podcast called the New Business Podcast where he talks a lot about internet marketing but his main business is he has this huge company in the Philippines that will find you a virtual assistant. It’s called Virtual Staff Finder, what is it, Jocelyn?
JOCELYN: VirtualStaffFinder.com.
SHANE: Yeah, VirtualStaffFinder.com. You can go there and hire them as a service and they will weed out the bad apples and they will find you two or three candidates that you can interview for your job. I would highly recommend after doing it the hard way on oDesk and getting those bad VAs, I would highly recommend using a service like Chris Ducker’s Virtual Staff Finder because it’s going to help you save time, save money, and save effort trying to train people and then all of a sudden they disappear on you and they don’t work out. He is going to help you find a really quality overseas virtual assistant. But that is not the only way you can get a virtual assistant. Jocelyn and I actually also hire virtual assistants here in the United States.
JOCELYN: And I think it just really depends on the types of tasks that you want your virtual assistants to do. For me, I want them to do things like customer service and sending out some of the physical products that I have, and some sort of specialty tasks that I don’t really either trust overseas or that are not very feasible to do overseas like sending out my physical product. I mean, it’s not cost effective for me to send the product to them and have them ship it out. That doesn’t even make sense.
I actually have several, I have two actually, assistants in the United States right now. For me, it’s really important to have them in the same time zone as people who are sending questions in like for customer service. I don’t want them getting emails back like 3 o’clock in the morning. I want them to get real time help basically. We don’t answer emails immediately but I want them to get more real time help than they would get from someone overseas.
Also, it’s really important to me in my Elementary Librarian product to have a native English speaker. I don’t want any type of broken correspondence in my customer service and there are some international VAs out there who do a fantastic job in speaking English but for me, it’s better just to know for sure that I have a fluent English speaker.
It is a lot more expensive to hire virtual assistants in the United States. I pay mine anywhere from $12/transaction to $25/hour and that’s for some very specialty projects that I do. For me, it’s worth it because I can tell my virtual assistants what to do and they get it right the first time. I don’t have to go back and look over their shoulder and make sure they are doing things or constantly check their work. The people that I have hired are topnotch and I know that I will have no problem getting them to do the things I’ve asked them to do.
SHANE: That’s not to say that the people overseas are not topnotch. I would say that our main virtual assistant overseas is in Bangladesh and he may be one of the best workers and the most detail oriented person that I have ever met in my life, but it’s just a difference – now, he does not speak English very good.
You talked about communication. I only communicate with him in text and on type because he can read English way better than he can speak English. So that’s how we communicate. We use Skype, we use Google Documents and things like that to kind of coordinate. One thing that we do to communicate with all of our virtual assistants is we share a Google calendar with them. That way, we can add tasks to their calendar. It will show up for them in their own time zone, their real time, and they can see that and that’s how we kind of assign tasks.
We just use Google Calendar, Google Documents, email, and maybe Skype to communicate with our people but you can get really good virtual assistants depending on the task overseas and really good virtual assistants in America depending on the task. You’ve really got to evaluate your needs.
What are you going to want them to do? Are they just deleting comments? Are they answering emails that they have to give detailed answers to? You might need an American. Are they just copying, pasting tweets onto your Twitter account for you so you can tweet 24 hours a day? That’s something that a VA overseas could do. Are they handling the backend of your site? That might be something an overseas person can do but depending on the task, you might need an American to do that. So really, you just have to evaluate your needs and figure out what kind of virtual assistant is best for you and then you’ll be able to figure out where you want to hire your virtual assistants from.
JOCELYN: One big tip that we use no matter if your virtual assistant is overseas or in the United States, it’s really important that you make videos, step by step videos for every process that you want them to do. The videos are great because they can rewatch them over and over again. They can see exactly what you do and how to do it. When we have done that, we’ve found really great success even with our overseas people. We’ve had pretty much no problems giving them to do what exactly we want them to do.
SHANE: And we didn’t have to sit there with them for hours and hours and train them. We just recorded the task, we gave it to them, they watched it as many times that they needed to get it finished and then they moved on and got it. So using videos is a great tip for training your VAs. If you want to communicate with them, you don’t need fancy software. You can just use Google Docs, Skype, and maybe a Google Calendar.
To really get down to what you need, you probably need to pick up the book “Virtual Freedom” by Chris Ducker, the guy we talked about earlier who owns Virtual Staff Finder. He’s got a book all about virtual assistants. We read it twice before we hired our first virtual assistant to make sure that we knew exactly what we needed to do and it will really lay it out step by step how to hire virtual assistants, how to pick the right virtual assistant, and get that process done successfully.
JOCELYN: All right, if you need some information about how we record, we use the Camtasia program to do a screen capture recording when we’re recording for our VA. We’ll put a link to that in today’s show notes for QA29. So just go to FlippedLifestyle.com/QA29. All right, we hope that that answers your question about virtual assistants, Rhonda, and we hope that you have great luck finding one that works out for you.
SHANE: All right, guys, until next time. We will catch you on the flipside. Thanks for all your questions. Keep sending them in and we will keep answering them for you. See you later, bye.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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Jason Lampel says
Great info, I may have to look into Elance one of these days.
FYI your second-to-last link is broken in the show notes is broken (looks like you have a space in front of the first ‘f’). But since it links to THIS page, you probably don’t need a link anyway. 🙂