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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Sarah feel comfortable trusting her virtual assistants with usernames and password for different accounts they’ll need access to.
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Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J.
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.
SHANE: What’s going on guys, welcome back to today’s Q&A with S&J. You probably noticed immediately that the audio was a little funky on this episode of the podcast and that is because we are using the internal microphone on my MacBook Pro. We are on the road, we are in a hotel room right now, we are traveling to the Philippines to see Chris Ducker and go to his Tropical Think Tank event. We did not bring our microphones. We do have digital recorders but we do not have that out right now and we had some extra time so we thought that we would go ahead and record a few Q&As to make sure we could keep rolling out the content while we are on the road.
JOCELYN: We’re actually in a hotel room and I’m sure our neighbors are not too thrilled about this podcast recording but –
SHANE: It’s 1:00 AM by the way where we are recording this.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we’re trying to flip our schedule little bit because we are going to the Philippines and it is a 12-hour time difference from us. So, we are staying up all night, or attempting to and recording some Q&A podcast for you guys.
SHANE: I thought we can sleep on the airplane on the way there. So, let’s jump into today’s question; today’s question comes in from Sarah and she writes, “I am an attorney working full-time in my own practice and trying to build up my website where I plan on selling digital products to other attorneys. I utilize sites like Fiverr and Elance.com to outsource certain tasks. But I’m a little leery of hiring someone from one of those sites to help me with my website issues. If I provide a freelancer with my username and passwords, so that they can do whatever they want with them, they will also have access to my financial information that I have stored on those accounts. So long story short, what do you do in situations like this? Do you have any recommendations for outsourcing these kinds of projects involving giving someone else either access to your private or financial information, or your username and passwords on WordPress?”
JOCELYN: All right Sarah, this is a good question and one that has concerned me as well. But there are ways to give people your information without giving up all of your password information, or your financial information. The first thing you need to do when you are in online business is definitely separate your business and personal financial accounts. That way, in case something does happen, you don’t have to worry about all of your personal money being wiped out.
SHANE: And you can do this too by setting up just two separate bank accounts or two separate PayPal accounts. Anything like that but what you do is basically anything that anyone would have access to, don’t ever keep a lot of money in that. We have accounts where we immediately have money moved every day whenever there’s sales made. That way, if someone were to ever get a hold of that information, there’s probably only a couple of thousand bucks or a few hundred dollars in that account anyway and everything else is moved by us to an account where they cannot access it so easily.
JOCELYN: And you also probably will need to set up a LastPass account or something similar. This is free and anyone who works with you online can also download LastPass. I love LastPass because you can just share passwords with people who do jobs for you but they don’t actually see the characters of the password. So to them, it just appears as stars and that way, if you ever need to cut them off from your account, you just stop sharing that password with them. It just keeps things a lot safer because if you’re like us, I mean, it’s hard to remember like 78 passwords and so LastPass really helps to be able to keep all that in one location and share it with people who need it without actually giving them the details of the password. So that’s something that I recommend for all of our listeners to download right away if you haven’t done that yet.
SHANE: And if you want to get LastPass, you go over to Lastpass.com; but there’s another simple solution you can do for minor projects like if you have somebody just writing for your website, or you have somebody just doing a few things in there that don’t require overall admin access, you don’t have to give them your username and password. You can go into the dashboard on WordPress, you can create a username and password for them and you can limit or restrict their permissions. Like most people that sign up for your website, like if you have anything where people can create a username or password, they become subscribers where all they can do is read but there’s all kind of different levels on there. There’s admin, which is what you are; you can do anything you want and change anything at any time but there’s also lower level access like editors and authors where people can come on, write content and do simple things like that and you don’t have to give them complete access to everything on your website. So, even without LastPass, there’s ways to give freelancers access to certain things. I have a VA that does nothing but manipulate post pages content and I don’t have to make him an admin. He can just be like an editor or an author and he can go in and change things, upload pictures, do whatever for me. That way, he can create blog posts but he cannot go in and change things like the way the dashboard looks or my color scheme or break anything or something like that.
JOCELYN: The bottom-line is, don’t be so concerned about doing this. We’ve worked with a lot of different virtual assistants and we’ve never had any trouble. I mean, that’s not to say that it can’t happen but it probably won’t. So try not to be too excited or nervous about that; just take those small precautions that we talked about earlier and go ahead and work with a virtual assistant. It’ll make your life a lot better.
SHANE: And just make sure that you are vetting your virtual assistants. Treat it like you are hiring a real employee; interview them, talk to them, look at their work history. Fiverr, oDesk, Elance, they all have massive history files on virtual assistants with reviews. You can see who they have worked with, you can see all the five-star reviews or whatever they have. Make sure that you properly vet the people you work with and you probably will not have any problems. But you are going to have to trust people online. It is very scary; right now, we are working with someone who is setting up Infusionsoft on backend and they pretty much have access – what, to everything we have pretty much, right?
JOCELYN: Mm-hmm.
SHANE: So we’ve given that to them and we trust them and we’re going to – you got to roll the dice a little bit if you are going to make it online and this is one of those moments where you just got to kind of let go.
JOCELYN: All right Sarah, thank you for your question and good luck to you as you are hiring a virtual assistant to help you out with this project.
SHANE: Until next time guys, get out there and take action and flip your life. We’ll see you later.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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Sam says
Thank you so much for sharing such a wonderful article with us regarding virtual assistant.Actually now I came to know the real value of a virtual personal assistant.I am planning to outsource many of my works especially my business related works to my virtual assistant and I hope it is going to help me in future.