Virtual Buzz Assistant

oDesk is a great outsourcing method to get work done.

I have recommended them for years.

I have had mostly bad results with people I have tried to outsource work to from craigslist and other places, but I have never had a bad experience with oDesk.

Do not get me wrong, I am careful about hiring.  I check references.  I do smaller projects and then expand on them.  I do not assume someone is good until I try it out.

But I have gotten great results with this marketplace of virtual assistants, programmers and graphic designers.

I have one person working for me via oDesk that has been with me almost two years.

I have worked with people in Russia, Philippines, India, Pakistan and Romania to get programming and virtual assistant stuff done and I have always gotten good, and sometimes great, results.

You should just try it.  Even if you are a virtual assistant – go try building a team there because you will be able to pass on more value to your clients.

Visit www.odesk.com and check out the great tools and members they have.

Here are just a few of the virtual assistant companies making the news today. 

Virtual assistants, no matter where you find them can really help your business grow.

Are you thinking about how to hire a virtual assistant? You should since they can make your business much more profitable.

They can really help you with your Internet Marketing. It is important to grow your business and with a little work you can find a cheap virtual assistant if you are willing to do some training and coaching.

This article is not a comprehensive guide, yet it will be at minimum a great place to start learning about it.

Here are the basics for hiring a virtual assistant.

The first step you need to decide is if you want to hire a virtual assistant oversees or in the US. This will be the core of all other things you do. The virtual assistant costs and your expectations should be very different if you are hiring a virtual assistant philippines worker or a certified virtual assistant in the US with marketing training.

The next thing that you should do is decide on the marketing activities they are going to be doing for you. It is going to be an important element to your training. The use of this in conjunction with the 1st item should help you get much faster results.

Keep in mind that there are some road blocks you most likely will find challenging the more advanced you become. For example, you may try several people and find that none of them work well for you. That can slow you down. However, don’t let the issue stop you. It can work but often you get better at hiring virtual assitants, training them and working with them over time.

The third thing is all about the long term relationship you build. Missing this most likely will have a negative effect on your ability to be profitable.  If you need to keep replacing people and training people you  may never get to the point of growing your business.

If you want to be sure about it, you have to start to learn different aspects of the topic. Consider visiting some of the vendors you see in the side bar of this post because they offer training,  virtual assistant outsourcing and even virtual assistant business plans to help you make more money with your virtual worker faster.

Need Solid Ideas for a Home-based Business?

Question:

Source: Yahoo! Answers

Just in case you are not able to make your new year goals, we have assembled a list of possible resolutions for virtual assistants to choose from.

1. Follow up with clients more
2. Document things better
3. Give 111%
4. Insist on clear objectives before beginning a task
5. Meet someone new every day
6. Speak at 3 local business events
7. Network with new people
8. Write 250 blog posts for my virtual assistant blog
9. Increase my billing rate
10. Become an expert in 3 new skills I can offer
11. Have a great attitude
12. Add 5 new products to my income stream that I can sell via the web.
13. Get testimonials and publish them online
14. Dominate search engines for my chosen keywords
15. Make two new friends that have nothing to do with my business
16. Increase my income by ____%
17. Read one business book per month
18. Do 2 important tasks every day before I start chatting on twitter.
19. Go on a trip to someplace I have not been
20. Create a process I follow that generates leads for me.

Is your business blog failing?  A virtual assistant can help your business blog be a big success.

Request a Blog Assistant Here

Blogging has some very tricky elements.  People fall in love with the idea but they fall short on execution.  Here is why.

Business blogs do not have as much personality.

Business blogs do not connect well with the audience.

Business blogs are often not updated enough.

Business blogs are too much about the business and not enough about what people care about.

—-  Enter the Virtual Assistant —-

If you hire a virtual assistant to help you with your business blog, you are making a marketing decision – not falling in love with the free blog idea.  Because it is a marketing decision, you are going to think about the results you want and how to achieve them.

Are you writing a business blog for SEO?  For relationships?  To keep clients up to date?

Your virtual assistant will have a clear set of tasks and clear outcomes they need to meet.  They can help you with a publication schedule, with proof reading your blog posts, with research for blog topics and with the actual posting, including doing search engine optimization on your post.

They can also get out there and promote the thing.

If you find your business blog is dying on the vine, you need to get a virtual assistant to water it, prune it, care for it and show it some love.  Then you will have a successful business blog.

On this Virtual Assistant Blog I argue that you cannot be successful as a general virtual assistant.  We help people become much more targeted in their skill set and become Virtual Marketing Assistants – or Virtual Buzz Assistants, as we call them.

But even that is rather broad.

You can specialize in just one expertise and be very effective, and very valuable to your clients.

For example, what about becoming a Virtual Affiliate Manager?

Affiliate programs are easy to set up, but not easy to make successful.  You have to create all the affiliate tools, interact with the affiliates and keep motivating them.  You are a marketing expert, sales coach and community manager all in one.

The upside of having a dedicated virual affiliate manager is that they will be responsible for many activities that will directly impact a client’s online income.

If you want to make good money from home as a virtual assistant, think about specializing in being an affiliate manager and it will only take a few clients to keep you busy full time.  And they will not dare part with your services if you are getting results.

Virtual Assistants can help clients set up and maintain free blogs.  My two favorite places to set up free blogs are blogger.com and wordpress.com.

Do not get me wrong – everyone should have a hosted blog on their own domain.  This is not a free blog, but it is not expensive and it can generate great marketing results.

The reason to also set up some free blogs is that they can help someone in many ways.

• Free blogs will help you lock up more search engine slots.
• Free blogs can help you with linking to important resources.
• Free blogs get indexed very fast.

When I post something that I want to drive traffic to on a blog, such as this post, I would also go out to some of my free blogs and write summaries (just a few unique sentences) and include a link with good anchor text in it linking to this blog post.  For example, I would use free blogs as the anchor text to this article.

The reason this is a perfect job for a Virtual Assistant is because it does have long term value, is often glossed over by time-strapped clients and because it is not something that takes a great deal of Internet Marketing Training to do.

Once the free blogs age some, they have high value and will help your posts rank higher for their keywords.

Virtual Assistants need to know how to do this and to understand the benefit, so they can convey to the client exactly why they are paying for this service.

How can Virtual Assistants help you grow your databases?

…and why am I saying databases?  Well, lists is too general.  For example, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) is much more than a list.  It is losts of lists with different percentages and categories.

So what can a Virtual Assistant do to grow your databases?

1. Design Squeeze pages – webpages that convince people to add their information, usually in exchange for a free white paper or eBook.
2. Design an auto-responder – much list a squeeze page, an auto-responder is where people sign up to get a series of emails.
3. Contests – A Virtual Assistant can help you design and promote a contest to get all kinds of traffic and information from people.
4. CRM management – have a virtual assistant manage your CRM – including, follow ups, prorogation and cleaning.
5. Data Entry – Simple data entry can be a great way to get value from your virtual assistant.
6. Followup call – Do you have some information about your database of customers but need more?  Have a virtual assistant do a follow-up phone call to collect more information.

I am sure there are more creative ways to use a virtual assistant to help you manage your databases of information about customers, contacts and leads.  There are just some ideas to get you thinking.

Working successfully with any Virtual Assistant, Virtual Buzz Assistant or otherwise, comes down to making your requests crystal clear.  If you are one of those entrepreneurs who thinks it is someone else’s problem to figure out what you mean, that is fine as long as you are OK with not getting what you want.

Here are 10 things you want to get confirmed at both ends before doing a task with a virtual assistant.

1. Expected time it will take for the virtual assistant to do the task.
2. Maximum time the virtual assistant can use on the task.
3. The rate it will run to do the task.
4. The exact outcome you expect the virtual assistant to achieve.  (What does the deliverable look like)
5. Who will be doing your task?  Is it the virtual assistant or an intern?
6. When will the task be completed?
7. What questions does the virtual assistant have before starting – make them repeat the project back to you in their own words.
8. How do they complete the task, step by step.
9. Are there any unexpected things the virtual assistant may encounter and how do they deal with them?
10. Billing and payment details – when will you get the virtual assistant invoice and what are the terms?  Do you need to pay a portion in advance?

This seems like a lot of stuff for one task, but most of it will be standard if you keep working with the same virtual assistant long term.  If the tasks are something you request frequently from multiple virtual assistants, consider using camtasia or another screen capture software to demonstrate how to do the task.  Then you can host it on Amazon S3 for pennies per month and send people to the video whenever there is a question on how to do something.

Crystal Clear Projects that are well thought out and defined rarely let you down.