I’ve come to the realization that I waste WAY too much time on things like:

• Checking email (hundreds of times a day)
• Customer support
• Internet window shopping (doing tons of research before deciding what to buy)
• Forum reading
• Social networking (Facebook, Twitter, other Ping.FM sites)
• Blog posts for niche sites

Most of these things can and should be done by someone else, so I can free up my time to do more important things. I’m not the only qualified person in the world to do these tasks, although sometimes I trick myself into thinking so 

So I’ve decided I want to hire a Virtual Assistant.

My plan is:

1. Log my time in detail for a couple weeks to see what can be outsourced or eliminated or managed differently
2. Write a list of VA-appropriate tasks
3. Hire a VA for a trial period (from a company, not an individual…as they’d become a huge bottleneck in my life if something were to happen to them)
4. If they don’t work out, find someone else, and if they do continue giving them work.
5. Make damn sure that my instructions are super clear and adjust the responsibilities and authorization (financial accounts) they’re given over time.

I’m already in the midst of doing #1. I’m using the site Paymo.biz with a timer widget that lets me switch between tasks easily.

I’ll continue to post about my outsourcing experience, so hopefully others can learn from my mistakes…which I’m sure there’ll be many of haha.

Related posts:

1. Outsourcing Myself – Decisions
2. Outsourcing Myself – Took The Plunge!
3. Best Outsourcing Companies

1. Keep the Content Fresh
   • At the least, a new post or page every week is great to keep the search engine bots continually crawling your site.  Plus the more pages your domain has the better.   The total Google PR for your entire domain can not exceed the # of pages.  So if you have a 1 page site you’ll never have higher than PR 1.
   • Yes I realize there’s irony in this point because I don’t update this blog nearly that often.  But I suppose that’s because this isn’t an income stream for me, I’m just doing it for fun, so I don’t really care too much about its SEO.
   • If you’re using a blogging platform, remember to use tags, as each tag creates yet another page.
2. Find Forums to Post in that have Do-Follow Signature Links
   • Be the first to respond to new threads so your sig will appear near the top of the page
   • Try to write useful, respectful comments, and not obvious spam…you know who you are…silly spammers
3. Submit your RSS Feeds to Directories
   • Search engines love RSS feeds, probably because they are great followers of Tip #1 (Keep the Content Fresh), and constantly updating
   • Two of the major ones are Feedage.com and Feedagg.com
4. Use ‘title’ and ‘alt’ HTML Tags for Images
   • This way you’ll get bonus traffic from search engine image searches, such as Google and Bing (my new favorite).
5. Social Bookmarking Rules
   • It’s powerful because each bookmark not only creates multiple backlinks (due to the tags), but also because of the “social” aspect your bookmark could appear on a “top bookmarks” page (with high PR) if other users vote or submit it as well.
   • With SocialAdr your webpages can be bookmarked (to 15 or so of the major social bookmarking services) up to 420 time per month.  And that’s just with the ‘Free’ account!
6. Keyword Research is ‘Key’
   • This is one of the (if not THE) most important parts of an effective SEO campaign.  Too many people rush through it and don’t take the time to realize either (a) there’s weak traffic for the keywords they’re targeting or (b) the competition is insane and it’s virtually impossible for them to get on Page 1 of Google.
   • I use a handy app called Micro Niche Finder – it saves a lot of time compared to using the free tools
   • The free method is simply using the Google External Keyword Tool to find how much traffic each keyword gets and Google (search for the keyword “in quotes”) to find how much competition you have.   I prefer > 1000 searches / month with less than 20,000 competition.  But there’s a lot of wiggle room in those numbers.

Related posts:

1. Outsourcing Myself – Language Barrier
2. SocialMarker – A free social bookmarking tool
3. SocialAdr – New Social Bookmarking Services Community