Internet Marketing Fun » virtual assistant

Get Traffic for Free

Kane — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:27:34 +0000

I stumbled across this site recently and thought it was a pretty clever idea. YouLikeHits.com allows you to:

Get Twitter followers
Get Facebook likes
Get MySpace followers
Get StumbleUpon followers
Get Digg followers
Get visitors to ANY website

And you can do all of this for FREE, it just takes time. Here’s how it works, using Twitter as an example:

Enter your Twitter username
Define how many points you want to pay for each follower
Browse a grid of other users who want to be followed, then choose which one you want to follow and click “Follow”. A window will popup with their Twitter page loaded, where you need to click “Follow”. Then return to YouLikeHits and click “Confirm”. In many cases you’ll earn 9 credits for each follow.

If you don’t want to spend time clicking buttons and waiting for popup windows, and don’t have a Virtual Assistant that can do this for ya, you can always buy points. They have different packages ranging from 1,250 points for $17.50 to 20,000 points for $160. If you do the math that comes out to 0.8 cents per point, or 1.6 cents per Twitter follower…pretty darn cheap!

YouLikeHits is definitely worth checking out. It’s an easy-to-use and effective tool for building social followers, boosting search engine rankings, and getting traffic on the cheap.

Outsourcing Myself – Took The Plunge!

Kane — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 18:33:08 +0000

After much deliberation, I decided to hire my first Virtual Assistant (VA) from First Page Web Search.

As the site says to do, I emailed “admin(at)firstpagewebsearch(dot)com” to request a part-time SEO VA, which costs a super-affordable $37.50 for 20 hours a week.

The company owner/manager, Jake, replied:

Right now, we do need one week confirmation payment. This covers the two days trial and 5 days work. This is a policy we implemented since we had previous clients who runaway after the two days trial. We hope you understand. If in case you’re not happy with the service, we can arrange a new VA or we refund the whole amount.

Please pay using the link below:

(PayPal link removed)

I will then forward the VA contact details after we receive the payment.

So I completed the PayPal transaction and the next day received this email:

The “New Client Pack” had the following 3 files, which are pretty self explanatory. The “Welcome Kit” is just a 1-page PDF with contact info for “First Page Web Search” departments.

So far so good! My next update will be about my first impressions and communication with my new VA named “Jemelo”.

Outsourcing Myself – Decisions

Kane — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:26:38 +0000

Time Tracking & Analysis

So I’ve religiously logged my time for a couple weeks now (using a desktop widget from Paymo.biz), and come to the following conclusions -

I waste too much time switching between tasks. I need to focus more on completing things before moving onto something else
I waste too much time with social media. I need to outsource Ping.FM, Facebook friend maintenance, Twitter follower upkeep, etc.
I waste too much time checking email. Rather than checking my personal and multiple business accounts 50x per day, I should set a schedule and check maybe 4-5x.
I waste too much time doing internet shopping / research. Whether it be a gift for my mom or a new laptop for myself, I always feel the need to find the best value product out there, and spend hours doing so. I can definitely outsource some of this research.

Virtual Assistant Providers

I’ve also been busy research sites / companies to hire a Virtual Assistant (VA) from. Here’s the options that I’ve come up with -

Job posting boards

Craigslist Manila – http://manila.craigslist.com.ph
oDesk – http://odesk.com

Outsourcing companies

Your Man In India – http://www.yourmaninindia.com
Get Friday – http://getfriday.com (sister company of Your Man In India)
Catch Friday – http://catchfriday.com
First Page Web Search - http://www.firstpagewebsearch.com/

From my research the job posting boards are time consuming because you have to interview people, and you also don’t want an individual because they’d be a single point of failure in your business (ie. if they got sick a lot of stuff would stop getting done).

First Page Web Search is by far the cheapest of the outsourcing companies, and even though they specialize in SEO VA’s, they can do solely admin work too, I’ve already asked them. Only $300/month for a full-time VA! So that’s where I’m currently leaning…

Outsourcing Myself – Intro

Kane — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:45:03 +0000

I’m determined to become more efficient and effective with my time.

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:

Log my time in detail for a couple weeks to see what can be outsourced or eliminated or managed differently
Write a list of VA-appropriate tasks
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)
If they don’t work out, find someone else, and if they do continue giving them work.
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.