When your online business is booming, there is one sure way to increase your productivity – by getting a virtual assistant!
A virtual assistant, or VA, can help you with day to day running of your business and make it so much easier to get the important stuff done, allowing you to hand over smaller, administrative tasks to someone else.
A VA don’t have to be expensive either. Luckily the online world opens you up to a whole range of options outside of your own country. The main thing you want is proficiency in the language of your business – assuming that is english, you will find many low cost VA in countries like India and the Philippines.
One of the first places people go looking for a VA is Freelancer – you may have even looked for work yourself on here at one point. However there are limited long term prospects available on Freelancer due mainly the the contractual style of work people are accustomed to there. So where do you look for a VA?
You can start by asking friends or people you know in your field of work. Very often they will have used a VA themselves and if you can’t use they’ve used, they may be able to offer other suggestions. You can also sign up to Facebook Groups that have people looking to work as VA’s.
When you find the ideal person, you should start by creating a simple list of jobs for them to complete over a day to see how competent they are. You need to focus on how long it takes them to do the task, how much difficult they have in completing the task and their communication and interest in the tasks. This will help you decide whether this is someone who could potentially be a long term employee. Whatever you decide, you’ll need to pay them for their time.
If they’re a winner, employee them. Send them a contract in writing that details their duties as an employee, the hours they are required to work and any other agreements you need to make. If not, keep looking!
A final piece of advice – it’s important to be careful about hiring someone online. Very often you’ll need to disclose personal information like passwords and maybe even banking details, so you’ll want to develop a level of trust before doing this. If possible, have a background check done on the person you’re employing.
Good luck finding a VA to take your online business to the next level!
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