Getting a Virtual Assistant

virtual-assistant

I am pleased to say that my online endeavours have got to such a point where my workload warrants getting extra help. I don’t want to go through the paperwork of hiring someone to work part time for me in the UK. I am a one man business and I want it to stay that way. I don’t want to have the responsibility of keeping someone in a job, especially in these difficult economic times.

As I don’t have enough hours to feed to a UK based person, I am going to take the plunge into Mumbai. It is clear that you get what you pay for with a virtual assistant, especially a Mumbai VA, and I have heard mixed reviews. Many people have told me “Mumbai is cheap but they take hours to do a job, and don’t always do it right”. However, without being too disrespectful, Indians are good natured and hard working people, and yes I could continue to pay my existing web developer £35+/hour with zero risk, knowing exactly what I get, but enterprise is all about risks and in my eyes there is no better validation of current business processes than a good bit of split testing.

So I am going to look at outsourcing these specific tasks:-

  • 50% Blog Posting for DailyEcoTips.com
  • Chunky data entry SEO tasks
  • Customer service emails for thejohnnyshop.co.uk
  • Graphic Design

I am not sure how this will turn out for me, and I will keep you posted. I am hoping to get a dedicated assistant for 20 hours a month, and will not settle for a situation where I deal with a different assistant every day, as I want to build up a working relationship with my assistant. My research at present is leading me to getfriday.com or taskseveryday.com. Does anyone have any experience with either of these? If so, i’d be delighted to hear from you.

Pain of Discipline ii

So it’s been a while since my last post. A few things have been going on online which I will blog about soon and offline I have been training for the Manchester 10k. As I said I will blog about the online stuff soon but until then I thought I would just humbly share with you a few schoolboy errors I have made recently!

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AdSense for FeedBurner

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Recently, I decided to ad AdSense to my feedburner feeds for DailyEcoTips.com, and the results were very pleasantly surprising!

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Pain of Discipline

The Pain of Discipline is less than the pain of regret

From chatting with friends of mine it seems that the above has been muttered by many CEO’s in the finance sector in the last few months as they look to restrict corporate travel, perks, pay rises and general corporate excess in light of the “credit crunch”. When mine said it in a company wide email I thought about it a little and what it meant.

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Meet & Greet

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Well Hello. Not quite sure what to write here that isn’t on the site’s new about me page. My name is David and I have taken over PowerDosh.com from Dan. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Dan for all his work on this site during the time I was a reader of it.

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Moving On - A New Direction

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After a great deal of thinking, I’ve decided to have a big change in my portfolio. I’m selling off PowerDosh and DailyEcoTips (I’ve already made a deal). The reason is because my RSI is not getting any better, so I need to reduce my website commitments. The new owner will be continuing both websites in the same spirit in which I ran them. The new owner will introduce themselves soon!

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Think Visibility

Think Visibility was the first SEO conference I’d ever been to, and it was held in Leeds last weekend. I met some top names in UK SEO, and learnt a great deal.

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journey

I’ve been doing a lot of different things relating to web mastering, design, monetizing, link building, link selling, etc. So for this article, I thought that I’d tell you some of the things that I have learnt recently.

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Google Reader Icon

Every so often, I come across a really useful articles on other blogs. The way I tag them is by clicking on the “Share” icon in Google Reader.

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Feedburner Unverified Email Subscriber Tool

If you have email subscribers with Feedburner, you might have users who have not completely finished the verification process to subscribe to your newsletter. I originally discovered this concept from Daniel Scocco at Daily Blog Tips. However, it was a hard process to manually copy and paste each unverified email address. Therefore I’ve written a tool that solves this issue!

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