Set Detailed Tasks with your Virtual Assistant

Hiring a virtual assistant can save you time and effort on a business you may run, a project you are working to complete, or even tasks surrounding your personal life. Most of the time, a virtual assistant or VA can be hired at a fraction of the cost and time that it would take you to complete the same task. That is because your VA is usually more skilled and versed in the tasks you are looking to complete. Your VA also typically comes at a reduced price because they are normally offshore freelancers who will work for a small portion of the costs it would take you to complete the same task.

While hiring a virtual assistant can save you time which is important when building passive income, there are some things you need to understand before you get started. Hiring a VA does not necessarily mean that your work will automatically get completed on it’s own. Using contractors and freelancers to complete tasks requires good project management skills – especially when you are starting out. Ignoring this rule could cost you a lot of money that could have been invested elsewhere.

One of my first passive income jobs that I outsourced to an offshore freelancer taught me several things about how to properly manage a hired resource. If you choose to hire offshore resources to reduce costs, then you need to focus a lot of your attention on communication. There can be language and cultural barriers between you and your resource that you need to account for in order to have a successful outcome.

The very first lesson I learned and plan to improve upon in future jobs is setting detailed tasks. My virtual assistant was from India and had very good English skills which helped in our communication. Unfortunately, there were still some critical steps that I ignored that could have saved me some time and money. Setting detailed instructions and tasks can remove any misunderstanding between you and your VA which cuts down on wasted time and costs.

Set Detailed Tasks with your Virtual Assistant

I learned the hard way that you MUST set very detailed tasks when working with your virtual assistant on delegating work to them. Just because you understand what you are asking your VA to complete, doesn’t mean they understand the tasks the same as you. To be honest, this is not a VA’s fault and should be the responsibility of the manager of the project. You should never expect a virtual assistant, who you are paying $4 per hour, to know what you are asking unless you use very detailed instructions.

One of the very first jobs I assigned to my VA was a project on SEO research around a niche website I was looking to build. My job consisted of the following tasks -

• Research a niche topic and come up with a keyword phrase that has the potential to be profitable.
• Provide a list of additional related keywords to the topic that can be used on the niche site to increase traffic and search engine rankings.
• Include a list of possible domain names that are available that could be used with this niche topic.
• Submit some statistics including monthly searches around the niche topic and associated keywords along with information on competing websites in the same niche.

As you can probably tell by now, those are some very vague guidelines to follow. Instead of using the tasks listed above, I could have used the following detailed instructions instead for better results -

• Identify a niche topic and keyword phrase that has less than 1,000,000 competing pages in Google.
• Provide a list of 10 related keyword phrases to the identified keyword phrase in the prior step.
• Include a list of 10 possible domain names that are available and contain the keyword phrase.
• Provide monthly search statistics for the keyword phrase as well as the 10 related keywords for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

As you can tell from the second set of tasks, they are more detailed and would have reduced any misunderstanding. After assigning the original set of tasks for the job, my VA promptly completed the tasks and sent me the information. The results were not at all what I had expected. After looking back at what I requested – I realized it was my fault. I reassigned a more detailed and specific list of tasks to my VA again and got the results I expected the second time.

Final Thoughts

Using a virtual assistant has been a big learning experience for me. Fortunately, I have been able to identify areas for improvement so that I don’t make the same mistakes again and can limit my costs. Assigning others to complete tasks for your business is what passive income is all about. Provided you can properly manage your resources to be efficient and complete their assigned tasks – your experience should be a success and your money well spent!

Tagged as: Virtual Assistant