Month: November 2007

In my previous post I mentioned how my virtual assistant is doing a great job with the diversity of projects I’ve given her.  In fact here is what she wrote me:

“I am happy to work for you for the fact i really enjoy the work rather than the pay. When we had chatted once i have stated this clearly i hope…. But to be true, i long for your projects because they are so interesting (i am not flattering sir) and give me enjoyment and satisfaction…”

What a great email to receive… I gave her a 17% raise!

One frustration is I’ve given her all the projects I had been storing up just for a Virtual Assistant.  I’m running our of things for her to do.

It’s time to step things up!

One of the things that is a HUGE time suck is managing emails from my community forums.  I decided I needed to have her monitor all the support requests from 2 of my forums.  I have taught her how to reset passwords (80% of the emails) and to reply to a plethora of other request.   I also have her delete the auto responders, spam, etc. from the account.  She will also take care of the spam blocking emails from places like Excite that require a person to visit a link and verify the email came from a person.  If there are requests she can’t answer I have her move them into an escalated folder for my attention.

I’m hoping this will keep her busy and will free me up.

Oh, one important footnote / suggestion:  I’ve been compiling all my instructions I send to her in one Word document.  Heaven forbid that if I ever loose her I’ll hopefully be able to shorten the learning curve substantially for the next person.

Things have been going Great with my oDesk virtual assistant.  She’s been great at completing all the projects I’ve given her.   Here is a list of the projects she’s worked on:

• Compile a list of potential sponsors for one of my community sites and rank them based on criteria such as “Are they advertising on Google?”   “Do they have a forum / community section of their site?” etc.  Organize all the information including contact pages, phone numbers, etc.
• Copy all the content (80 pages), page by page, from one of my static sites into WordPress
• Compile a list of content submissions from my community and rank them based on my criteria
• Search my forum for information on a topic and collect all the content into a page with links back to the post so I could quickly write a content page from the information.
• Take the very static pages (180) from a site I purchased and remove the static head / foot information and insert a php header and footer.
• For a new forum I had her do a Google search for key terms and look for popular forums in my niche.  I had her review and compile a list of the forum categories and sort by popularity.  This really helped me determine which categories to setup on my new forum.

I’m so happy I found this provider!  While I feel I’m just scratching the surface on what I can do with outsourcing I’ve got the feeling that if I can duplicate this with all the other diverse skill areas of my life then I’ll be in a super productive spot!