It’s no secret to be successful at internet marketing, You will need to build a team. Otherwise, you are limiting your own success. The last thing you want is to be the bottle neck of your operations. I meet and talk to a lot of affiliate marketers every day and they always ask me about my team; and how I hired my very first employee.
When it comes to hiring your first VA, people always think, oh jump on UPWORK or another freelance site and go nuts. Sure this is a great idea; however a lot of the freelancers I’ve encountered on these sites are careless; don’t take work seriously. They see work as a means to an end, and not like a professional business relationship – which for us internet marketers is bad, because we need reliable staff. I wrote about this before, and it attracted a lot of ‘bad press’ from upwork freelancers; but – the facts still remain most freelancers think they are free so they work whenever they feel like it only; often leaving internet marketers in the grind stuck waiting and waiting and waiting.
There’s actually a way to solve this, because one thing I do agree with from all my hate comments on that upwork post is that not all of freelancers are unprofessional. So how do you find the good ones?
The trick is proper test procedures in place; that makes an applicant go through multiple tests in order to test their knowledge, and also their speed, and their work ethic (yea some of those tests get sent on weekends). And you know what, this systematized way of evaluating freelancers workers.
So why hire virtual assistants?
To remove the bottleneck and increase productivity. Say you are about to launch a campaign; that’s made up of a lot of moving parts (lets call em puzzle pieces). If you have a skilled VA; you can give them many of these moving parts while you focus your time on the $100-1000/h activities. Like talking to AMs to get the hottest new offers; or seeking out the advertiser to cut out the middle men – the cpa network.
Don’t you want to get more shit done in the same amount of time you already spend working? I bet you do!
Where to find virtual assistants?
There’s the obvious choices, upWork, eLance, Freelancer but there’s also other great resources where you can truly hire superstars – for the Philippines the following are very popular: Onlinejobs.ph, Craigslist Manila, Jobstreet. These are all sites where you need to post an ad for your virtual assistant job, and then review applicants, interview them, and go through that manual process.
How to find the perfect virtual assistant for you?
First of all, make a list of tasks you want a virtual assistant for. Let’s say you are a typical affiliate marketing – then these tasks might be;
-editing landing pages and making changes (for example swapping a product image on a skin care lander), changing the angle, etc.
-doing spying (looking for ads that relate to the offer you are running to get ideas for angles)
-entering data into voluum like offers, landing pages, traffic sources + their tokens.
-keeping tabs on expenses per traffic source, and revenue generated
these are just a few that come to my mind on the fly, but from the list you know you will need more than a pretty face that can say yes sir every other sentence.
You need someone with some basic skills HTML, CSS, research, data entry, book keeping (someone that’s organized)
In your ad you’d explain these; and then wait for applicants.
GREAT, I have my applicants, now what?
Next, you’d want to test them on all these things related to what you need a VA for. Keeping to the above example, here’s a sample of a 4 part test we’d send our applicants. We’d monitor a lot during this process; how long it takes an applicant to do a test from the moment they received it until deliver; and if they are available on weekends while we’re doing this process (if yes, that’s a good sign because it shows they are very interested in the job) and also if they pay attention to the instructions, or they just rush through it.
Test 1 – For HTML/CSS – I’d send them a page we prepared, and ask them to goto google images, and find a product named WHATEVER, then i’d tell them yuo need to swap out the current product on lander, and replace it everywhere with this product in both text + images.
Test 2 – I’d ask them to find me 10 CPA networks that are the biggest based on alexa rank. This would be the test on how they can research, and also how they can problem solve (we are looking to see what they will do with the alexa rank part, will they simply google what is Alexa, and how to find the rank, and what it means, or will they ask a question, or simply abandon the project because they don’t know)
Test 3 – Data entry, we’d ask them to create a spreadsheet on google drive, and find the top 10 highest density cities in the usa, and enter it into the excel and nicely format it.
Test 4 – We’d give them a challenging question like, our offer was paying out $40, and we were getting an EPC of 0.06, if we invested $1000 dollars, after 10000 clicks, what was our final outcome? — again you can prepare any challenging math question, it might even be missing something – you are looking for their ability to solve problems by asking questions or providing you with an answer that outlines the missing part.
And last but not least, why is a man hole cover round? 😀 Just kidding.
So there you have it; a test to vet your VA to make sure they can do what you need. Of course, VA’s need to be trained, and for that we usually write internal procedures (much like this guide) but very detailed which unfortunately I cannot post online.
I’ve got multiple awesome applicant’s which one to hire?
I highly recommend hiring multiple ‘winners’ if you will and giving each a ‘trial period’. Some people are masters of faking their way through an interview process, only to disappoint afterwards. That’s why we utilize a trial period with all new hires and we observe how they communicate, their availability, and the overall experience working with them.
We first ease into the work process slowly, and as we build up rapport with the employee and trust and know they are superstars, we delegate more and more tasks to it.
In conclusion, hiring your first VA can be a life changer, if you do it right. Please do not make the mistake of hiring the first one that applies, make sure you vet them properly by taking them through a series of tests. This will help get rid of the lazy ones who feel entitled; those people will not do your tests; or they will only do them if you pay them for it – this is not good attitude, and it’s an automatic NO from our end.
The more custom tailored the tests are to the actual tasks you need done; the higher the success rate will be when it comes to finding your superstar VA.
Good systems like this are the secrets of super affiliates; so use em and you will increase your profits!